Scott McClellan is unleashed

Samuel Johnson, the iconoclastic 18th-century English essayist, put it best: “No man but a blockhead, ever wrote, except for money.” So, sure, former Bush administration press secretary Scott McClellan compiled his memoirs with an eye toward making a buck. Since when are Republicans opposed to profit?
McClellan’s memoir, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” has caused quite a stir. But can there be any American not currently on the White House payroll who doesn’t know the administration hoodwinked the nation into invading Iraq with a tidal wave of propaganda?
Condi Rice alibis that President Bush never intended to mislead the public and “was very clear about the reasons for going to war.” Yeah, well, I recall Rice testifying under oath that a CIA briefing entitled “bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” was “historical” in nature, before its contents were declassified and everybody saw it had predicted everything but the precise location of the 9/11 attacks before they happened. Bush went fishing.
McClellan calls Rice “sometimes too accommodating” as national security adviser. She was worse than that. Her false 9/11 testimony exhibited two qualities essential to rising in the Bush administration: shameless sycophancy and an incapacity to be embarrassed. Give her the motorcade and the big corner office and there’s no falsehood so brazen Rice won’t embrace it.
Then there’s Bush himself, whom McClellan depicts as a charming fellow who frequently “convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment” and engages in “self-deception.” Do tell. Would this be the same president who’s repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by refusing to admit U.N. arms inspectors? This despite the fact that mocking those inspectors’ incompetence — never mind they proved 100 percent correct about Iraq’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” — kept White House imagineers busy until the “shock and awe” bombardment began.
McClellan even reports overhearing Bush telling a supporter he can’t remember if he ever used cocaine. If you believe that, chances are your brains ARE made of feathers.
But what really provided sardonic amusement during the book’s rollout was the disingenuous reaction of the high-dollar press: “If anything,” McClellan wrote, “the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.
“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Got that, pigeons? The Bush administration’s former press spokesman surrounds the phrase “liberal media” with ironical quotes to indicate what most people with the intellectual acumen of a basset hound already know: that far from being an independent check on government power, today’s corporate-controlled, courtier-dominated Washington/New York media function as reliably, and far more smoothly, to advance White House propaganda than McClellan himself ever did.
That said, quality journalism definitely got done amid the Iraq propaganda barrage. One news organization, then Knight-Ridder, now McClatchy, and a handful of terrific reporters — Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, Joe Galloway, etc. — were all over this story back when it counted. See their stinging rebuttal to McClellan at washingtonbureau.typepad.com/nationalsecurity.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons can be reached at [email protected].