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The “McClellan Story” Is About Bush, Not Scott McClellan |
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The Bush administration has a tried and true method for dealing with the parade of ex-insiders (Scott McClellan is hardly the first) who criticize the administration.- kill the messenger, or, more precisely, launch an all-out smear campaign. As Ali Frick of Think Progress has observed, that was the approach used with Paul O’Neill, Matt Dowd, and Richard Clarke.   Of course, the ultimate smear campaign was the one launched against Joseph Wilson, which extended to outing his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame.Â
The Bush administration is betting that the media can be easily distracted into asking questions about “disgruntled ex-employee” Scott McClellan rather than focusing on the elephant(s) in the room–that the Bush administration used propaganda to sell the American public on an unnecessary war in Iraq, that McClellan himself gave the press “badly misguided” information, that Rove and Libby “at best misled” McClellan with regard to their role in outing Valerie Plame.
The White House would love to have the media focus on the distraction of McClellan’s motivation in dropping these bombshells. So far, the strategy may be working–try a google search for “Scott McClellan” and “disgruntled”. On this morning’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, Chuck Todd and Mike Barnicle speculated as to whether McClellan was upset that he wasn’t doing as well as other former press secretaries–Tood gravely intoned that what has his “antennae up” is former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s silence.
What should have Todd’s, and the rest of the media’s, antennae up are McClellan’s actual, substantive disclosures, which raise a number of obvious questions, none of which I have seen/heard asked:
- Is McClellan correct to say that the Bush administration used propaganda to mislead the country into an unnecessary war against Iraq? (it is easy to see that McClellan is correct –remember the false claim about Iraq attempting to buy uranium from Niger, as well as other lies Bush administration used in the lead-up to Iraq, which were documented at the time)
- If McClellan is correct about this, why should we trust anything the Bush administration has to say about Iraq? (or, really, about anything? if the administration will lie about the need for war, for death and suffering, they’l lie about anything)
- If McClellan is correct about this, what does that mean for John McCain, who continues to support a war based on propaganda and helped re-elect an administration that used lies to sell the war to the public?
There’s a lot to talk about here, and whether Scott McClellan was “disgruntled” is beside the point.Â
I believe Scott McClellan will be on Keith Olbermann’s show tonight…looking forward to that–maybe we can actually hear about something substantive!
It’s unbelievable to me that with stuff like this coming out that there are still people blind to what the Bush admin has been up to the last 7 and a half years. It’s as obvious as it can be.
most of the country agrees with you–Bush’s approval ratings have ben stuck in the 30s for more than a year. many Rs even agree with you. one thing that frustrates me is that the media still tends to treat the admin with kid gloves and is unwilling to question outright lies–they often serve a stenographic function, reporting outrageous misstatements by the administration (or John McCain) withour comment