I haven't said anything about this yet because I didn't think I had anything to say that anybody else wasn't saying: If you believe Bush (there still are such people), you're mad because you think McClellan is, at least, just trying to sell books; successfully, it seems. At worst, you think he's a traitor.
If you never believed Bush, or even if you just stopped believing him a couple of years ago, you're mad at McClellan for not speaking out when it might have made a difference.
But I do think it's worth reading a couple of posts about it. First, from Matt Cooper. If anybody has a right to an opinion on this, it's Cooper, and he gives it in this post (excerpts below).
As you may recall, Cooper was one of the reporters to whom Karl Rove leaked the name and work of Valerie Plame. But, unlike the other journalists, he did his job, as Hullabaloo reminded us a few years ago. He wrote a piece about the leak as what it was, an attempt to punish Joseph Wilson.
The piece led to my being subpoenaed as a witness in the leak case—something both me and Time Inc., which was the owner of my notes and emails, fought mightily in the courts to avoid. Eventually Libby and Rove gave me permission to talk and I, like every reporter touched by this case from Tim Russert to Robert Novak to Bob Woodward to Judith Miller, wound up speaking under oath.
I rehash all of this because McClellan famously defended Rove and Libby, saying they had no role in the leak case. He had gone to them and they had, to put it charitably, misled him. McClellan, not exactly a silver-tongued orator, assured the press that they played no role. A defter press secretary would have made a small but crucial distinction by saying: "They tell me they played no role." McClellan, in his book titled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, now laments that he watched his credibility disappear after it emerged in 2005 that Rove had been my primary source.
What's the larger thing we should take away from What Happened? In a way, both McClellan and his critics are right. Certainly everything McClellan says about the rush to war and the incompetence of the administration has held up over time. He now finds himself with the nearly three-quarters of Americans who disapprove of the president's job performance. But the Bushies do have a point when they note that McClellan did not raise these objections while he was in the White House. There is something unsettling when a George Stephanopoulos or Scott McClellan rides a presidential candidate and then a White House to fame, and then dumps a critical memoir out there.
And here, The Independent (UK) commentator (and Kirsty MacColl fan!) Matthew Norman opines that McClellan's book is "a potential nightmare" for McCain.
After Bush, Obama will ask, do you honestly want a bellicose Beach Boy humming "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" as he arranges the family snaps on the Oval Office desk? The Senator paints me as babyishly hopeful that everything will come up roses, he'll say, so tell me who's the guy who bought the promise that US troops would have rose petals showered over them as they marched into Baghdad? Aren't you just sick of all the scarifying mendacity laid bare in that former press secretary's book?
It was fearmongering that persuaded the American people to support the war, and fearmongering that conned them into re-electing George Bush. Fool me once, shame on you, as Dubya once so hilariously struggled to articulate. Fool me twice, shame on me. But fool me thrice? Are you kidding?
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