listen, oo, ah ooo do you wanna know a secret....
as if we didn't figure it out for ourselves.
Hello government, WE THE PEOPLE have a brain.
White House blasts McClellan as ‘disgruntled’
Former press secretary alleges Bush used propaganda to mislead Americans
 | President Bush with Scott McClellan, right, at the White House after McClellan announced his resignation as press secretary in April 2006. |
Ron Edmonds / AP |
 | Scott McClellan's book on Bush |
 Bartlett 'bewildered' by McClellan May 28: Dan Bartlett, Scott McClellan's former White House boss, tells NBC's Andrea Mitchell he's 'puzzled and bewildered' by the views expressed in McClellan's new book. |
 | Video |
 | President Bush in his own words A look at the quotable foreign policy speeches that define George W. Bush’s presidency. Produced by Kevin Flynn and Lisa Desai. MSNBC.com |
 | Interactive |
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WASHINGTON - In a shocking turnabout, the press secretary most known for defending President Bush on Iraq, Katrina and a host of other controversial issues produced a memoir damning of his old boss on nearly every level — from too much secrecy to a less-than-honest selling of the war to a lack of personal candor and an unwillingness to admit mistakes.
In the first major insider account of the Bush White House, onetime spokesman Scott McClellan calls the operation "insular, secretive and combative" and says it veered irretrievably offcourse as a result.
The White House responded angrily Wednesday to McClellan's confessional memoir, calling it self-serving sour grapes.
"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House," said current White House press secretary Dana Perino, a former deputy to McClellan. "We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."
McClellan was the White House press secretary from May 2003 to April 2006, the second of four so far in Bush's presidency.
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He reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned, and he displays some bitterness about that as well as about being sometimes kept out of the loop on key decision-making sessions.
He excludes himself from major involvement in some of what he calls the administration's biggest blunders, for instance the decision to go to war and the initial campaign to sell that decision to the American people. But he doesn't spare himself entirely, saying, "I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be."
He includes criticism for the reporters whose questions he fielded. The news media, he says, were "complicit enablers" for focusing more on "covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war."
And McClellan issues this disclaimer about Bush: "I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people."
But most everything else he writes comes awfully close to making just this assertion, all the more stunning coming from someone who had been one of the longest-serving band of loyalists to come to Washington with Bush from Texas.
Bush's decision to go to war
The heart of the book concerns Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 — at least a full year before the invasion — if not even earlier.
"He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest," McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."
The book, which had been scheduled for release on Monday, was being sold by bookstores on Wednesday after the publisher moved up its release.
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Alex Wong / Getty Images Copies of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's memoir "What Happened" is seen at a bookstore in Washington, DC. |
During the "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people," Bush and his team tried to make the "WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were." Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of "the possible unpleasant consequences of war — casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions."
'Serious strategic blunder'
In Bush's second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was "insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin."
All of this was a "serious strategic blunder" that sent Bush's presidency "terribly off course."
"The Iraq war was not necessary," McClellan concludes.
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McClellan draws a portrait of Bush as possessing "personal charm, wit and enormous political skill." He says Bush's administration early on possessed "seeds of greatness."
But McClellan ticks off a long list of Bush's weaknesses: someone with a penchant for self-deception if it "suits his needs at the moment," "an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader" who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a man with a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he's been wrong.
McClellan also writes extensively about what he says is the Bush White House's excessive focus on "the permanent campaign."
"The Bush team imitated some of the worst qualities of the Clinton White House and even took them to new depths," he writes.
Disgruntled my ass; we have a right to know all complicit acts that took place, and if charges should be filed, let us do so.
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