SCOTT McCLELLAN'S LITTLE FALLING OUT WITH THE HOUSE REPUBLICAN RUBBER STAMPS

No more thick as thieves

Yesterday it was the activism end of being a blogger that was driving me, more than the journalism end. We got a little involved with Steny Hoyer's collaborative efforts with the Bush Regime to undermine the Constitution, helping collect a couple hundred grand and working with a team on some newspaper ads. In the process we lost touch with the ongoing saga of Scott McClellan who testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Even before he showed up, something remarkable had happened-- a former Bush Regimist agreed to voluntarily come before a congressional committee-- without a subpoena-- and give sworn testimony. For Republicans this was shock and awe! And they reacted... well, they reacted like school yard bullies react when there's no adult around. According to US News and World Report, "Republicans went straight for his throat."

He was dismissed as a "disgruntled former employee." He was likened to no less than the apostle Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ-- and that by a fellow Texas Republican. "Scott McClellan alone," Rep. Lamar Smith of San Antonio intoned, "will have to wrestle with whether it was worth selling out his president and friends for a few pieces of silver."

Although quite a few Republicans tried their hand at character assassination, afterwards it was generally agreed that the Clown Of The Day Award went to the now svelte former rolly polly rubber stamp from Orlando, Ric Keller, who demanded to know -- out of the blue-- whether McClellan remembered ever taking illegal drugs. If Scott had wanted to play rough with Keller he could have asked him what his role was in his major campaign donor Lou Pearlman's child molestation scandal. It would have been far more germane than Keller's sleazy question.

According to the account in this morning's NY Times, McClellan thinks it was probably Cheney rather than Bush who was behind the leaking of Valerie Plame's name to the press. "I do not think the president in any way had knowledge about it. In terms of the vice president, I do not know. There is a lot of suspicion there." Bush didn't exactly come off heroically either. McClellan said he should how he decided to invade Iraq since he was "less than candid and less than honest" about persuading the American public that it was necessary to attack Iraq.

One of the most lunatic fringe extremists in the whole GOP, Iowa nutcase Steve King, has no interest in getting to the truth and seems to feel no one else should either. He asked McClellan why he couldn't have just "taken some of this to the grave with you and done this country a favor?" King, of course, has a long and shameful career of mixing up "the country" and the radical wing of his political party.

If the Bush regimistas would just quit, admitting they've waged an 8-year war of lies and deceit, we wouldn't have to prove all the lies one by one

Do we really have to keep proving, agency by agency, inspector general by inspector general, congressional inquiry by congressional inquiry, how the Bush regime turned the entire federal government into a vast right-wing propaganda machine for its catastrophic extreme ideological agenda?

"The significance of [Scott] McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now."

--Dan Froomkin, in his washingtonpost.com column yesterday,
"Vindication for the Bush Critique"

It isn't even front-page news anymore when the Bush regime is caught in another web of lies and deceit. On page A2 of today's Washington Post:

Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
Appointees in NASA Press Office Blamed
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.

James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are two of the government's lead agencies on climate change issues.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."

And so on and so on.

In public, Chimpy the Prez would say that we need "more study" of the climate-change issue. In private, the storm troopers of the regime were using every available resource to stifle all those inconvenient truths.

I've been saying since the revelations from poor Scotty McClellan's book broke that we weren't likely to gain much knowledge, since all we were likely to get was insider confirmation of what we've already managed to find out. And as much as I normally esteem the judgment of washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin, I didn't even bother to read his above-referenced column yesterday. The point -- "vindication of the Bush critique" -- seemed so obvious as to be hardly worth belaboring.

Note that the story of NASA's wholesale rigging of its scientists' research findings isn't new. As the story indicates, it was all aired pretty thoroughly back in 2006 -- and even then, was anyone really surprised? For years now, we've been hearing the same story, agency by agency, about how the managers of the Bush regime distorted or even shut down the agency's rightful functions to turn it into yet another tentacle of the propaganda machine. All that's new is the IG report (at least something about NASA's role in the climate-change issue finally got studied

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in fact we need more of these reports, or something to show the American people that the dissatisfaction they're registering in Chimpy the Prez's ghastly poll numbers isn't based on stuff just happening. Their onetime hero didn't just make a bum decision or two along the way, with unfortunate consequences. The regime to which so many Americans for so long showed such unshakable loyalty was always a festering fraud. It was always a hotbed of ideological hooliganism, in cahoots with corrupt corporate profiteers, advancing an extreme right-wing agenda through a combination of secret stealth and public propaganda, including blatant lying.

The job of rebuilding a trustworthy federal government is so enormous, so overwhelming, and it has to be done at the same time as so many ongoing crises have to be managed, that I don't see how we can have much hope of success unless the country faces up to the dimension of the challenge. How can we hope to make progress with the mess in Iraq, for example, as long as anyone takes seriously anything said by anyone involved in the regime's all-deception-all-the-time policies there?

I think back to events as recent as the 2004 presidential campaign, when most of the groundwork was laid for the regime's spectacular fall from public grace, but there were still few visible signs of what was to come. Back then anyone who spoke ill of Chimpy the Prez was still dismissed, even by the so-called mainstream media, as a "Bush-basher." Back then supposedly respectable media types were still insisting that no proof existed that Chimpy had ever "lied" -- the magical "L" word.

I'm not really angling for an apology, though I wouldn't mind one from the hordes of dimwits who jeered at every attempt to penetrate the nation-choking jungle of Bush propaganda as "Bush bashing." But what would be nice would be an acknolwedgment that anyone who wasn't "Bush-bashing" was at very best deluded.

So maybe we do need more independent verification of the truths we've known for years about the Bush regime's commitment to untruth. And in that spirit I've gone back to what Dan Froomkin had to say yesterday. Here's the start:

Vindication for the Bush Critique

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

As the response to former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book enters its second week, the focus has shifted to the messenger rather than his message.

McClellan is a flawed vessel for any serious communication. From behind the podium, he made a mockery of the press and the public's right to know, most notably by repeating non-responsive and sometimes ludicrous talking points. He has yet to persuasively explain his change of heart. And his insistence that self-deception rather than a conscious disregard for the truth was behind what he now describes as the White House's consistent lack of candor is spectacularly self-serving.

But the significance of McClellan's book is that his detailed recounting of what he saw from the inside vindicates pretty much all the central pillars of the Bush critique that have been chronicled here and elsewhere for many years now. Among them:

* That Bush and his top aides manipulated the country into embarking upon an unnecessary war on false pretenses;

* That Bush is an incurious man, happily protected from dissenting views inside the White House's bubble of self-delusion;

* That Karl Rove's huge influence on the Bush White House erased any distinction between policy and politics, so governing became about achieving partisan goals, not the common good;

* That Vice President Cheney manipulates the levers of power;

* That all those people who denied White House involvement in the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity were either lying or had been lied to;

* That the mainstream media were complicit enablers of the Bush White House and that its members didn't understand how badly they were being played.

By coming back again and again to the CIA leak story, McClellan also validates a key theme of the Bush critique: That the Plame case was a microcosm of much that was wrong with the way the Bush White House did business.

This is no way to run a country, and it's one of those routine cliches to say that America deserves better. But maybe America doesn't deserve better. At least not as long as we don't own up to the real-world consequences of what we do.

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David Frum Blames The McClellan Mess On Bush's Lack Of Vision and Lack Of Managerial Skill

Frum now claiming publisher botched title & he meant "Rightist Man?"

Although the GOP reaction To Scott McClellan's book that gets the most ink was prissy Bob Dole's "miserable creature" remark, a few days ago, author Newt Gingrich was questioned about McClellan on Fox and, speaking as a publishing business insider, he claims the whle thing was a big giant ploy to sell books and that the publisher probably encouraged McClellan to "spice it up." Gingrich went on to say that he's "more concerned about 'American Idol' than I am about Scott McClellan... where there are more voters and maybe more to vote for."

Republican Party wordsmith and propaganda agent David Frum has a more serious critique to offer. He thinks the whole tawdy episode is a reflection on the poor managerial qualities of his ex-boss, the man who, pre-9/11 when he became the "War President,"  fancied himself the "CEO-President:

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock-- but Rove did it.)

These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility-- Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

Yet as the proverb warns us, even worms will turn.

...To recruit and hold strong personalities, a president must demand something more than personal loyalty. He must offer a compelling vision and ideal-- a cause that people can serve without feeling servile. Otherwise a president will only get… what Bush has now got.

After Scotty: The Tom Brokaws of the world ask, How could we have known?, while the Bush kooks crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the traitor

"Regardless of whether McClellan is right about [the media] not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point) . . . there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not."

-- clammyc, in his Daily Kos diary yesterday,
"While 'defending its honor,' MSM still dropping the ball"

"There's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, [Bernie] Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

"On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served."

"While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped [Scott] McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested."

-- Gail Collins, in her NYT column today, "What George Forgot"

It occurs to me that I may have been underestimating what poor Scotty McClellan's revelations have to tell us.

Oh, not poor Scotty's revelations themselves. I'm thinking of the reaction to them, in particular among the two groups who feel most challenged by poor Scotty's shocking revelation of, well, stuff we've known for some time now.


(1)
FIRST, THERE ARE THE MEDIA HORDES WHO SCREWED
UP BACK THEN -- JUST LIKE THEY'RE SCREWING UP NOW

Even some of the media mensches who actually got the story right are up in arms about poor Scotty pointing a pudgy finger at them. How dare he? they seem to be asking. Why, why (note how they're reduced to spluttering), by his own admission, he just stood up there and lied to us!

Is it really necessary to explain how fatuous this is? Of course the Bush regime's relentless propagandizing and lying made the media pigeons' job harder. But wasn't it still their job to get at the truth? There were lots of media people who weren't fooled, and who tried to do honest reporting -- and a bunch of them did a splendid job. Of course nobody paid any attention to them, in large part because the fat and lazy big-time media, with their suspicious big-corporate ties, tanked on the job.

But even within those organizations, I think it's safe to say there were people who knew better. I have no inside sources at the New York Times, but I know enough about the organization to venture with confidence that inside the Times building there were a lot of reporters and surely lower-level editors as well (we saw the way it worked in the last season of The Wire) screaming bloody murder about, for example, how Judy Miller had become a shill for the Bush regime.

The depressing thing is that the infotainment media don't seem to have learned a bloody thing. NBC's Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams put their heads together, combining their two generations and years beyond counting (albeit mostly wasted years) of Nightly News managing-editor experience to figure out whether "the right questions were asked, the right tone was employed and should it be viewed in the context to that time?" (That's Brian doing the asking.)

And here's the wisdom of Graybeard Tom:

Look, I think all of us would like to go back and ask questions with the benefit of hindsight of what we know now, but a lot of what was going on was unknowable.

Except, of course, that lots of people knew, and were jumping up and down trying to get the attention of the stonewalling infotainmenteers. "Well," as our pal John Amato notes on Crooks and Liars, "he should have watched Bill Moyers special on the media as a refresher course."

Meanwhile, as our friend clammyc pointed out yesterday in the terrific Daily Kos diary from which I've quoted at the top, those media slugs are providing essentially the same caliber of performance now that they did back then (I should warn that I haven't attempted to reproduce the scads of links embedded in the text -- you can check them out on Daily Kos):

While "defending its honor", MSM still dropping the ball
by clammyc

For starters, I only use "MSM" in the title because "corporate media" or "infotainment media" wouldn’t fit. That being said, the sad irony of the press corps which once again shows how out of touch the village idiots are with reality is that, despite all of the huffing and puffing about how Scott McClellan wouldn’t let them do their jobs, they still are falling flat on their faces at every turn.

I’d use the term jumped the shark (hyperlinked for those who don’t know what it means) to describe them and their role in the whole "reporting the news and professional journalism" thing that they clearly have long given up but I think the term "jump the shark" has kind of jumped the shark...

When news reporters say that their corporate bosses pushed them to take out their "America, Fuck YEAH!!!" pom poms, that is bad enough. But when the same reporter complains about how unfair McClellan was being to criticize them was not only the same one to share a stage with traitor Rove in one of the most eye-burning dances ever and is STILL, to this day the NBC News Chief White House Correspondent, and is not doing the job that McClellan accused him of not doing, well, sorry, I have no sympathies there.

And when someone like Tom Brokaw is shocked, SHOCKED, that his profession were either dumb or complicit or unfit to do the jobs they are supposed to do, it is time to not only call him on this, but to push back forcefully.

When Brokaw says that "all wars are based on propaganda", he misses the point. Propaganda means the spreading of ideas or rumor to further your cause or to damage an opposing cause. This was not propaganda. It was lies.

Period.

Hell, even Speaker Pelosi calls it a lie, although that apparently is still not grounds for impeachment.

What makes this worse, and what all of the whiny whiners are missing is that regardless of whether McClellan is right about them not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point), is that there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not.

Where to even begin here? Even equating McCain’s total cluelessness about the troop levels and the violence in mosul with Obama’s minor "gaffe" (if it can even be called a gaffe) about a personal story that happened to be accurate in every meaningful way is a great disservice to what Americans should know when judging who should be their next President. Or the way that the Wright/Hagee/Parsley stories were reported -- if they should even have been covered at all in the first place.

And it doesn’t stop there, of course. There are real serious things -- things that should be covered and reported to the American people that we deserve to know about. Things that are imperative -- things that are both accurate but ignored and things that are inaccurate yet covered non-stop as if they were gospel.

Things like the number of troops that are committing suicide and have PTSD. Things like telecom immunity really being about protecting Bush and his illegal programs. Things like the GAO report that shows how unprepared we are to deal with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan. Things like the Pentagon propaganda campaign. Things like FISA. Things like fake "evidence" that overblows the threat that Iran is to the United States (or Israel for that matter). Things like the continued devastation in the Gulf Coast, almost three years later.

Things like Rove and Miers ignoring Congressional subpoenas for no good reason. Things like the hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters from voter ID anti-voter laws and other voter suppression tactics. Things like the same voting machines that were unreliable in 2002, 2004 and 2006 are still being used, despite many not being certified. Things like asking what exactly happened to the millions of dollars in cash that were "lost" in Iraq. Things like why the US was arming both sides of a civil war in Iraq, or exactly what the role of our troops is or the desired end game is in Iraq or the reason we should still be spending billions of dollars every month there.

So many more things. Even things like why Cindy McCain gets a pass when Teresa Heinz Kerry didn’t. Or why McCain still calls himself a "straight talker" when he is either lying, stupid or just losing it. And even bringing it back to McClellan’s bubble bursting smack in their faces, why they STILL aren’t saying that they were lied to.

All the handwringing and finger pointing and blame gaming in the world won’t change the fact that McClellan passed along (either willfully or not) lies and they were not challenged or questioned at the time. And nothing will change the fact that the independence and integrity of those who are in the corporate media were sacrificed to become "buddy buddy" with the very people that lied and destroyed national security secrets and pissed all over the Constitution and made them out for the damn fools that they proved to be.

Regardless of whether it was their choice or the choice of their corporate puppetmasters bosses.

But instead of this "woe is me" nonsense, how about a bit of reflection and actually using it as a learning experience. There is so much that needs to be reported, so much that needs exposing, so much that a bit of research can lead to a huge story that the American public will be interested in.

The sad thing is that instead of doing the job that McClellan said you didn’t do a few years ago, you choose to keep crying that it just isn’t fair.

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THEN THERE ARE THE REGIMISTS AND THEIR GROUPIES
WHO ARE SIMPLY SHOCKED BY SCOTTY'S DISLOYALTY

Here's where it gets hilarious. Presumably on the old theory that there's honor among thieves, the most astonishing people are crawling out of the woodwork. Mary Matalin? Bob Dole? And . . . and . . . Bernie Kerik???

When we venture into the land of the kooks, there's no better tour guide than the Times's Gail Collins:

Op-Ed Columnist
What George Forgot
By GAIL COLLINS

"DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE," wrote Bernard Kerik in an e-mail that he was circulating around this week. Kerik, you may remember, was the former New York City police commissioner who George W. Bush once tried to make chief of Homeland Security. This was during Kerik's happier, preindictment era.

Kerik's outrage was directed at Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary whose much-discussed memoir, "What Happened," reveals that the Bush White House put politics ahead of truth and openness with the American people.

I know it's a shock, but try to be brave.

The administration's defenders have not really attacked the book's thesis -- really, what could you say? But they've been frothing at the mouth over McClellan's lack of loyalty. "This will stand as the epitome, the ultimate breach of that code of honor," said Mary Matalin.

We've heard a lot about loyalty this year. Remember when Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama and James Carville compared Richardson to Judas Iscariot? And the whole Jeremiah Wright drama was mainly about Obama's coming to grips with the sad fact that presidents do not have the luxury of being loyal to anybody outside of their immediate gene pool.

"Having been through all I have been through in the past four years, disloyalty and betrayal seem more prevalent today than ever before in my lifetime, and that in itself, to me, is sickening," Kerik wrote in his e-mail, which also suggested that writing unflattering memoirs about working for the president "should be a crime."

Currently under indictment for multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion, Kerik is not, at this point, a person the administration calls upon when it wants to be defended. But he is a perfect example of what a worthless quality loyalty is in high government officials.

Kerik is stupendously loyal, which is what endeared him to Rudy Giuliani, his great patron. The Bush administration, which also prizes loyalty, shipped him off to Iraq with the critical job of supervising the rebuilding of the Iraqi police. Kerik stayed only three months, during which he devoted himself to giving interviews and being gregarious, the two things he does very well. Management, however, turned out not to be a strong point.

Back home, Bush was embarrassed when Kerik's Homeland Security nomination immediately ran aground on reports of his ethics issues. His downfall was a terrible blow to Giuliani's presidential candidacy -- although given Rudy's multitudinous deficiencies as presidential timber, it's hard to pick the one that made the difference.

Anyway, there's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served.

Whoever the next president is, I hope he-she picks incredibly well-qualified people who are strong enough to speak their minds and cynical enough not to assume the chief executive knows what he-she is doing. Loyalty does not tend to be a great virtue in these types, and the goal should be to wring as much accomplishment as possible out of them before the inevitable betrayal.

My favorite moment in "What Happened" was from 1999 when George W. Bush was deeply irritated about questions from the press on his past drug use. "The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors," the future president said. "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not."

"I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? It didn't make a lot of sense," McClellan wrote.

While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested.

Even now, McClellan still appears to have trouble with the critical concept that deeds matter more than words.

"Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake," he writes. "But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I've come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made -- a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

Personally, I'm a huge fan of candor and honesty. But when it comes to fundamental mistakes, I'll start with the unnecessary war.

Man, you can't make this stuff up. Sometimes I wish you could, but when it comes to these people, trust me, you really can't.

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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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