Black Box Report

A conscience is a horrible thing...but my book advance makes it a li'l better.

Scott McClellan was always my favorite White House Press Secretary.

Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow were always too comfortable in a job whose sole purpose is spin. They weren't just good at it, they enjoyed it. On the other end of the spectrum, poor Dana Perino has that ever-present look of someone who's vaguely aware that something is amiss, but as long as she does her job, everything will work out OK. And why not? Most of the things that account for her boss' rock-bottom approval ratings happened before her tenure.

But Scott McClellan, for all his blank stares and robotic repetitions of denial, had soul. You could see the effects of the spin he was in taking its toll on him. While Fleischer and Snow took evident delight in misleading the press, and Perino's denial is as deep-rooted as her loyalty to the administration, Scotty looked more and more physically uncomfortable the weaker his stories became. The cognitive dissonance on his face when he'd utter his catch phrase, "I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation," was writ as large as a Times Square billboard.

And yet - and this is what I loved about him - in the face of all of this, he did the job anyway. Fleischer and Snow, whether they believed what they were saying or not, never let it show, and Perino doesn't seem to know any better. But Scotty did, and he went ahead and lied his fool head off anyway.

Fleischer and Snow have been at the kool-aid trough long enough that they'd never regret a single thing. Perino will likely move on and try to forget this episode in her life ever happened. But I always wondered if, and when, Scotty would break.

And now we know:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

So, Scotty...tell us something we didn't know.

Of course, the White House is "puzzled" and thinks "it is sad" that the Scotty they knew and loved is now "disgruntled" (i.e. like a postal worker! crazy!). Former colleagues are shocked that he never expressed these reservations while serving.

Maybe because he valued his job?

The pushback is inevitable. Already Rove has likened him to a "leftwing blogger." Book sales will be touted as his sole reason for turning against his former master (although Scotty has two other very good reasons named "Rove" and "Libby"). This despite the inherent acknowledgement that Bush is extremely unpopular and Bush-bashing sells (ask Ari Fleischer how his rose-coclored memoir Taking Heat did).)

In the end, McClellan's book serves to underscore two things that come as no surprise to anyone outside of Bush's 28% dead-enders:

Between 2001 and the present, the American press failed miserably:

Just consider how remarkable that is. George Bush's own Press Secretary criticizes the American media for being "too deferential" to the Government. He lays the blame for Bush's ability to propagandize the nation on the media's uncritical dissemination of the Republican administration's falsehoods.

And...ummmm....we told you so:

Scott McClellan tells us Dirty Effing Hippies we were right about most everything. Of course, being right about everything we already knew that.

President Bush has no shortage of critics these days, and tonight he can add another to the list. Scott McClellan used to occupy an office just steps away from the Oval Office just down the hall, but now he's written a book that's rocked the White House and set the political talk show circuit on fire.

This morning the White House issued a terse statement saying McClellan is disgruntled about his experiences as Press Secretary. The statement went on to say, "This is not the Scott we knew."
The White House's reaction aside, what's really sad is how McClellan's claims barely raise an eyebrow anymore.

In fact, things have gotten so bad these past eight years that an inner circle confidant of the president claiming the war to be a "grave unnecessary mistake," saying he was lied to about the Plame affair, saying his White House was in "denial" as people died during Katrina...Somehow this doesn't surprise, but merely confirms what we've sadly come to accept under our fearless leader.

I've always been dumbfounded how anyone, even the most diehard Republican, could give this president and his administration a positive approval rating. Sure he's got the lowest numbers in history, but have we really sunk so low that this abomination of an 8 year chapter could be considered as anything but a nightmare?

Forget critics; consider what former employees have said. His Treasury Secretary described him as a "blind man in a room full of deaf people." And appointees from his former Secretary of State to the Director of Faith-Based Initiatives, they all said Cheney pulled the strings in a White House that always put politics above principle.

Maybe the only surprise in McClellan's tell-all is the tough truth from a former Press Secretary to many of my friends in the media: You have served as enablers to a president who needed a watchdog not a cheering section. Shame on all of us, Scott McClellan included.
And there are more books to come.

More of the president's former confidents will attempt to shock us with stories of the hypocrisy and hubris that are already such a large part of this White House legacy. The only surprise is that, no matter what is written, for many of us it will come as no surprise at all.