McClellan's book in no way exculpates him for his role in now-myriad crimes against humanity, still today faithfully abetted by Fleischer, Snow or the propaganda-whore-du-jour Perrino, but I will give him props for trying to salvage his own soul. If he truly wants to do so, however, I will expect him to be sworn in before sundry committees with document-stuffed dossiers under both arms.
'MANAGED TRUTH'
The thing about Ari Fleischer, that archetype of PR savoir faire, was he could reasonably, intelligently and articulately say nothing to White House reporters for hours on end, meander around and just close enough to clumsy lies for them not to seem clumsy, and obfuscate the dark agenda of his masters while seeming plainspoken, if a condescending prick. His command of bullshit was such that fledgling public relations students could look at Fleischer as a role model of sanguine, deliberatively contrived humanity, the ultimate public pod person -- never of course realizing how this damns their profession utterly and would have them all on a luge track to Hell if such cartoony cosmology actually informs our existence.
Which brings us to Scott McClellan, the reigning presidential press secretary, who can't seem issue a "no comment" without that little bead of sweat on his upper lip that suggests even that is a lie. I understand that McClellan buys into the beshitted orthodoxy of the Bush Administration, or he would not have taken the job -- but given how the yield of that orthodoxy has spiralled like the ammoniac moppings of a peep-show booth down a rusty drain, and that McClellan continues to be given nonsensical talking points and bald, indefensible lies to stutter out from the dais every fucking day of his life, it's difficult to understand how he can even get up in the morning anymore.
Back in my days at the magazine, I dealt with my share of flacks, a handful of them decent people trying to be earnest interlocutors of information, the grand majority just clueless shills of pabulum that meant nothing and no one needed, the "best and brightest" of them, like Fleischer, slick dissemblers who could seem engaging and amenable while in fact erecting bulwarks against any information they didn't want aired. In fact, I lost my share of good reporters to corporations and mega-flack firms who routinely poach the journalistic ranks, offering twice and more the dough any real reportorial enterprise can pay for doing the exact opposite of real reporting. Always made me sad. Fleischeresque flacks "manage truth," an utterly absurd and logically impossible concept that has nevertheless become the sluice of how anyone gets any information in this country, since -- see Judy Miller and the Times -- most reporters don't actually seek the truth of any matter anymore. They process shit people said, stack it up against shit other people said, and don't bother to weigh any of it or crosscheck it against hard realities that occur on the actual soil of the Earth.
It was a triumph of PR, for example, that the Times for a full year sat on a story addressing arguably the most vital constitutional question of our era, the legality of a government circumventing laws written to assure the freedoms that same government insists we are mired and slouching towards bankruptcy to spread. By law, wiretapping American citizens is categorically illegal, unless, when "warranted" ostensibly for public safety, one can provide proof of such to a relevant judicial entity and thus obtain a "warrant." The point there, see, is that the government cannot go about digging into the particulars of someone's life for its own purposes without proving it has good cause in the public interest, be that someone Republican, Democrat, Black Radical Congress or Smurf.
Bush and his puppetmasters might not like what the Smurfs stand for, nor that their ideas differ from his, and so fucking what? Don't hang out with Smurfs. I don't like fiscal libertarians, but that doesn't mean I can randomly hack into computers at the Cato Institute or the University of Chicago to look for evidence of somebody banging the intern or belonging to Opus Dei. That, you see, would be none of my goddamn business. I surf porn, have been a Green Party member and, long before the fucked and illegal war in Iraq proved a boondoggle whose only purpose was to bully the world and enrich a handful of corporate contributors, warned that it would be a boondoggle whose only purpose was to bully the world and enrich a handful of corporate contributors. I don't like the president, think he's an utterly dimwitted, coddled rich twit who served as a convenient proxy for the orthodox money-grubbing Lords of Capital who already run the earth and want to tighten the strings still further.
Does this make me an enemy of the state? How about that war, and how, y'know, all that shit I and millions of others warned about, that came true, went patently ignored by PR-suckled mainstream media (by the way, if I haven't said it recently, fuck the Times, and all you butt-ignorant dittomonkeys who think it's a "leftist bastion," it's worth reiterating you have no fucking idea what leftist means). None of us ever bombed a fucking thing, never threatened any violence of any sort -- all we did was disagree, we offered competing concepts of reality in the free marketplace of ideas, and, lo and behold, our ideas seemed to better resemble reality than the confabulated horseshit Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan were given to bleat into people's heads like Chicken Fucking Little.
How do you do it, Scott? It's tough enough to understand how my old reporters went over to that dark side, how reporters at supposedly legitimate media like the Times and CNN can squander their vast, precious resources and name to dutifully word-process monkey's-grasp-of-reality official stories -- but how do you just LIE, for a living, in your bad suit, sweat trickling down into your servile, starched collar, retreading bullshit after pointless factoid, dissemble so translucently that even people as stupid and servile as the White House press corps is calling you on your perfidy and dataless turds of official quotation? How do you just go back in there, official spokesman, and everybody knows you're a joke, a stammering suit tossed out like a sideshow in the Bread-and-Circuses agenda. Maybe you should wear a funny hat.
The president never "met" Jack Abramoff? Are you out of your fucking mind? The power-brokering Republican lobbyist who greased the wheels of your hopelessly corrupt leadership and spent every dollar to advance your administration's Malthusian, feudally-inspired agenda visited the White House on many non-consecutive occassions, had "staff" meetings and has been photographed multiple times with Bush -- but they never MET? That's like me going to porn sites, but insisting I never jerked off. There's a causality thing here that your talking points seem to be missing. Like, we don't torture, and aren't operating secret gulags in countries that do, except, y'know, for the all the European investigations finding that we did and do, and except for the German tourist with all the scars from being kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia and whisked off to Afghanistan where he was TORTURED because they thought he was someone else? Reading my fucking emails and bullying internet engines into showing you what websites I visited, doing it in the name of, ahem, "liberty," and all this, Scott, is constitutional and legal? What legal code prescribes all this shit, the Nuremberg Laws?
Oh, but we're in a state of war, so extraordinary times call for -- aaaand right up your ass. Your boss chimp wants to make the Patriot Act permanent, which tells us all how free you want us to be, permanently, and how the Project for a New American Century -- your masters' blueprint -- sees the lot of us with our wiggy ideas and quests for information other than what you hork up into our midst. Free, as Hicks said, to do what you tell us.
A postscript: Fuck David Gregory and Charlie Gibson, as hard as Miller. Dissembling jackals. The republic's looming catastrophe is just as much on your heads.