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TechnoratiThanks, Scott, but We Knew It Already
Why is it that former members of the Bush administration would rather be considered stupid than evil by the time they get around to writing self-serving memoirs about their White House years?
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is the latest ex-Bush partisan to admit the obvious -- that much that came out of the White House in the run-up to the Iraq war was lies, damned lies and propaganda. He, of course, didn't know it at the time.
In "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," Mr. McClellan systematically recounts the various ways in which the Bush administration "sold the war" to a credulous Washington press corps and a gullible American public still reeling from the trauma of Sept. 11.
Former White House counselor Dan Bartlett called his former colleague's charges "total crap" and questioned his motives.
Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush's first press secretary, wondered aloud about his successor's sudden attack of morality: "If Scott viewed what the White House was saying [as] so irresponsible or wrong that it rose to the level of propaganda for him, it's not a job he should have accepted. He should on principle have declined it."
Dana Perino, the hapless apparatchik who currently holds the job, dutifully repeated the talking point that Scott McClellan is a disgruntled employee who suddenly hates America: "For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad -- this is not the Scott we knew."
Once again, the White House claims it is "mystified" by something that is pretty obvious to the rest of us -- Scott McClellan is tired of lying about the biggest military boondoggle and unnecessary loss of military and civilian life since Vietnam.
If Mr. McClellan ever hopes to get a cushy job in the media he once showered with contempt, he'll have to become this administration's version of former "Clintonite" George Stephanopoulos and put some distance between himself and the cult that once nurtured him in its duplicitous bosom.
"I have a higher loyalty than my loyalty to my past work," Mr. McClellan told Meredith Viera on NBC's "Today Show" yesterday with a straight face. No wonder the Bushies are furious at him. In his self-righteousness, he comes across as a gasbag.
In a way, Scott McClellan reminds me of a wheel man who, after a successful bank heist, suffers from robbers' remorse after pulling the getaway car safely into the gang's hideout.
During the bank robbery itself -- i.e., the time Mr. McClellan spent as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration -- he wasn't about to express his misgivings about the heist while Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld were toting shotguns in the back seat.
Like every expendable wheel man, Scott McClellan was kept in the dark regarding many important details of the caper and told only what he needed to know to do his job. Still, he wasn't blind. He must have had an inkling he was driving some pretty bad men around town.
That's why I don't buy his self-serving argument that he was simply an honest guy trying to put the pieces of a vast conspiracy together. According to him, he's just a more dull-witted version of Fox Mulder from "The X-Files."
If Scott McClellan was as out of the loop when it came to divvying up responsibility for the Iraq fiasco as he claims, then one has to wonder where he came up with the details for his explosive narrative -- especially those involving the other players.
I suspect Scott McClellan has been reading Bush administration exposes in his down time and "stumbled" upon a more coherent understanding of what his time in the White House was all about.
Either Scott McClellan had an epiphany after he left the White House or he knew these things at the time and did nothing, which would make him complicit in evil.
For the sake of his own dignity and place in history, Scott McClellan should have gone the evil route and left the "stupid" dodge to Mr. Bush.
If only the supporting players in the administration would admit they knew all along what they were doing was wrong -- and that they did it anyway because they could.
For once, I wish former administration insiders would admit they knew they were vessels for the darkest impulses in our civilization when they launched this war. Somewhere there must be digital photos of them drinking each other's blood and summoning Beelzebub while dancing naked on the White House lawn.
The sheer waste of lives that is the Iraq war and the corruption of our politics is nothing short of satanic. Do we really need Mr. McClellan's book to tell us that?
Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com.
Copyright ©1997 - document.write(new Date().getFullYear());2008 PG Publishing Co., Inc.
19 Comments so far
Show AllIf Daniel Ellsberg and Mike Gravel had been smart, they would have sold the Pentagon Papers as a book.
MR. McCLELLAN: "Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."
Scott McLellan's comments on Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies".
Too late Scotty, time to crawl back into your spidey hole.
This is not about Scott, guys.
The point being that WE may have known for a long time the substance of revelations in McClellan's book, but he - Bush's pressmouth - is calling it. It's not illuminating to the initiated, but to the uninitiated it's something very different. It's an indictment from the inside - the WAY inside - the Bush Loyalists. Try to understand that you are not his target audience and appreciate the significance of whistle-blowing from the inner sanctum, even if Scott was a lackey. He was privvy to treason and has enough whatever to come out with it. He tars himself with the same brush. A true coward does what Colin Powell has done.
I wonder what the sneering Cheney and General Betrayus are up to right now--there are still 7 2/3 months to go before he is legally gone.
A rat for sure. Useful- yes! More dirt for the right to contend with. But please don't don't let the disgraceful Democrats off the hook for leaving Bush unopposed. Bush got everything he wanted and wants. Where is the opposition? The Democrats just helped the Senate appove enough money to keep this obscene occupation going through 2009. You figure.
EVERY SAINT HAS A PAST AND EVERY SINNER HAS A FUTURE
Scotty is a day late and a dollar short. Still something good may come of this.
Maybe it will make it just a little harder for Bush/Cheney & Co. to start the war with Iran that they so desparately want.
However, if McCain is elected all that will be for naught as he will get us into war with Iran well within his first year in office.
Perhaps Scott Mcclellan's 'mea culpa' would be more believable if he were to be standing in front of a MSM news camera, reads his apology, holds up the wrapped manuscript, and then 'Darwins' himself with a shotgun on live TV...
I wonder what would have happened to Scotty had he spilled the beans as soon as he left the White House. Would he have been smeared and discredited more or less than he is now?
WHO CARES ABOUT SCOTT MCCLLELAN's BOOK !!! it does not matter now
Dana Perino is Ari Fleischer in drag---a smug, contemptuous, lying prostitute who'd rather see thousands suffer and die than say/do an honest thing in the faces of her bosses....Yeah, "it's not the Scott we knew": he's lost his mind or something, yeah that's it....When maybe in fact he's found it for the first time in his life
I agree here with all three posts above. Yes, we do "need" Scott's book. No, we don't need a blog from someone "who doesn't know when to be happy about something". And we can hope "maybe some more insiders will come out".
There is an old saying that if you are not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative by 40 you have no brain. It might have once been reasonably true, because we know, for instance, that Woodstock, has to be replaced by most people in midlife with a job that actually earns a living. That was an old meaning of being conservative.
But "Conservatism" as recently practiced in politics has become so objectionable as to turn the "saying" upside down. The more you grow up, the more you recognize some institutionalized things that are wrong. McClellan seems to have now noticed this---perhaps around 40 inhis own life.
We can hope for many more, I think, but probably not Dana Perino. (I have a feeling she is only there for the anti-abortion aspect of Republicanism and for her those "ends" would justify any (ANY) means. Single-issue folks don't moderate much-----ever.)
Rats deserting the sinking ship before they are prosecuted? Or genuinely honest people having a change of heart?
Another ridiculous article by an Inter-Left blogger who doesn't know when to be happy about something. When have you ever heard the right complaining about leftists moving rightwards? I know that progressives in general aren't this dim, as my life is filled with people of all political stripes, but blogging seems to dull people's sense of tactics and the big picture - it becomes about being right.
Let Scotty tell it all, anything to help unravel all this crap.
Democracy Now is reporting that McClellan said that Pres. Bush admitted to approving the outing of Plame. No doubt if true, that Bush will claim it was his right as POTUS. I say, Let a thousand flowers bloom. Maybe more insiders will come out and seek atonement for their respective part in all this mess.
Yes, Tony - we need every shred of info printed no matter how self-serving. For some reason this expose seems to have pricked the thick skin of the Bush apologizers more than any previous 'outings'.
I mean, it has been in the news for 3-4 days now - that's 2-3 days more than previous tell-alls. Maybe this one has finally gotten to the consciences of at least a few MSM news readers.
The sheepies have paid little or no attention to previous revelations - no matter how timely they were.
Its always great to have critical books written and published by previously important Bush insiders.
Compared to other US administrations, the number of critical, ex-insiders books published is much greater than previous administrations.
In fact, this publishing phenomenon is qualitatively different and unusual and it says something about the Bush regime.
We also need these critical published works for the historical record since this regime is one of the most secretive in US history and much of its records have been destroyed or placed in longterm secrecy.
Last, one of these publications may become the tipping point for the established media and the Washington pundit circle. Even that closed-off bunch in the capitol may finally vomit and stop being the regime's sounding board.
Maybe a tipping point will occur and the corporate owned media will disconnect itself from the Rightwing media infrastructure.
And then that media might sink back down into the anti-intellectual smear-and-fear hole that it had earlier emerged.
Olbermann asked Scotty something like: "Do you lose any sleep knowing you are complicit in the deaths of 4,000+ US service men and women?"
Scotty--true to form--side-stepped the question.