I always suspected Little Scottie was the weak link in the chain of evidence.
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written that President Bush relied on a propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq war in the place of honesty and candor.
It’s being reported that an upcoming book by McClellan says Bush “veered terribly off course” and was not “open and forthright on Iraq.”
According to the report on the Web site Politico, McClellan wrote that some of his own words from the podium in the White House briefing room turned out to be “badly misguided.” He says his words were sincere at the time.
McClellan blamed many failings on what he described as a government that was run as a permanent political campaign.
At least that’s all the AP has to say in the Strib. ALL, that the AP has to say, that is after being edited to protect Bush. The Times has a bit more.
President Bush “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends, Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in a critical new memoir about his years in the West Wing.
In addition, Mr. McClellan writes, the decision to invade Iraq was a “serious strategic blunder,” and yet, in his view, it was not the biggest mistake the Bush White House made. That, he says, was “a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”
Mr. McClellan writes that top White House officials deceived him about the administration’s involvement in the leaking of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. He says he did not know for almost two years that his statements from the press room that Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in the leak were a lie.
“Neither, I believe, did President Bush,” Mr. McClellan writes. “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.”
He is harsh about the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying it “spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.” Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.
A theme in the book is that the White House suffered from a “permanent campaign” mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.
He is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her role as the “sometimes too accomodating” first term national security adviser, and what he calls her deftness at protecting her reputation.
“No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean,” Mr. McClellan writes, adding that “she knew how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems, and come out looking like a star.”
Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.
The rats are coming, the rats are coming.
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The NYTimes has a rent vs. buy calculator. I plugged in my rent vs. a $150,000 home (cheap in the Cities) and the calculator plunged into the gray across the board, telling me I’d never get ahead by buying a home.
Never.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Republican economics. And yes, Bill Clinton most certainly played a role in this quarter-century effort to crush the middle class.
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Did I mention that the WaPost also had a front page “real” story on Little Scotty’s new book?
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 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.”
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.
Little George. So fucked up in the ’70s and ’80s he can’t even remember which drugs he used. In his defense, I will point out that cocaine and crystal meth do look a lot a like.
There is more of this than we need to know. Everyone who’s worked with Bush has this book in them. Altho maybe not all of them could bring all the insights McClellan seems to have mustered.
“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 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.
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.
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Would Thomas Friedman please, please, please stop trying to tell me stuff? Given how horribly, sickeningly wrong he’s been about Iraq and Bush, where does he get the chutzpah to keep serving up his e coli opinions?
This administration has been wrong about EVERYTHING. When will Friedman acknowledge that? Does he even know that we’re experiencing more bankruptcies (despite draconian anti-bankruptcy laws)?
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The domestic steel industry is coming back.
With $130/barrel oil, it’s hard to understand how anyone can ship steel across an ocean and still make money.
Even with cheap gas that never made any sense to me. None of it ever made any sense, unless you looked at it from the perspective of the few who made money from each shift in how the world works.
This one won’t change back. Micro-foundries are changing everything. Why pay for transportation when a small steel mill can handle your needs, using local labor who will then buy your products because they’re earning a fucking living!
I think the problem came when the bankers and rich folks decided that scratching each other’s backs was so much fun, only they should get to do it.
Over at America’s Finest News Source, they have a story about how all of this is backfiring on the rich as the nation’s poorest one percent have come to “control two-thirds of U.S. soda can wealth.”
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Is there anyone left on planet Earth who hasn’t seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at least four times?
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Too little, too late, McClellan. Hope someone takes a 2×4 to ya.