Friday, June 06, 2008

Scottie: "Thanks for Nothing"

I definitely need to redirect my venom soon to personage more worthy of our attention than McC, i.e., Slimeball McSame, especially as I am working my way through Cliff Schecter's "The Real McCain," a truly damning account of what may be the most flip-foppiest unprincipled presidential candidate in our lifetime. This is a man seemingly never impeded by the need to adhere to a semi-principle for long. He sweats desperation, pees equivocation, and must defecate some amazing material from all the earlier supposedly-principled stands he has since been unable to adhere to (anti-torture and campaign finance reform just two of ever so many). This man seems to not have a single principle he has been able to adhere to in his career (life?). And then there is the tempestuous temper that suggests incipient mental illness. I.e., the perfect candidate.

But in the meantime I am bringing a little more on that cute little scottie-dog (can't you just hear him panting away at george's side?).

Leonard Pitts starts off a recent column with a quote from "What Happened":

“The first grave mistake of Bush’s presidency was rushing toward military confrontation with Iraq. It took his presidency off course and greatly damaged his standing with the public. His second grave mistake was his virtual blindness about his first mistake . . . ”– Scott McClellan in What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

We could probably work up some pretty good riffs and improvisations of our own on the basis of that quote. As just a couple spontaneous examples: Scottie: could you please edify us as to the just-less-than-grave mistakes? What part of his planned "course" was deviated from by obsession with Iraq?

But Mr. Pitts does an excellent takedown on his own:

Years ago, I gave one of my kids some advice. Don’t do such-and-such, I said. If you do, so-and-so is going to happen and it will not be pretty.

Naturally, the kid did not take my advice and the outcome I predicted came to pass. Sometime later, we’re riding along and the kid turns to me and says, in a tone of wonder, “You were right.”

You may think this was an ”I told you so” moment. Actually, it would have been an attempted homicide moment had I not been driving. ”You were right?!” Like this was news? Like it was a revelation? I knew I was right. Any intelligent adult would have known I was right. Being right was not rocket science. So I didn’t need any belated validation. I needed for this kid to have listened to me. What headaches and hardship might have been avoided had this child only listened?

The analogy is imperfect for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Scott McClellan is not my child. Yet I hope it imparts some sense of how it feels to choke down the new book by the former Bush White House spokesman in which he finally acknowledges that, yes, whaddayou know, the war in Iraq was a blunder, marketed like McDonald’s to a compliant public and a prone press, and exacerbated by the inability of an incurious president to face any reality that conflicted with the fantasies he had erected around him.

Defender of Iraq debacle

It is hard to imagine a public confession more extraordinarily frustrating or profoundly unsatisfying.

For almost three years, McClellan was the lead salesman and staunch defender of the Iraq debacle, the man who swore with a straight face and evident sincerity that up was down and black, white. Now here he comes with this remarkable mea culpa, and it’s hard to know what he expects a reader to take away.

There is no cheap joy of ”I told you so” in this book. Too many people are limbless, maimed and dead for that, too much treasure is lost, too many lives are ruined, too much national prestige has been peed away.

And if the idea is for McClellan to reclaim his integrity, well, that ship has sailed — and sunk. The time for integrity was four or five years ago when telling the truth would have required some guts, when it might have meant something, challenged something, changed something.

A publicity hound?

But four years ago, McClellan was too busy savaging a man who did have the integrity to speak truth to power in the moment when it mattered. When former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke made some of the same arguments in his book Against All Enemies that McClellan makes now, McClellan led the White House counterattack, calling Clarke a publicity hound with no credibility.

It is ironic — and satisfyingly appropriate — that angry defenders of the president are now leveling the same charges against McClellan.

But that’s a political sideshow that doesn’t move the ball forward a single inch. Not that there’s anything really to do at this point other than hope whoever becomes president in January will bring to the Oval Office a capacity for reason and an ability to countenance unwelcome realities that haven’t been seen in that space for far too long.

Between now and then, we are left to ponder this sad, meaningless little confession. Perhaps the best response is simply, thanks for nothing.

You may think that’s harsh. I think there are few things less satisfying than being validated in what you already knew, too late to make a difference.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

"Liars OR Fools" or "Liars AND Fools"?

As I believe I posted a lifetime ago, I recently found myself smack on my first jury. It has been quite an experience, including a feeling that a good part of my life was no longer my own in the sense that it had been before. Perhaps more on that later. We reached a verdict today and were released, probably in more than a few cases to return to jobs with a whole new level of chaos induced by prolonged absence.

I have been of a mind to post on Scott McClellan's book-bombshell, but the disruption and all have made that difficult. I hope and trust that at least many of you are quite well aware of the event of publication of "What Happened" and the pretty tawdry aspects of former uncritical, unthinking bushivik stooge seemingly now that it is too late (but not too late to sell a book) shedding his tail and growing legs. But I risk mortal offense against amphibians, and I am far fonder of all of those I have ever met than I will ever be of lil scottie the stooge.

But if are aware of that you are probably also on some level at least aware of the ferocious push-back by both the increasingly desperate ideologists of the right and the mainstream press who have been their reliable lapdogs these many years. A more unpleasant yowling is hard to imagine.

Anyway, in case you are needing leads, I am offering two. The McClatchy folks are quite rightly calling the cowardly mis-named "journalists" who are flinging spitwads at McClellan out on their crap:

Until now, we've resisted the temptation to post on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, which accuses the Bush White House of launching a propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

Why? It's not news. At least not to some of us who've covered the story from the start.

(Click
here, here and here to get just a taste of what we mean).

Second, we find it a wee bit preposterous -- and we are being diplomatic here -- that a man who slavishly - no, robotically! -- defended President Bush's policies in Iraq and elsewhere is trying to "set the record straight" (and sell a few books) five years and more after the invasion, with U.S. troops still bravely fighting and dying to stabilize that country.

But the responses to McClellan from the Bush administration and media bigwigs, history-bending as they are, compel us to jump in. As we like to say around here, it's truth to power time, not just for the politicians but also for some folks in our own business.

Bush loyalists have responded in three ways:

1) Scott, how could you? This conveniently ignores the issue of what Bush did or didn't know and do about intelligence on Iraq, converting the story line into that of wounded leader and treasonous former aide. (That canard was the sole focus of a CBS news radio report Wednesday night).

2) Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Okay. When do Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, et al *not* say that? Dog bites man.

3) It was an intelligence failure. The CIA gave us bad dope on WMD and, well, they're the experts. More on this in a second.

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.

Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."

Really?

Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?

Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH.

We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe Galloway, Clark Hoyt, Jon Landay, Renee Schoof, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Tish Wells and many others - was, with a few exceptions, the only major news media organization that before the war consistently and aggressively challenged the White House's case for war, and its lack of planning for post-war Iraq.

Here are
Bill Moyers and Michael Massing on the media's pre-war performance.

Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks,
dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (yes, we reported that
at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in
speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters,
or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

-clip-


There's more there, and I would put this in the "must-read" category altogether.

Meanwhile, Digby seems to have the limited taxonomy of these folks pretty well worked out in a post entitled "Liars or Fools":

From Crooks and Liars comes this gem from Byron York on Fox News Sunday:

York: ... I think the thing that kind of distinguishes McClellan is he was amazingly naive and his belief that George W. Bush would kind of bring us all together which was why he comes to Washington. Uh, if you remember that conference where Bush is asked to name a mistake that he’s made. And he gives an awful performance. He can’t name a mistake and this is terrible. And, but Bush realizes, and he told McClellan, he said look if I name a mistake my enemies are just going to keep pushing for more and more and more. And McClellan doesn’t see if that way. He actually writes in the book “I believe that by embracing openness and forthrightness, he could have, it could have redeemed him. It could have transcended partisanship and brought together leaders of both parties to try to consensus his way forward on Iraq. (crosstalk)

That is a naive point of view.
Yeah, It's hard to figure out where anyone got the idea that Bush was that kind of guy. As C&L points out:

Bush used the phrase I’m a uniter not a divider, over and over again.
I believe all laws and public policy should support strong families. I believe in individual responsibility, that all individuals are responsible for their actions and decisions. A responsible leader sets a clear agenda and brings people together to achieve it.

Responsible leadership sets a tone of civility and bipartisanship that gets things done. I am a uniter, not a divider and, as the governor of Texas, that is how I have led. It is how I will lead in the White House.

Finally, together we can give this nation a fresh start after a season of cynicism. In that spirit, I make this pledge to you, the American people: Next January, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear not only to uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.
Perhaps the most touching speech of this kind was the night of the Supreme Court decision, when he promised to "lead the entire nation" and work across the aisle in the spirit of reconciliation after a disputed election result. it was very heartwarming.

Of course many of us weren't buying, considering what we knew about how the Republicans play politics, but there were a few who did. And
nearly all of them were addled Village gasbags like Richard Cohen:

"Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."

That worked out really well.

Scott McClellan apparently didn't realize that his boss and mentor George W. Bush was a baldfaced liar. He was a naive true believer. The real question is why the Villagers were so taken in by what nearly half the country could see was an anti-intellectual manchild with a mean streak a mile wide? Are they baldfaced liars too or just naive fools like Scott McClellan? They are one or the other --- and either makes them unfit to be political commentators.