Scott McClellan Grew a Conscience...For a Price

More than two years after leaving the White House, former press secretary Scott McClellan has grown a conscience.  And all it took was a lucrative book deal to convince McClellan to reveal the previously unknown, deeply held secrets of the Bush administration.  We learn that George Bush was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” that he used propaganda to sell the war, and perhaps most shocking of all, that the “White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.”   Besides the entire progressive blogosphere and the traditional media who chose to look the other way, who knew?  So let’s leave it to the media to breathlessly report on the “explosive revelations,” from the book, and instead look at McClellan’s take on his own role in the Bush White House.

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided.

Well, that’s one way to put it.  Another might be to say that for three years he willingly distorted and lied about Iraq, about domestic spying, about secret prisons, about torture, and of course, about the White House role in the outing of Valerie Plame.  Or he didn’t lie and, as the truth was revealed about these many issues, he chose to stay on and defend Iraq and domestic spying and secret prisons and torture and of course, the people who lied to him about their role in the outing of Valerie Plame. Which is it?

Let’s look at just one of the excerpts from the book and see if we can determine whether McClellan was a liar or simply a pimp for the White House lies.  In the book, McClellan writes:

...that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial..."

So, what was McClellan saying about denial in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

Q:  Scott, recently, top Democrats in Congress, they had some tough words and some questions about President Bush. Congressman Pelosi says that -- said that "the President was obviously in denial," because she said she talked to him yesterday about Mike Brown and said that things were going wrong, and he said, What's gone wrong?"  

MR. McCLELLAN:  ...You all are well aware of how engaged this President is in the response efforts and making sure that we're meeting the immediate needs...the President has been working to make sure that we have all the resources needed dedicated to this effort, and that the needs on the ground are being met.

It was obvious to anyone with two eyes and a television that McClellan was lying that day, and today we are supposed to forget that blatant lie and applaud McClellan’s willingness to admit he was a liar.

And this is just one example from a slew of self-serving, revisionist history brought to you by McClellan for the bargain price of $27.95 (which is a steal when you consider that we were paying him more than $160,000 a year to lie to us on a daily basis). Or save your money and stay tuned for future fact-checks on McClellan's deceptive look at What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.