“What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Scott McClellan)
Gee, where have we heard this routine before?
As President Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan was a dutiful practitioner of the swift, efficient and highly coordinated strategy the White House typically employs to take on Mr. Bush’s critics.
On Wednesday, Mr. McClellan got a taste of life on the other side.
As news of Mr. McClellan’s new tell-all book — in which he calls the war in Iraq a “strategic blunder” and accuses Mr. Bush of engaging in “self-deception” — dominated the airwaves, the White House and a tight-knit group of former aides pushed back. They sought to paint the former press secretary as a disgruntled man trying to redeem his own reputation after long remaining silent about concerns he is suddenly taking public.
The result was a kind of public excommunication of Mr. McClellan, waged by some of the people with whom he once worked most closely, among them Karl Rove, the political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, the former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary; and Dan Bartlett, the former counselor to the president.
Their cries of betrayal served as a stern warning to other potential turncoats that, despite some well-publicized cracks, the Bush inner circle remains tight. Their language was so similar that the collective reaction amounted to one big inside-the-Beltway echo chamber.
[From Ex-Aide Turns Critic; Chorus Strikes Back – NYTimes.com]
Impossible to have any sympathy for McClellan, as he piled on other ex-Bushites when they were promoting their tell-all books. Hard to have any sympathy for McClelland also because such revelations are much more useful when still employed by the Bush juggernaut, not after being fired.
—
Ezra Klein has more anti-love for Scotty:
There are no revelations in Scott McClellan’s new book. No fresh information, no new insights. Just the tinny bleatings of a man who abetted a lying, disastrous presidency because it seemed like a good gig, but doesn’t want his name maligned by the historians. But truthtelling is powerful and redemptive when it’s hard, as it was for Richard Clarke, who broke with the administration when it was powerful and popular. They smeared his name, of course, Implied that he was lying. They asked, “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.” Those words, of course, were Scott McClellan’s.
