Maybe the newly unemployed regimistas should just say they were in prison -- isn't that better "work experience" than service in the Bush regime?

Don't worry about our Dana. Apparently she and her better half have enough bucks salted away to be able to afford "to do something that would help others." (No, she does not mean nude press conferences. Who started that rumor anyways?)

"The cream always rises to the top. Those that are the first-rate individuals out of the administration and who have developed good bipartisan relationships and have solid policy experience will be able to make the transition."

-- Nels Olson, of the executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International, in Philip Rucker and Dan Eggen's "All That Experience and No Place to Go," in today's Washington Post

by Ken

I say, if you can't trust cliches, what can you trust? (Apparently not Team Obama's ability to plan a simple concert, for one. But I digress.)

That's a good one from our head-hunter friend Nels, the one about cream rising to the top. Personally, though, my thoughts have been going more to the one about rats deserting a sinking ship. After all, if there's one thing we know, it's that rats desert a sinking ship.

And goodness knows, as the second term of the Bush regime turned to crap, we saw armies of the bastards jumping -- or being pushed by bigger, meaner rats -- off the Good Ship Chimpy. Now, however, we (and the left-behind rats) are learning a corollary to the Rat Rule:

A smart rat knows when to jump.

You might say that this is kind of obvious, or should be to any right-raised rat poised for the big jump. But apparently a lot of the left-behind rats aboard the U.S.S. Chimpy didn't get the message. In case you missed the above-cited Rucker-Eggen piece in today's Post, the subhead is "GOP Appointees Scramble for the Few Washington Jobs in a Tough Economy."

I know it's not a good thing to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, and it doesn't matter that the Germans have a whole word for it, Schadenfreude. I mean, the Germans probably have words for lots of stuff that's not apt to get you karmic time off for good behavior against your eternal rap sheet.

So it was with no sense of personal pride that I chortled, giggled, and guffawed my way through the article. Man, life is tough!

Here's the news, in case you missed it:

As President-elect Barack Obama's team transitions into the federal government tomorrow, President Bush's political appointees will be locked out, and in these tough economic times many of them are scrambling to find new jobs. High-ranking White House loyalists have deluged Washington headhunters with pleas for jobs. Corporations and nonprofit organizations have stopped hiring. With the GOP out of power, jobs on Capitol Hill are scant and K Street lobbying firms have trimmed their golden parachutes.

So this is the new reality: Instead of boasting to friends and colleagues of new jobs in goodbye e-mails, many longtime Bush aides have offered home phone numbers and Gmail and Yahoo e-mail addresses as their new contacts.

Tip: Try not to laugh too hard while you're drinking tea. You're apt to see it spraying out of your nose.

Awww! After all the hard work they put into turning the country -- and the world -- into the shithole their masters dreamed for us.

"It's a bear market out there, no question, for Republicans leaving the Hill or the administration," said Tom C. Korologos, a longtime Republican adviser and lobbyist who served as Bush's ambassador to Belgium from 2004 to 2007. "In this political business, you live by the sword and die by the sword. . . . You're a caretaker for a while, and all of a sudden there's nothing to take care of and you're gone."

In the current political climate, ties to an unpopular president could hurt candidates. "I think there are people whose connection to the Bush administration will be a kind of taint if they try to stay in Washington," said Calvin Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College.

Rucker and Eggen do offer a sterling example of how to do the Rat Jump wisely. Now, Tom Davis isn't an administration-jumping rat. He's one of those "Republicans leaving the Hill." You'll recall that he got tired pretending to be a "moderate Republican," as if there were such a thing in this century. Everybody assumed it was just a matter of time before he transitioned his way into one of Virginia's U.S. Senate seats. Instead, he read the tea leaves in his increasingly Democratic northern VA district and decided to jump ship without even serving out his last House term:

Tom Davis, a powerful Republican congressman from Virginia, retired last year and landed a seven-figure job at Deloitte Consulting, a global financial services company, as the economy started to tank. But he said many of his GOP colleagues "didn't get out soon enough" and are stuck with few opportunities. The market is so poor, Davis said, that some senior GOP congressional aides "are fighting over taking a pay cut from $130,000 to $140,000 to just $60,000 to $70,000."

Davis often repeats a saying passed down by his grandfather, a former Nebraska attorney general: "There is nothing as desperate as a defeated politician looking for a job."

Interestingly, a major problem the desperate regimista rats are having is that they don't want to go back where they came from. One Ron Kaufman, described as "a close White House adviser to former president George H.W. Bush and an executive at Dutko Worldwide," who "helped many loyalists land appointments at the beginning of the Bush presidency," is now telling the regime refugees: "Go home. Take the expertise you've learned here, go back home and apply it to a trade back home."

But they're not biting. The above-quoted Tom C. Korologos -- you remember, the "longtime Republican adviser and lobbyist who served as Bush's ambassador to Belgium from 2004 to 2007," who understands that "it's a bear market out there, no question, for Republicans leaving the Hill or the administration" -- explains: "We're talking Washington. There's an old saying, you know, they never go back to Pocatello." (I'm guessing it was a helpful WaPo editor who added, "referring to an Idaho railroad town," concerned that readers wouldn't get the Pocatello reference. It's a lucky thing Tom C. didn't say "Podunk" instead of "Pocatello," or they would have had to explain Podunk.)

You'll be relieved to learn that there are regime refugees who can afford to take time off, among them our darling Dana Perino. But she won't be doing nothing:

Dana Perino plans to travel with her husband to volunteer in South Africa at the Living Hope Community Center, a beneficiary of Bush's anti-AIDS initiative.

"I didn't want to sit around the house thinking about what I want to do next," Perino said. "I wanted to do something that would help others."

Perino said many White House employees have been too busy in the final months of the Bush presidency to look for new jobs, but acknowledged the difficulty.

"Certainly it's not the roaring days of the dot-com boom or the 52 months of growth we saw during this administration," Perino said, getting a plug in for her boss's economic record.

I don't know about you, but I'm missing our Dana already. No, not really! (You bought that?) Which is not to say unequivocally that we won't look back at these as the golden years for White House press communications, and I'm not even going to try to work in some kind of rude crack about how if only she had had the courage to pioneer nude press conferences, she'd have the job offers rolling in. No, I'm going to take the high road on this one.

Apparently we're supposed to feel sorry for the ex-regimistas because they have poor job-hunting skills:

[F]or many Bush appointees, this is the first time they've been on the job market for years, if not decades. Many came to Washington during the 1990s to take jobs in the Republican-controlled Congress, only to move into the administration after Bush's 2000 election.

"These are people who haven't put together a résumé in 20 years," said Steve Gunderson, a former Republican congressman who is president of the Council on Foundations. He has been reviewing résumés of those seeking jobs in the nonprofit sector. "It's a first for them in developing résumés, applying for open and competitive jobs, and trying to figure out where their skills might work best."

"Figure out where their skills might work best"? OMG, talk about a straight line of the "big fat hanging curveball" variety. I'm not going to swing, though. That would be the old schadenfreudenvoll me. I'm above that sort of thing now.

Nah, I'm just kidding! I'm not above it. I'm right down in it. As a veteran of many resume wars, having spent countless hours trying to construct one that might get me some kind of decent job, I'm just going to make one suggestion to all those first-time resume-writers: When it comes to your time served in the Bush White House, you might want to fudge and claim to have been out of the workforce, like maybe a stay-at-home mom or dad. Failing all else, say you were in prison.

I'd like to think that will still count as better employment history than time served as part of the Bush regime. Meanwhile, why not give Monica Goodling a call and see if she's free for lunch?


POSTSCRIPT: INSIDE THE CREEPY WORLD
OF THE BUSH-CHENEY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Too late for inclusion in the original post, I found this passed-along link from Howie, in which Slate's Christopher Beam recounts his experience behind enemy lines, crashing Sunday night's final gathering of the loyal regimistas in the Spanish Ballroom of Maryland's Glen Echo Park.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll check the locks on your doors and windows to make sure none of these people can sneak in.

BULLETIN: THE DANA PERINO WATCH (FOR BIL)

As I stood in line for barbecue, Dana Perino came over to greet some friends. "I'm starting to breathe!" she said. I asked her for a comment on the party. "It's a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the outgoing administration and reminisce in casual clothes," she said.

[Hmm, nothing about those rumored nude press conferences? -- Ed.]

And, oh yes, there's a good chance you'll upchuck, hearing almost-former President George W. Bush say:

So we're no longer sprinting to the finish -- we're dancing to the finish. This is objectively the finest group of people ever to serve our country. Not to serve me, not to serve the Republican Party, but the United States of America.

And yes, there really is a Bush-Cheney Alumni Association, for "employees, appointees, and interns of President George W. Bush … as well as campaign donors and volunteers." Christopher picked up his own application form. You can find about it online. In a sense, a very grim sense, we're all veterans of the Bush regime -- and certainly victims. That ought to count for something.

Wouldn't you think?

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Maybe the White House Correspondents Association isn't going far enough in its efforts to limit access to on-the-road "news" to paying media players

A better model for access to "news" when the president travels?

You can't blame correspondents who are forced by their employers to travel to goodness-only-knows-where with Chimpy the Prez for resenting that some of their colleagues are getting literally a free ride thanks to the pool system set up by the White House Correspondents Association. Now, Dan Eggen reports in his column of political notes in today's Washington Post, the WHCA is trying to deny the freeloaders access to some of those reports:

Everybody in the Pool -- or Not

Warning: Media navel-gazing ahead.

A brouhaha erupted last week among the ranks of the White House Correspondents Association, the official club of reporters who cover the aforementioned building. The trouble centers on a move by the WHCA board to limit distribution of some pool reports, which are dispatches describing photo opportunities, Air Force One flights, and other doings not open to the entire press corps.

A dwindling number of newspapers and media companies are paying to send reporters with the president when he travels at home or abroad, leaving it to a few big papers (full disclosure: You are reading one) to pick up the tab. As a result, the WHCA decided to limit some reports to those traveling with the president.

The move set off a fevered debate via e-mails that -- reporters being reporters -- were quickly leaked to Mediabistro.com's FishbowlDC.

"The idea that pool reporting on the road with the president will be available only to those who travel and pay for it should be repugnant to our profession," wrote Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune. "I call it pay to play."

But Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times called the out-of-town pool system "broken" and wrote in an e-mail: "A system that called for pool duty -- let's not forget the word duty -- was set up so that we could share the responsibility for coverage, as well as the information gathered. Today only the information is shared."

So far the association is holding firm, but current WHCA President Ann Compton of ABC News has urged members to weigh in.

I think an opportunity is being missed here.

Why not convert all presidential briefings to a Wheel of Fortune-type format, where the content of each briefing point is reduced to the standard WoF format of a "puzzle" consisting of a familiar phrase, which the journalistic contestants compete to identify by guessing letters. Surely the NYT could afford, for example, to buy Ms. Stolberg the occasional vowel. And of course the kicker could be that only the correspondent who solves the puzzle gets, say, the single additional paragraph of information that the Bush regime is prepared to dole out for public consumption.

Press secretary Dana Perino would seem tailor-made for the Vanna White Wheel of Fortune role, but it shouldn't be too great a stretch to slot her into the Pat Sajak role. After all, she seems better suited to answering questions like "Is there a T?" than the ones she usually fields. Especially assuming she'll have an earpiece into which the answers can be fed.

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As poor Scotty talks to Keith, Richard Clarke reminds us that poor Scotty used to merrily dish out the abuse that's being heaped on him now

It was interesting last night seeing poor Scotty McClellan spend most of the Countdown hour with Keith Olbermann. (There's a complete transcript on the Countdown website.) The rest of the hour was filled out with an instructively complementary interview with onetime Nixon White House Counsel John Dean.

It was also interesting, later in the evening, to see counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke (flogging his new book, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters) with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show recalling how when he published his 2004 book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, which accused the Bush administration of screwing up the anti-terrorism effort, he had been attacked with almost exactly the same talking points that McClellan is hearing now: disaffected former official, was totally out of the loop, never said those things while he was here, is just trying to sell books in an election year.

Of course back then Clarke heard the talking points from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

I still don't hear much news in the "revelations" in poor Scotty's book, or for that matter in the interview. I think I got the circumstances pretty much right yesterday. The discovery that both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had just plain lied to him when they told him unequivocally that they had not leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA identity seems to have gotten the poor boy's attention like being thwacked over the head with a two-by-four. After that wake-up call, he began to see the people around him rather differently.

The poor sap had entered the service of George W. Bush believing him to be what he had pretended to be as governor of Texas: a bipartisan uniter who could bring people together. Of course he wasn't really that in Texas either, but it was still possible for simple souls -- or complex ones with devious agendas -- to believe it. That's who he thought he was following to Washington, and even after 9/11, he really believed in, and was inspired by, Chimpy the Prez's supposed plan to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East, and any other damned place that got in his way.

I just don't think poor Scotty has much more to tell us about the Bush regime. Is he really telling us anything we didn't know about the regime's singleminded and ruthless pursuit of its vicious partisan agenda? The significance of his witness is that it comes from someone that close to the center of power.

John Dean also suspects that poor Scotty doesn't have much more to tell us, for the obvious reason that press secretaries really don't know very much about policy-making or the inner workings of an administration. In fact, the nature of the job dictates that the less they know, the more effectively they can sell what they do know to the media they service. The press secretary is briefed to know exactly what the administration wants him/her to pass on, and nothing more. This way he/she isn't put in the position of having to hide or lie about things he/she isn't supposed to talk about. (Conspicuously, when Keith tried to press the discussion beyond the few matters that have already been discussed, it usuallly turned out that it was an area poor Scotty had never been briefed on.)

Nevertheless, Dean agreed with Keith's suggestion that with the passage of time, Scotty may find that he has more to tell us. In his own case, once he had absorbed the beating he took from his former colleagues and friends over his congressional testimony laying bare some of the Nixon administration's grubbier secrets, he began to realize that other things he had witnessed and taken for granted might actually have larger significance.

The difference, of course, is that Dean as White House counsel really was often part of the policy-making (or at least policy-enforcing) apparatus. Poor Scotty was thought of and used as a tool. In that capacity he had the misfortune, as I suggested yesterday, of having a shred of decency that was both (a) absent from his regime predecessor and successors and (b) unsuspected by his regime overlords.


A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE BUSH REGIME PRESS FLACKS

Just to be clear on this matter of White House press secretaries being basically out of the policy-making loop, it seems reasonable to assume that while this model applied to poor Scotty's dismal predecessor, Ari Fleischer, and to the incumbent, Dana Perino, it was probably not the case with poor Scotty's immediate successor, the unspeakable Tony Snow. I doubt that he would have taken the job under those conditions.

Snow brought conservative movement cred of his own to the job, and I suspect was permitted rare access and input for a press secretary. After all, since he had already established himself as one of the most accomplished liars and propagandists in the modern communications business, he could be trusted to bamboozle the docile White House press corps.

Even so, I doubt that our Tony would have lasted much longer in the job even without his health considerations. I suspect that the regime policy-makers were coming to find him a bad fit for the job. The last thing they needed or wanted was more opinions. They had all the opinions they needed, thank you very much.

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How would you expect the lying liars of the Bush regime to respond to the charge that they (gasp) LIED? Why, naturally, with a new fusillade of lies!

C'mon, Scotty, smile! Rod Serling rarely managed a Twilight Zone scene as creepy as this sendoff Chimpy the Prez gave his longtime loyal lapdog. (Poor Scotty looks like he's praying to a different sci-fi icon -- to his Star Trek namesake, to be beamed up, or anywhere away from here.)

"McClellan's explosive new book, which alleges that the Bush administration waged a 'political propaganda campaign' in favor of the Iraq war and bungled the response to the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast, prompted a counterattack yesterday from some of his oldest political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility."

--from Dan Eggen's front-page report in today's Washington Post

Howie has already noted the furious response by Bush regimists to news of former White House Press Secretary Scotty McClellan's new book. I'm more struck by the comic element of the fracas. As news of the book's innards tumbled out last night, I really didn't think all that much about it. I figured, well, this should cause the regime gang some temporary embarrassment -- you know, having such stuff said by such a deep-inside-the-regime insider.

But the revelations themselves? I mean, really now! Ooh, the bad regime boys (and girl, with Madame Condi's ritual denial duly noted) propaganda-blitzed the country into a war in Iraq. Blah blah blah. Shocking!

Yawn. Come on now! In May 2008, can there possibly be anyone to whom this is news? And so on with all the "revelations" in the book. Of course I haven't read the thing, but could there be anything in it that would surprise anyone who's been paying even the tiniest attention to the unfolding horror of the Bush regime?

Least of all the gang of conspirators within the regime, rising now in unison in such self-righteous dudgeon. And they all profess to be shocked, really shocked. The deck on Dan Eggen's Washington Post story captures (I suppose unwittingly) the hilarity of it:

"Former Bush Aide Stuns Many With Critical New Book"

Why, they're beyond shocked, they're stunned! All the way to the, er, top. We have it on the authority of no less than poor Scotty's most recent successor as White House manure-shoveler, Dana Perino, that the president "is puzzled, and he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years." (Doesn't it seem possible, even likely, that if you put a pair of Groucho glasses on Mrs. Chimpy, Chimpy the Prez wouldn't recognize her either?)

Now we all know the brand of comedy that's being played out here, don't we? One hates to invoke yet again the utter shock of the corrupt police Captain Renault in Casablanca, as voiced so memorably by Claude Rains, at the discovery of gambling in Rick's Cafe Americain. But this wonderful moment has become a cliche precisely because in it the hypocrisy is so perfectly distilled.

Except to the brain-locked class of Beltway insiders, there's no imaginable mystery about "what happened" to poor Scotty. During his long lapdog-like service to George W. Bush, it obviously escaped everyone's attention that while he might have been every bit the schlub he appeared, he may not have been the doofus and moral cypher normally pressed into service for the moral sinkhole that would be the Bush regime.

Clearly there were glimmerings during his service as press secretary that the regime power brokers were lying to him, and sending him out to the briefing room to spread those lies to the press, and by extension to the American people. Clearly there were instances when he discovered he was being lied to bare-facedly, as with the manure that Karl Rove among others shoveled at him over Plamegate.

Maybe the book spells out the process by which poor Scotty came to understand how badly he had been used by a pack of liars he had foolishly trusted -- and, worse, came to understand that he had been made a cog in their machine for systematically lying to the American people. My guess is that the loyal sad sack started with an alarmingly high doubt threshhold, but that once it was breached, the real story came together increasingly easily.

By the time poor Scotty couldn't take any more and abandoned his liar's podium, it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that something terrible had happened to him. My gosh, who could forget that creepy scene where Chimpy the Prez bade farewell to his loyal retainer, who looked like he was about to walk off into an alien spaceship? It was like a scene out of The Twililght Zone.

But of course the Bush regimists weren't paying attention. Poor Scotty was just another lowly functionary who'd been used and now, when his time came, discarded. (Write if you get work!)

However far along poor Scotty was in his path to illumination at the time he left the White House, I'm guessing that the view from outside the Beltway did wonders to clarify and sharpen his vision. Why exactly he went public, especially knowing the kind of humiliation and character assassination that inevitably awaited him, only he himself could explain. If I had to guess, I'd say that there was a spark of decency in him that escaped the notice of the regimists who had been pulling his strings. (We'll speculate a bit more below.)

It's that same spark of decency that turned out to lodge somewhere inside some of the Nixon faithful as the Watergate scandal unfolded. John Dean, for one, who after all had tried to warn the president that there was a cancer on the presidency, at a time when he was still too naive to realize that the president he had served so loyally was the cancer on the presidency. Talk about a fish rotting from the head: All the filth and corruption of the Nixon regime traced back ultimately to the mind of the master.

So where, I keep asking, is the mystery in all of this?

Supposedly serious media types tell us, in all supposed seriousness, how mystified all of poor Scotty's former colleagues are by this shocking book. Where could poor Scotty have gotten those crazy ideas?

Now, it could be that some of the Bush loyalists, both within the regime and in the media, are genuinely stumped. Because Bush loyalists (again, both in the media and within the regime) come in two basic flavors: the people who drank the Kool-Aid and the people who served it.*

And it's entirely possible that the Kool-Aid drinkers are puzzled. For example, all those Bush regime law diplomates who got their "legal training" at Pat Robertson's Regent U. I can believe that many (most?) of them believe that shredding the damned document and lining bird cages with the resulting confetti really is how a president can best "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

But as for the others, the people who have made the Bush regime function, my gosh, if it weren't so pathetic, and also so semi-serious, it would be hilarious.

Here we have the bloated carcass of Karl Rove, a man who has never in his benighted life told the truth about anything unless he was playing some other-dimensionally devious angle, blithering bemusedly (on Fox Noise, where else?) about the perfidy and ignorance of poor Scotty. Okay, in fairness to our Karl, it's not as if treating poor Scotty like a schmuck and a patsy is something new, or something that he does only behind his back -- look how long he did it right to the dumb schmuck's face.

Thank goodness for Countdown, where we at least had Keith Olbermann pointing out that the regime's hastily assembled Get Scotty Posse was merely spewing -- what else? -- talking points! "Why, that doesn't even sound like our Scotty!"

Well, this may actually be true, because it's doubtful that their Scotty ever talked to them this way when he was shoveling their manure to the ever-eager-for-more White House press corps. Where they apparently went wrong was in assuming that he was just another member of the loyal Kool-Aid Brigade.

On Countdown last night there was much speculation as to what poor Scotty could hope to gain by writing a book that incriminates himself as much as anybody. Let me throw out a theory. Might this be the necessary first step toward redeeming his soul?

It can happen. The young John Dean paid a heavy price for his involvement in the swamp of Nixonian corruption. The older-and-wiser John Dean has emerged from his crucible as one of our more valuable public figures.

It's a start, Scotty.

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*Although it doesn't really concern us here, there is in fact a third category of Bush loyalist, especially prevalent among the crony capitalists who have been so well served by the regime -- like the war profiteers and other sleazy opportunists for whom each successive regime disaster, regime-made or otherwise, represented another potential bonanza. The cronies didn't need to drink the Kool-Aid because they didn't need to believe any of the regime's pathetic mock-patriotic cover stories. They understood how the game is played: You make the payoffs so you can cash in on the paydays.

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