TW3 — and the Snitch

That Was The Week That Was … complete, from soup to nuts; body liquefacation to improbable political statements. One bit that made me happy was that Dubby laid his LAST wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. LAST. Thank ya, Jesus!

Your bonus today is a pip. Of all Bush’s press secretaries, Scotty McClellan seemed to me the most clueless, the one IV’ing the Kool Aid and wide-eyed with real naïveté; and when you mess with the Faithful instead of the Cynical, you better watch out … which makes it no surprise to me that he’s the one to defect; bless his pudgy little head!

Drudge is running the previews of his coming book under the headline: Scott the Snitch.

Yeeeeehaw! Perhaps this will add to the [long anticipated and] growing rage … now that the smoke is clearing … of the American public at the condition their condition is in; calls for impeachment have amped up in the last few weeks — and [chuckle!] John Bolton, in the UK for a book festival, had a person try to make a citizens arrest for war crimes. Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Rove and says they’re willing to arrest if he doesn’t testify.

Yep — good times comin’ … bet on it!

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
May 27, 2008

President George W. Bush gave a radio address for Memorial
Day weekend, invoking the sacrifice of 4,071 U.S. soldiers
in Iraq and 432 in Afghanistan. Later, for the last time
in his capacity as President, he placed a wreath at the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National
Cemetery. Ten thousand Iraqi troops met little resistance
as they took over Mahdi Army-controlled Sadr City
under the terms of a cease-fire agreement. Oil rose above
$130 a barrel, and Barack Obama won the Democratic primary
in Oregon, while Hillary Clinton won in Kentucky. Clinton
insisted that her candidacy was still viable. “My husband
did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the
California primary somewhere in the middle of June,
right?” she offered. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated in June in California.” Obama gave the
commencement address at Wesleyan University in
Connecticut. “You know that feeling when you’re so excited
you have to pee?” asked Lola Pellegrino, ‘08. “I’m feeling
that. In my heart.” Obama, who spoke in place of Senator
Ted Kennedy after Kennedy was diagnosed with a likely
fatal malignant brain tumor, called for a “generation of
volunteers to work on renewable energy projects.”
Twenty-five thousand people attended. “I can’t imagine
anyone that the Wesleyan student body would possibly be
more excited about,” said Sarah Lonning, ‘06. “Maybe
Gandhi, if he weren’t dead.” In Afghanistan, at
Chaghcharan Airfield in Ghor, two civilians and a
Lithuanian soldier were killed in protests over the
shooting of a Koran in Iraq, and Lebanese factions met in
Qatar and gave Hezbollah veto power in Lebanon’s new
national unity cabinet. It was, said a U.S. State
Department representative, “really a welcome development.”

Aftershocks in the wake of the Great Sichuan Earthquake
toppled thousands of buildings. At least 80,000 people
were thought to be dead from the quake, up to 11 million
people were homeless, and 69 dams were at risk. The
Myanmar junta, under U.N. pressure, agreed that all
international aid workers could enter the country, where
Cyclone Nargis had left an estimated 130,000 people dead
or missing. In parts of Chile five months of rain fell in
eight hours, displacing 15,000 people and killing five,
and a 34-year-old farmer in Kumamoto, Japan, killed
himself by ingesting the agricultural chemical
chloropicrin. Hospitalized before dying, he injured 54
people by vomiting toxic chlorine gas. The Phoenix
spacecraft landed on Mars, where it will search for
life. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and
Venezuela formed Unasur, the Union of South American
Nations; Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared the
American empire Unasur’s “number one enemy.” Dick Martin,
co-host of Laugh In, died at 86, and Charles Booth, the
man who invented the starting block, died at 104. New
Hampshire banned resomation, a process that liquefies
bodies, and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,
concerned about the risk of terrorist activity at the
upcoming Twin Cities Republican National Convention, was
recruiting spies to infiltrate vegan potluck dinners.

A press conference by Garry Kasparov was interrupted by a
helicopter-dildo, and the fourth human foot since August
washed ashore in British Columbia. “All we got is,” said a
corporal, “it’s a foot in a shoe.” U.S. colleges were
unsure of what to do with students who write dark or
disturbing fiction, fearing that such fiction could be a
sign of impending mass murder. Steven Barber, a Navy
veteran of the Iraq war and student at the University of
Virginia at Wise, was scrutinized after writing a story
about the murder of a man resembling his English
instructor, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s son
Christopher. A subsequent search of Barber’s car found
three guns, two of them loaded; Barber was expelled, then
reinstated, offering that he would now write about
“butterflies and rainbows.” “How long would Edgar Allan
Poe,” wondered a vice chancellor, “who attended the
University of Virginia, have lasted?” Gough, an island in
the South Pacific, was overrun by gangs of gigantic mice
that attack and eat baby albatrosses; bird conservation
groups planned to airdrop tons of poison onto the
island. The 640 percent increase in the cost of scrap
metal since 2001 had led to a nationwide epidemic of
manhole-cover thefts, and the United Nations, responding
to food riots in 30 countries, said that the number of
chronically hungry people in the world was expected to
rise 100 million to 950 million. Japan released 20,000
tons of its 1.5-million-ton rice stockpile for sale to
Africa. Fertilizer-company representatives, flush from
last year’s 300 percent increase in the price of potash,
gathered in Vienna at the orangery of a Hapsburg palace,
where they were heralded by trumpeters in green
robes. “For the last 35 years, nobody noticed,” said one
fertilizer executive. “I’ve waited my whole career for
this.”

– Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/WeeklyReview2008-05-27

Bonus

Scott McLellan, Former Press Secretary, Attacks Bush’s White House
Politico/Washington Post
May 27, 2008

The Politico and Washington Post have excerpts from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s scathing book on the Bush Administration.

From The Washington Post:

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president’s intellect — “Bush is plenty smart enough to be president,” he writes — but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

“A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people’s ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change,” he writes.

In another section, McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘How can that be?’ ” he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

“The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office,” he writes. “And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned.”

From The Politico:

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts. ++

Rove: McClellan Sounds Like a Left Wing Blogger
Youtube

Bush misled U.S. on Iraq, former aide says in new book
Scott McClellan’s ‘What Happened‘ delivers tough criticism of president, advisers
KEN HERMAN, Cox News Service via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
05/27/08

WASHINGTON — The White House called former press secretary Scott McClellan “disgruntled” after he wrote a blistering review of the administration and concluded that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq in a book due out Monday.

“History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder,” McClellan wrote in “What Happened,” due out Monday. “No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact.”

“What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary,” he wrote in the preface.

White House aides seemed stunned by the scathing tone of the book, and Bush press secretary Dana Perino issued a statement that was highly critical of their former colleague.

“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” she said. “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.”

Perino said the reports on the book had been described to Bush, and that she did not expect him to comment. “He has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers,” she said.

The book provoked strong reactions from former staffers as well.

“For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional,” Fran Townsend, former head of the White House-based counterterrorism office, told CNN.

Said former top aide Karl Rove, in an interview with Fox News Channel, “If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them. And frankly I don’t remember him speaking up about these things. I don’t remember a single word.”

Richard Clarke, another former counterterrorism adviser who also came out with a book critical of administration policy, said he could understand McClellan’s thinking, however. Clarke told CNN that he, too, was harshly criticized, saying that “I can show you the tire tracks.”

The volume makes McClellan, a Texan picked by the president and paid by the people to help sell the war to the world, the first longtime Bush aide to put such harsh criticism between hard covers. It is an extraordinarily critical book that questions Bush’s intellectual curiosity, his candor in leading the nation to war, his pattern of self-deception and the quality of his advisers.

“As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq,” McClellan wrote. “Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced.”

McClellan worked for Bush from 1999, when he signed on as a deputy in the governor’s press office, until 2006, when he was forced out as White House press secretary.

“President Bush has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader. He is not one to delve into all the possible policy options — including sitting around engaging in extended debate about them — before making a choice,” McClellan wrote. “Rather, he chooses based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions. Such was the case with Iraq.”

In an interview Tuesday, McClellan said he retains great admiration and respect for Bush.

“My job was to advocate and defend his policies and speak on his behalf,” he said. “This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things. There were things we did right and things we did wrong. Unfortunately, much of what went wrong overshadowed the good things we did.”

He said the Bush administration fell into the “permanent campaign” mode that can cripple a White House and has tainted much of Washington.

In the book — subtitled “Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” — McClellan said that Bush’s top advisers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “played right into his thinking, doing little to question it or cause him to pause long enough to fully consider the consequences before moving forward,” according to McClellan.

“Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded,” he wrote.

Bush’s real motivation for war

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw “his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness,” something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.

The president’s real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East,” McClellan wrote.

“Rather than open this Pandora’s Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth,” he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used “innuendo and implication” and “intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”

“President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option,” McClellan concluded, noting, “The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president’s entire second term in office.”

Bush’s national security advisers failed to “help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening,” McClellan recalled.

“I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war — more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead — he would never have made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly today,” McClellan wrote.

‘Plenty smart enough’

In a summation, McClellan said the decision to invade Iraq “goes to an important question that critics have raised about the president: Is Bush intellectually incurious or, as some assert, actually stupid?”

“Bush is plenty smart enough to be president,” he concluded. “But as I’ve noted his leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate.”

McClellan also expresses amazement that Bush seemed flummoxed by a query by NBC’s Tim Russert in February 2004 as to whether the invasion of Iraq was “a war of choice or a war of necessity.”

“It strikes me today as an indication of his lack of inquisitiveness and his detrimental resistance to reflection,” McClellan wrote, “something his advisers needed to compensate for better than they did.”

McClellan tracks Bush’s penchant for self-deception back to an overheard incident on the campaign trail in 1999 when the then-governor was dogged by reports of possible cocaine use in his younger days.

The book recounts an evening in a hotel suite “somewhere in the Midwest.” Bush was on the phone with a supporter and motioned for McClellan to have a seat.

“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’”

“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”

“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”

In the years that followed, McClellan “would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment.” McClellan likened it to a witness who resorts to “I do not recall.”

“Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment,” McClellan wrote, adding, “In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind.”

And McClellan linked the tactic to the decision to invade Iraq, a decision based on flawed intelligence.

“It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy,” he said of the cocaine rumors. “But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare,” he wrote.

‘Too stubborn to change and grow’

The book also recounts Bush’s unwillingness or inability to come up with a mistake he had made when asked by a reporter to do so.

“It became symbolic of a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, and unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistake — too stubborn to change and grow,” McClellan concluded.

A page later, he recounts what he perceived as a moment of doubt by a president who never expresses any. It occurred in a dimly lit room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a room where an injured Texas veteran was being watched over by his wife and 7-year-old son as Bush arrived.

The vet’s head was bandaged and “he was clearly not aware of his surroundings, the brain injury was severe,” McClellan recalled. Bush hugged the wife, told the boy his dad was brave and kissed the injured vet’s head while whispering ‘God bless you’ into his ear.

“Then he turned and walked toward the door,” McClellan wrote. “Looking straight ahead, he moved his right hand to wipe away a tear. In that moment, I could see the doubt in his eyes and the vivid realization of the irrevocable consequences of his decision.”

But, he added, such moments are more than counterbalanced by deceased warriors’ families who urge him to make sure the deaths were not in vain.

Rice, Cheney not spared from criticism

McClellan’s criticism of Rice — who he pegs as “hard to get to know” — is blistering.

“I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation,” he wrote. “No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview, including the WMD rationale for the war in Iraq, the decision to invade Iraq … and post-war planning and implementation of the strategy in Iraq.”

McClellan predicts a harsh historical review of Rice.

“But whatever her policy management shortcomings, Rice knew public relations well. She knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems and come out looking like a star,” he wrote. “Few performed better under the spotlight, glossing over mistakes with her effortless eloquence and understated flair.”

McClellan brands Vice President Cheney as “the magic man” mysteriously directing outcomes in “every policy area he cared about, from the invasion of Iraq to expansion of presidential power to the treatment of detainees and the use of surveillance against terror suspects.”

“Cheney always seemed to get his way,” McClellan wrote.

The book is so critical that it becomes difficult to imagine a future scene that Bush predicted on the day that McClellan’s forced resignation was announced.

“One of these days,” Bush, with McClellan at his side, told reporters that day, “he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, ‘Job well done.’” ++

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled US on Iraq
Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post via TruthOut
Wednesday 28 May 2008

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”

McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade.

He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.

The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney “the magic man” who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war…. In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

McClellan resigned from the White House on April 19, 2006, after nearly three years as Bush’s press secretary. The departure was part of a shake-up engineered by new Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that also resulted in Rove surrendering his policy-management duties.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the book, some contents of which were first disclosed by Politico.com. The Washington Post acquired a copy of the book yesterday, in advance of its official release Monday.

Responding to a request for comment, McClellan wrote in an e-mail: “Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years.”

The criticism of Bush in the book is striking, given that it comes from a man who followed him to Washington from Texas.

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president’s intellect - “Bush is plenty smart enough to be president,” he writes - but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

“A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people’s ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change,” he writes.

In another section, McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘How can that be?’” he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

“The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office,” he writes. “And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned.”

McClellan has some kind words for Bush, calling him “a man of personal charm, wit and enormous political skill.” He writes that the president “did not consciously set out to engage in these destructive practices. But like others before him, he chose to play the Washington game the way he found it, rather than changing the culture as he vowed to do at the outset of his campaign for the presidency.”

McClellan charges that the campaign-style focus affected Bush’s entire presidency. The ill-fated Air Force One flyover of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina struck the city, was conceived of by Rove, who was “thinking about the political perceptions” but ended up making Bush look “out of touch,” he writes.

He says the White House’s reaction to Katrina was more than just a public relations disaster, calling it “a failure of imagination and initiative” and the result of an administration that “let events control us.” He adds: “It was a costly blunder.”

McClellan admits to letting himself be deceived about the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, which resulted in his relentless pounding by the White House press corps over the activities of Rove and of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the matter.

“I could feel something fall out of me into the abyss as each reporter took a turn whacking me,” he writes of the withering criticism he received as the story played out. “It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit.” He also suggests that Rove and Libby may have worked behind closed doors to coordinate their stories about the Plame leak. Late last year, McClellan’s publisher released an excerpt of the book that suggested Bush had knowledge of the leak, something that won McClellan no friends in the administration.

As McClellan departed the White House, he said: “Change can be helpful, and this is a good time and good position to help bring about change. I am ready to move on.”

He choked up as he told Bush on the South Lawn, “I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all.”

Bush responded at the time: “He handled his assignments with class, integrity. He really represents the best of his family, our state and our country. It’s going to be hard to replace Scott.” ++

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

Bartlett rips McClellan, calls allegation ‘total crap’
House Correspondent Ed Henry, CNN politicalticker
May 28, 2008

(CNN) — Former White House counselor Dan Bartlett lashed out at Scott McClellan in a telephone interview Wednesday, saying the allegations that the media was soft on the White House are “total crap,” adding that advisers of President Bush are “bewildered and puzzled” by the allegations in McClellan’s new book.

“It’s almost like we’re witnessing an out-of-body experience,” Bartlett said of McClellan. “We’re hearing from a completely different person we didn’t have any insight into.”

Bartlett added that intimates of the President feel McClellan has violated his trust. “Part of the role of being a trusted adviser is to honor that trust,” said Bartlett.

“It’s not your place now to go out” and criticize the President like this.

“What did he really believe when he was serving as press secretary?” Bartlett asked.

While he said McClellan himself has to “answer as to motive” for writing the book now, Bartlett said, “I do question his judgment.”

Bartlett said the bewilderment stems from “Scott’s decision to publicly air these deep misgivings he’s never shared privately or publicly” with fellow Bush insiders.

“To do it now, through a book, is a mistake,” he added.

Bartlett asserted that McClellan did not play a major role in key events, noting that the former aide was serving as deputy press secretary for domestic issues during the run-up to the war in Iraq, raising questions about how McClellan could claim the President used “propaganda” to sell the war.

“I don’t think he was in a position to know this,” Bartlett said flatly. He said it’s “troubling” that McClellan is now “gives credibility to every left-wing attack” on anecdotes that are “either thinly-sourced or not witnessed by him” in the White House.

Bartlett bluntly said it was “total crap” for McClellan to suggest the media was too easy on the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war.

“The problem is the intelligence was wrong,” said Bartlett. “But this debate has been conflated into either we lied or on your side the tough questions were not asked. I think the truth is the intelligence was wrong.”

On the Hurricane Katrina allegations, Bartlett refused to confirm or deny McClellan’s claim that he and Bartlett believed the President should not have flown over New Orleans but were overruled by Karl Rove. “I’m not going to rehash internal deliberations,” he said. “We’ve all acknowledged the whole Katrina experience could have been handled better.” ++

Scott McClellan, Where’s the Apology?
David Corn
May 27, 2008

Where’s the apology?

Politico reports that in his new book, former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan says that Bush was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” adopted a “permanent campaign approach” when it came to governing, and used “propaganda” to sell the war. He also writes that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove “had at best misled” him about their role in the leak that disclosed the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and that he (McClellan) had presented information to the White House press corps that was “badly misguided.” McClellan notes that Bush “and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”

Now McClellan says the media was not tough enough on Bush: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise….In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Excuse me for getting a bit huffy. But when it counted there were a few of us in the media who were indeed arguing that the Bush White House was setting new records in presidential deception–especially when it came to Iraq. McClellan, though, was part of the White House’s defense team, pushing back against media coverage that questioned Bush’s rationale for the war and Bush’s serial abuse of facts. Apparently McClellan has seen the light. Well, where’s his plea for forgiveness? If he were truly contrite about his involvement in a deceptive, propaganda-wielding administration, McClellan could demonstrate his sincerity by pledging that all profits from his belated truth-telling will go to charities supporting the families of American soldiers killed or injured in Iraq. For history’s sake, it is good that McClellan is confirming what most Americans (according to polls) have long known: the Bush administration trampled the truth to win public backing for the Iraq war. But as an enabler (witting or not) of that process, McClellan owes the public more than a for-sale account. He should not profit from this book, making bucks for correcting war-supporting falsehoods that he defended. He ought to be doing penance. True heart-felt confessions come free. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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