Scott McClellan Hits White House in New Book

Yeah, this looks juicy. Nice timing in terms of McCain, too.

'Wash Post' Probes McClellan Book - He Responds in an E-mail
'Wash Post' Probes McClellan Book -- He Responds in an E-mail
By E&P Staff
Published: May 28, 2008 9:30 AM ET

In offering the first excerpts from the upcoming book, titled "What Happened," by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan, Politico.com got the early headlines (see other E&P stories) but other news outlets are now finding other revelations.

The Washington Post found this in the chapter on selling the Iraq war in the advance copy of the book: "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

But the Post adds: "McClellan stops short of saying Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not 'employing out-and-out deception' to make their case for war in 2002."

The Post notes: "A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the book, some contents of which were first disclosed by Politico.com. The Washington Post acquired a copy of the book Tuesday, in advance of its official release Monday."

Responding to a request for comment, McClellan wrote in an e-mail: "Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course, and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years."

According to the Post, Bush is depicted in the book "as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble who stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president's intellect -- 'Bush is plenty smart enough to be president,' he writes -- but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job."

More at: www.washingtonpost.com.

Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled U.S. on Iraq
Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled U.S. on Iraq
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 28, 2008; A01

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war."

McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a "lack of inquisitiveness," says the White House operated in "permanent campaign" mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president's inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative's name.

The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not "employing out-and-out deception" to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled "Selling the War," he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush "managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."

"Over that summer of 2002," he writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

McClellan resigned from the White House on April 19, 2006, after nearly three years as Bush's press secretary. The departure was part of a shake-up engineered by new Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that also resulted in Rove surrendering his policy-management duties.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the book, some contents of which were first disclosed by Politico.com. The Washington Post acquired a copy of the book yesterday, in advance of its official release Monday.

Responding to a request for comment, McClellan wrote in an e-mail: "Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years."

The criticism of Bush in the book is striking, given that it comes from a man who followed him to Washington from Texas.

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president's intellect -- "Bush is plenty smart enough to be president," he writes -- but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

"A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people's ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change," he writes.

In another section, McClellan describes Bush as able to convince himself of his own spin and relates a phone call he overheard Bush having during the 2000 campaign, in which he said he could not remember whether he had used cocaine. "I remember thinking to myself, 'How can that be?' " he writes.

The former aide describes Bush as a willing participant in treating his presidency as a permanent political campaign, run in large part by his top political adviser, Rove.

"The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office," he writes. "And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

McClellan has some kind words for Bush, calling him "a man of personal charm, wit and enormous political skill." He writes that the president "did not consciously set out to engage in these destructive practices. But like others before him, he chose to play the Washington game the way he found it, rather than changing the culture as he vowed to do at the outset of his campaign for the presidency."

McClellan charges that the campaign-style focus affected Bush's entire presidency. The ill-fated Air Force One flyover of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina struck the city, was conceived of by Rove, who was "thinking about the political perceptions" but ended up making Bush look "out of touch," he writes.

He says the White House's reaction to Katrina was more than just a public relations disaster, calling it "a failure of imagination and initiative" and the result of an administration that "let events control us." He adds: "It was a costly blunder."

McClellan admits to letting himself be deceived about the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, which resulted in his relentless pounding by the White House press corps over the activities of Rove and of Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the matter.

"I could feel something fall out of me into the abyss as each reporter took a turn whacking me," he writes of the withering criticism he received as the story played out. "It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit." He also suggests that Rove and Libby may have worked behind closed doors to coordinate their stories about the Plame leak. Late last year, McClellan's publisher released an excerpt of the book that suggested Bush had knowledge of the leak, something that won McClellan no friends in the administration.

As McClellan departed the White House, he said: "Change can be helpful, and this is a good time and good position to help bring about change. I am ready to move on."

He choked up as he told Bush on the South Lawn, "I have given it my all, sir, and I have given you my all."

Bush responded at the time: "He handled his assignments with class, integrity. He really represents the best of his family, our state and our country. It's going to be hard to replace Scott."
-----------------------------------

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

How so?

It's a very anti-Bush book. McCain is currently doing these awkward fund-raisers with Bush -- they appear together briefly (1 minute I think, for the one McCain did attend -- others he doesn't even attend), and press isn't allowed at the actual fund-raiser. Obama has been making hay from this whole thing.



http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/05/27/politics/fromtheroad/entry4130325.shtml

I suppose, but I think the McCain crowd will really not be terribly swayed.

No, not the "McCain crowd" per se. But the undecideds, the independents, the swing voters -- more reminders of Bush's ickiness just as McCain is prominently benefiting from his association with Bush can only help Obama. Maybe not a ton, probably not a game-changer, but one more little element...

Are there undecideds? Is that possible?

The closer the two are tied together, the more points McCain will lose by.

Cycloptichorn

Scott McClellan Mocks NYT
Scott McClellan Mocks NYT -- Near 4th Anniversary of Paper's Weak 'Mini-culpa' on the War
Greg Mitchell - E & P
Posted May 27, 2008

In a supreme irony, word leaked out about bombshell revelations in the upcoming Scott McClellan memoir -- including his unexpected charge that the "liberal media" fell for Bush "propaganda" on Iraq -- almost precisely four years from the day from The New York Times offered its famous "mini-culpa" on its role in helping to pave the way for war.

The Times, you remember, reluctantly published a short piece, admitting that a half dozen of its stories in the run-up to the war were fatally flawed, but didn't name any of the guilty scribes and buried the story on Page A10 - about where many of its articles that had raised doubts about Saddam's WMD had ended up.

Now here is McClellan in his book, What Happened, as quoted by Mike Allen of Politico.com, admitting that the Times and other media had been too easily hoodwinked by the White House. He calls them "enablers" in the march to war.

McClellan charges that Bush relied on "propaganda" to sell the war. Allen summarizes: "He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war....McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush's liberal critics."

In the book, McClellan charges: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Ouch.

E&P was one of the few "mainstream" publications to repeatedly raise serious questions about the case for war before the invasion. In the months after the attack, we often charged that the Times had been duped and questioned why it refused to come clean. Executive Editor Bill Keller mocked some of the critics (and later stood by Judith Miller through thick and thin).

Finally, on May 26, 2004, the paper ran an editors' note, copping to some of the charges. But the paper tried to shield the guilty parties, and I was first online to identify by name the authors of the six pieces in question, with Miller turning out to be most guilty, and Michael Gordon also having a hand in two stories.

The paper refused to penalize any reporters or editors for their failures. Jack Shafer of Slate memorably called the mea culpa a "mini-culpa."

Perhaps most embarrassing, the paper's reluctant review sparked some other papers that had carried the faulty Times accounts in 2002 and 2003 to run corrections of their own. Many of them placed their own apologies in far more prominent positions than did the Times.

And clearly Keller had been reluctant to own up to the misreporting at all, at least in that time frame. Consider that my assessment of the Times' report, carried the day it appeared, closed with this: "But Executive Editor Bill Keller continues to defend the editors' note, and blamed 'overwrought' critics for overreacting to the Times's WMD coverage. Asked why he finally published the editors' note, Keller (quoted in the Washington Post) replied: 'Mainly because it was a distraction. This buzz about our coverage had become a kind of conventional wisdom, much of it overwrought and misinformed.'

"With his managing editor, Jill Abramson, he penned a memo to staffers explaining that the critique in the paper was 'not an attempt to find a scapegoat or to blame reporters for not knowing then what we know now.'

The problem of course was that certain reporters ignored, or only paid lip service to, evidence that "we know now' - but (as some Knight Ridder reporters showed) was often also available then."

But don't take my word for it. Ask Scott McClellan.

BBB
Journalists for the then Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) newspaper were the few who got it right.

BBB

Push-back against McClellan book begins
Push-back against McClellan book begins
By Alex Koppelman - Salon
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:40 EDT

News about the contents of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book leaked only Tuesday night, but by Wednesday morning the counterattacks had begun in full force. It's not surprising to see that, of course: Republicans were bound to be unhappy with a book that roundly criticizes George W. Bush's administration, suggests the president had indeed once done cocaine, and says that there may have been collusion between two key figures in the Valerie Plame scandal.

The Drudge Report's headline on the Politico's article on the book this morning is "Scott the Snitch." An unnamed former White House senior advisor told NBC, "This book has left many of Scott's closest friends puzzled and shocked ... He never expressed any reservations while serving. To do so in a highly publicized book is what makes people lose faith in those who work in Washington."

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday night (video of the appearance is below), Karl Rove questioned one part of McClellan's book, an account of a 2005 meeting between Rove and Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Without direct knowledge of the content of the meeting, McClellan wrote that it may have been so that the two men could get their stories straight as they were becoming the focus of inquiries into the leak of Plame's identity:

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 ... I don't know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic?

Read part of that quote by Fox host Sean Hannity, Rove responded, "Well, look, it goes to show how out of the loop [McClellan] was, that he didn't think we spent much time together." He also specifically denied McClellan's suggestion about the purpose of the meeting. Later, in response to another question from Hannity, Rove said of McClellan, "This doesn't sound like Scott. It really doesn't. Not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time ... It sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger ... If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them. And frankly, I don't remember him speaking up about these. I don't remember a single word."

Bloggers on the right have also been critical of McClellan. At the Weekly Standard's blog, Stephen F. Hayes, who's previously written two books sympathetic to the Bush administration and its worldview, said, "Ask fifty Washington reporters for an assessment of Scott McClellan and forty-nine of them will give you some version of this: He's a nice guy who was in way over his head. (Most of them will be tougher in their analysis of his intellect.)" At the National Review's the Corner, Katherine Jean Lopez wrote, "The question: Is he a liar then or now? He should have resigned in protest if he thought Bush was the liar and dolt he claims he was. What a disgrace this kind of book is."

It is true that this kind of book isn't the most honorable thing anyone could do -- it's not exactly savory to keep silent, to even be complicit in telling stories you feel are untrue, while serving in the administration and then only open up after you get a big payday. But, sadly, that's how these things tend to happen, and not just on the Republican side.

Bush's syncophants were chicken turds when they didn't resign is protest to his policies. It's easy to be brave after leaving the administration. These cowards include the generals who waited until they retired to speak up. Damn them all! ---BBB

Scott McClellan, Where's the Apology?
By David Corn - CQ
May 27, 2008

Where's the apology?

Politico reports that in his new book, former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan says that Bush was not "open and forthright on Iraq," adopted a "permanent campaign approach" when it came to governing, and used "propaganda" to sell the war. He also writes that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove "had at best misled" him about their role in the leak that disclosed the CIA identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and that he (McClellan) had presented information to the White House press corps that was "badly misguided." McClellan notes that Bush "and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."

Now McClellan says the media was not tough enough on Bush: "If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise....In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Excuse me for getting a bit huffy. But when it counted there were a few of us in the media who were indeed arguing that the Bush White House was setting new records in presidential deception--especially when it came to Iraq. McClellan, though, was part of the White House's defense team, pushing back against media coverage that questioned Bush's rationale for the war and Bush's serial abuse of facts. Apparently McClellan has seen the light. Well, where's his plea for forgiveness? If he were truly contrite about his involvement in a deceptive, propaganda-wielding administration, McClellan could demonstrate his sincerity by pledging that all profits from his belated truth-telling will go to charities supporting the families of American soldiers killed or injured in Iraq.

For history's sake, it is good that McClellan is confirming what most Americans (according to polls) have long known: the Bush administration trampled the truth to win public backing for the Iraq war. But as an enabler (witting or not) of that process, McClellan owes the public more than a for-sale account. He should not profit from this book, making bucks for correcting war-supporting falsehoods that he defended. He ought to be doing penance. True heart-felt confessions come free.

there is so much talk about this.... everyone is so shocked and can't figure out why he would do it.... has anyone considered he just had an attack of conscience and decided to do the right thing whether it cost him or not?

No, that couldn't possibly be it, because we all know that the honesty and pure motives of the Bush administration are beyond reproach. Therefore, he must be "disgruntled."

How ironic it is that the Democrats have a great chance to be the party that puts our first black president in office as a direct result of the ultra-conservative assh*les in this corrupt Republican administration. If Obama is elected, we can all thank George W. Bush. That is beautiful, man.

Re: McClellan whacks Bush, White House

Being "badly misguided" is when you hit a baseball through your neighbor's window. What little Scottie McLellan did was lie to the American people, over and over again -- and badly, too.

Dem congressman calls on McClellan to testify about book's revelations by Nick Juliano
Published: Wednesday May 28, 2008


Already getting grief from his former White House colleagues, former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan is now being asked to testify before Congress about the revelations contained in his scathing new memoir.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), a key Bush antagonist and member of the House Judiciary Committee, says McClellan needs to tell Congress the full story about potential White House conspiring around the leak of a CIA officer's name and propaganda efforts that preceded the invasion of Iraq.

Wexler released a statement Wednesday calling for McClellan to tesitfy under oath before the Judiciary committee.

"The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby - and possibly Vice President Cheney - conspired to obstruct justice by lying about their role in the Plame Wilson matter and that the Bush Administration deliberately lied to the American people in order to take us to war in Iraq," Wexler said. "Scott McClellan must now appear before the House Judiciary Committee under oath to tell Congress and the American people how President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and White House officials deliberately orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people.

"The allegations by this former top White House aide - that Rove and Libby deliberately coordinated their stories in order to obstruct justice in the Plame case, that the President deliberately disregarded contradictory evidence related to Iraq, should outrage every American and Congress must respond by initiating immediate aggressive oversight starting with an appearance by McClellan before the House Judiciary Committee," he continued. "Any continued obstruction by this Administration to prevent White House officials from appearing before Congress cannot be tolerated by this Congress in the face of these shocking revelations."
link

i read on another thread that mcclennan is another "disgruntled" former white house staffer .
interesting that the writers are usually described as being "disgruntled" - perhaps there will eventually be some "gruntled" former white house staffers writing books also .
hbg