Scott McCllellan: media defensiveness

Here's a link to my most recent piece for Antiwar.com. Perhaps a little late to the topic (though he did testify in the House Friday). What struck me -- well one of the things -- about the response to Scott McClellan's tell-quite-a-bit book, "What Happened," was how defensive some of the media were about Scott describing them as pretty pliant to the White House spin during the run-up to the war. Well, of course they were. I try to explain some of the reasons they were.

McClellan seems remarkably credible

This is a preliminary impression, of course. I haven't read the book yet, though there's a good chance I'll have a copy tomorrow. But I watched the Scott McClellan interview with Keith Olberman tonight, and he seemed pretty credible, in the sense that he seemed to stick to what he had reason to know about and to resist speculating on what he didn't or couldn't know about. I'll have more to say later.

I still think he wasn't much of a press secretary, especially in the sense that he wasn't especially good at communicating what the administration was trying to do. I guess I'm not surprised it took him so long to get disillusioned; loyalists can often overlook vague and growing uneasiness for a long time. My preliminary impression, however, is that he did the book for what he conceives to be patriotic motives. The White House, and Ari Fleischer, of course, are trying to say he didn't have enough access to say what he has said, but of course nobody will admit to having read the book yet. So far I haven't seen a convincing refutation of any of the facts or incidents he's written about.

If he's right that Bush's impulses from an early date were more Wilsonian than defensive -- that he wanted to attack Iraq to impose "coercive democracy" (nice turn of phrase) more than because the intelligence was so supposedly airtight on WMD, it's an important thing to know. It would mean that Bush is an even bigger fool than we thought.

McClellan: just a few words

I obviously haven't read the book yet, though the publisher says a review copy is on the way. But although I'm sure there's a fair amount of self-serving in former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book, "What Happened" -- and he was a lousy press secretary, though he may have been operating with a guilty conscience -- there's enough of a serious nature there to make it worth some attention. I hope I'm not just having my own view of the Bushlet reinforced, but unreflective, equating stubbornness with strength, capacity for gross self-deception sure sounds like Bush to me. If he really had the grandiose and foolish Wilsonian vision in mind from the outset but decided he had to sell it with the pipsqueak danger posed by Saddam and a hope that WMD would be found, that's pretty mendacious.

Scott McClellan's Plame bombshell

So now former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, in a curious bit of prepublicity for a book that isn't due out until April, says he didn't tell the truth way back when he told reporters that nobody at the White House was involved with leaking the information that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent/employee. And he says five people in the White House -- Rove, Card, Cheney, Libby and the Bushlet himself -- were involved in putting out this misinformation. He doesn't quite come out and say the president was involved in or ordered a cover-up, but it's darned close.

On Chris Matthews' "Hardball" tonight the panelists -- Dan Balz of the WaPo and Yepse of the Des Moines Register -- thought the Republicans would have to start distancing themselves from the president on this one, since they all claim to be devotees of truth and integrity. Also said it would probably benefit non-Washington candidates, especially Obama on the Democratic side.

It was curious to me, however, when they said the Republican likely to benefit here would be Mike Huckabee. I can see his having a reputation as a Washington outsider, but on policy he seems almost like a carbon copy of Bush, and maybe even more of a big-government "conservative." He's an evangelical -- an ordained Baptist minister -- and he stresses he's more "compassionate" than a standard conservative, urging government attention to health care, AIDS, poverty, etc. And he was quite the tax-raiser as governor of Arkansas. I don't think I'll ever understand how it's supposed to be a Christian characteristic to be "compassionate" with other peoples' money, and I don't think Jesus does either.