How McClellan Prettifies Bush

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/leupp05312008.html


Former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan’s accomplishing several things with his “blockbuster” book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. He’s making a lot of easy money, as befits an opportunist of flexible morality who admittedly stuck with the Bush administration even as its amorality and penchant for lying to the American people became clearly apparent to him. He’s earning praise, not just from “leftist bloggers” as some of his quasi-fascist former friends allege, but from objective journalists and scholars in general. He thus partially redeems his own historical legacy as a minor figure in what will be remembered as a notorious administration. But he’s prettifying that administration rather than appropriately damning it.

According to the former press secretary, in going to war on Iraq Bush misled the nation, hyping dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. But he did so, McClellan declares, out of a naive commitment to the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. And he didn’t deliberately lie. He was merely the victim of bad advice, his own intellectual limitations, his disinclination to ask questions and his belief that being a wartime president was his ticket to greatness. McClellan states repeatedly that he continues to feel “affection” for the man responsible for perhaps a million Iraqi deaths and over 4300 American and other “Coalition” ones.

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Finally, McClellan damns the news media for being “complicit enablers” of the march to war. Having performed a central role in the dissemination of disinformation, he chastises the Fifth Estate for “covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it…” He notes accurately enough that the media neglected “their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding.”

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As my kids would say: “Well, duh….!” Of course the corporate media was complicit in the prewar propaganda campaign, just as it is now complicit in the Cheney/neocon drive towards war on Iran and Syria. But McClellan, who played a central role in the disinformation campaign (the psychological warfare against his own people) is now engaging in shameless scapegoating. It reminds me a little bit of the administration’s scapegoating of the CIA beginning in the fall of 2003. It had become clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The mainstream intelligence community had in fact questioned the evidence for them all along, but been brow-beaten by Dick Cheney and his sidekick “Scooter” Libby into signing onto the bogus content of Colin Powell’s infamous UNSC presentation on February 5, 2003. That drew on false reports from Ahmad Chalabi and neocon asset “Curveball” vetted through Douglas Feith’s “Office of Special Plans.” When it became obvious that there were no Iraqi WMD, Cheney & Co. blamed the CIA for getting the story wrong and used the occasion to reorganize an organization they mistrusted precisely because of its commitment to objective intelligence gathering.

When it’s become obvious that Bush lied about Iraq, and that McClellan was a key conduit of lies himself, what does he do but blame the media for believing him! So in sum: Bush deserves affection, as a well-meaning if misled guy. (McClellan writes that Dick Cheney “always seemed to get his way” and was thus the chief misleader.) Freedom” was a good objective but maybe not obtainable (too “idealistic”) in the Middle East. McClellan thinks we should all feel sorry for he himself due to all he’s been through, realizing that his critical reasoning deficits were the result of trust and affection and that he, just like other Americans (who weren’t in positions to mold public opinion), changed his view about the war and the administration over time. Most of all we should buy his book, in order to access what he calls “my truth” (p. xi). It’s Number One on the New York Times’ best seller list at $ 27.95.
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Scott will never get away from his own bloody hands

[Junkdrawer]

1. Good to see others are paying attention...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3363199&mesg_id=3363199

[nashville_brook]

2. the WH has had the book for a month and didn't raise any hell about it -- so, one would assume

they approve.


i agree with this writer -- the book makes the Bushies look as good as possible.

[grasswire]

3. as John Dean said....

....it was a "modified limited hangout."