McClellan's tell all is not warm & fuzzy

[Arrian]

Scottie boy on Richard Clark, a couple of years ago:

"Why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."

If the shoe fits, *******, wear it.

-Arrian

[rah]

Yep, no common elements here.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Oerdin


Doesn't that just show the idiocy of raving rightwing bloggers like Michelle Malkin? OMG a commercial for iced coffee shows a woman wearing a high fashion scarf so clearly she supports terrorism!

Well, it's more than that. It's just another type of headwear for all Arabs, so clearly Miss I-don't-think-the-internment-camps-were-all-that-bad Malkin thinks that all of them durka-durks are actually ethnically terrorist...

[OneFootInTheGrave]

this admin is hiring people who cannot think so I am not actually surprised that it took Scotty this much time to figure out what was going on...

it's like the Borg with Karl and Dick being central command.. all the others - drones... one just woke up now

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Arrian
Scottie boy on Richard Clark, a couple of years ago:



If the shoe fits, *******, wear it.

-Arrian

Sounds like a canned response from the administration then.

[Dinner]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc57o0E_kA8

Actual interview with Scottie. Pay close attention to the last 30 seconds where he says Bush admitted to authorizing the leak of Plame's identity something which Bush has publicly denied and pretended not to know about. It's a clear cut case of bush lying to the American people, committing a crime for political reasons, and then attempting to cover it up.

[-Jrabbit]

From today's NY Times... I've bolded some of the fun bits.

McClellan Responds to White House Criticism

By JOHN HOLUSHA
Published: May 30, 2008

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan continued to press his case Thursday that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, and responded to a growing chorus of criticism from other former administration officials.

Appearing on NBC’s Today show, Mr. McClellan said that the administration ignored evidence that contradicted its position on Iraq, and he sharply criticized some of Mr. Bush’s closest advisers.

He said Vice President Dick Cheney “was given a lot of deference by the president,” and said “in a number of ways, he has not served the president well.” He said Mr. Cheney was known as “the magic man” in the White House for his ability to get things done.

Mr. McClellan said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not challenge the president or other top officials when she should have. “Too often she was too accommodating” to the president’s views, he said. She was also too deferential to Mr. Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

He described Mr. Bush as “a gut player,” and said that the president was strongly inclined toward war with Iraq after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Responding to criticism that he did not voice his objections when he was in the White House, Mr. McClellan said that he was swayed at the time by his affection for the president and respect for the president’s policy team. “I gave them the benefit of the doubt, like a lot of Americans,” he said. Mr. McClellan said he later concluded that “things went terribly off course” in Iraq after he left what he termed “the White House bubble,” where outside views often were not considered.

Also speaking Thursday morning on “Today,” Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to the president, sought to minimize Mr. McClellan’s participation in events leading up to the Iraq war, noting that during that time he was deputy press secretary for domestic affairs. He said that Mr. McClellan’s assertion in his new book that intelligence was shaded to justify the war “is wrong.”

Mr. McClellan responded that, as deputy press secretary at the time, he often filled in as press secretary and he participated in meetings leading up to the war.

Mr. McClellan’s remarks came a day after the White House and a tight-knit group of former aides sought to depict him as disgruntled and trying to cash in with sensational allegations to sell books.

The result has been a kind of public excommunication of Mr. McClellan by some of the people he once worked most closely, among them Karl Rove, the political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, the former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary, and Mr. Bartlett.

Mr. McClellan said on Thursday that he was expressing his views now because of “a loyalty to the truth and the values I was raised on.”

The cries of betrayal from former aides served as a stern warning to other potential turncoats that, despite some well-publicized cracks, the Bush inner circle remains tight. Their language was so similar that the collective reaction amounted to a big inside-the-Beltway echo chamber.

All seemed to take their cues from Dana Perino, the current press secretary. Ms. Perino used the words “sad” and “puzzled” to describe the White House response, as if Mr. McClellan had undergone some kind of emotional breakdown, while making the case that if Mr. McClellan had problems with Mr. Bush he should have raised them while in the president’s employ.

And all seemed to suggest that maybe Mr. McClellan had been hijacked by liberal New York book editors who prodded him to turn out a memoir that did not reflect his own beliefs.

“This does not sound like Scott; it really doesn’t,” Mr. Rove said on Fox News Channel.

“You’ve heard the way Scott briefed — it doesn’t sound like him,” Mr. Fleischer said. He said he could not wait to hear Mr. McClellan talk about the book on television, “to see if there’s a written Scott and an oral Scott.”

Later on Thursday, Ms. Perino was asked by a reporter aboard Air Force One about a passage in Mr. McClellan’s book that involved the exposure of the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie, as a C.I.A. agent.

The reporter said the book said that a question about the issue was shouted to Mr. Bush as they were boarding Air Force One. Mr. McClellan says the question prompted him to ask Mr. Bush directly if he was the one who had authorized the leaking of her name. The passage says Mr. Bush told Mr. McClellan, “Yes, I was.”

Ms. Perino answered the question, saying: “I don’t know. Obviously, I wasn’t there, and obviously I don’t know the context.”

Ms. Perino went on to say, “I don’t think that’s what Scott says in the book, and I think that everyone should go back and look at it a little bit more carefully.” When asked directly if Mr. Bush ever authorized the leaking of classified information, she said she was “not aware of that.”

Mr. McClellan’s book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” is due out next week, but copies leaked out Tuesday night. In it, Mr. McClellan, who was press secretary 2003 to 2006, bluntly accuses Mr. Bush of misleading the nation into war.

Mr. McClellan uses the book to drop a personal bombshell, recounting a phone conversation between Mr. Bush and a political supporter in which, he says, he overheard the president dismiss “ridiculous campaign rumors” about accusations of cocaine usage by saying he could not recall if he had tried the drug.

“We had some pretty wild parties back in the day,” Mr. McClellan wrote, recounting Mr. Bush’s words, “and I just don’t remember.”

The last one ("I just don't remember") is every bit as BS-fragrant as "I didn't inhale."

[Darius871]

I think Jon Stewart's take on this topic summed it up nicely, something along the lines of "the most shocking revelation is that McClellan thinks these are actually shocking revelations."

[-Jrabbit]

Exactly so.

[Theben]

Hannity joined the flagellation today on FAUX news. Seems McClellan is considering "joining the Obama campaign".