McClellan whacks Bush, White House

As the ship slowly sinks, the rats are leaving, and some of them are realising that there is money to be made from, at last, coming clean.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is leading the way with what has been described as "a surprisingly scathing memoir" in which:

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.

McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

I doubt that many of us had expected McClellan to be as forthright as he appears to be being, nor can one predict what will be the legal ramifications of such honesty for the main participants.

Rove has always denied any role in this affair and the fact that McLellan is letting it be known that he was "at best misled" over this issue will surely open the door for further investigation by Fitzgerald. McLellan states:

“There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” he writes. “It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby.

“I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. … At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …

“The confidential meeting also occurred at a moment when I was being battered by the press for publicly vouching for the two by claiming they were not involved in leaking Plame’s identity, when recently revealed information was now indicating otherwise. … I don’t know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic? Like the whole truth of people’s involvement, we will likely never know with any degree of confidence.”

There's something ironic about the very people who dismissed any critics of the regime as people "with books to sell" now rushing towards every available publisher in a desperate desire to dish the dirt and portray themselves as one of the good guys in a corrupt administration.

But some of Scotty's revelations are truly disturbing. And they won't be dismissed as "book selling" as easily as Scotty managed to do when he was White House Press Secretary.

Amongst his many home truths McLellan also speaks of the "botched federal response" to Hurricane Katrina and says that Bush's infamous photo-op aboard Air Force One was all Karl Rove's doing.

He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped. But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”

Why is Rove spoken of as some sort of political genius when he has been behind so many disastrous decisions?

And McLellan takes no prisoners when it comes to the honesty of some within the Bush administration, even going so far as to name the names.

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later. “Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

The Vice President was encouraging the Press Secretary to repeat lies. Who would believe it of such an honest man?

UPDATE:

Olbermann and Maddow discuss McLellan's new book.



UPDATE II:

The tossers over at Fox News are parroting the usual bullshit.



Click title for full article.

Tags: Scott McLellan, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, Bush, Cheney, lies, liars, Valerie Plame