Black Box Report

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.