Powered by Max Banner Ads
Scott McClellan Lashes Out At Bush White House In New Book
We’ve heard rumors about former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book titled, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” for some time now.
Just last November McClellan’s publisher released an excerpt from the book that seemed to implicate the Bush Administration in the Valerie Flame Plame leak case.
Just a few days after the controversy erupted that same publisher told the media that McClellan’s statements were being taken out of context and misinterpreted.
Today we learn a very different story. This according to The Politico, which managed to get a copy of the book ahead of its Sunday release.
It seems that excerpts released last year about McClellan’s book were indeed accurate after all.
Here are some of the highlights:
- McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
- He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
- He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
- The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
- McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
I’m actually pretty surprised McClellan came out with such strong allegations given his long friendship with President Bush. Some of his assertions are standard liberal talking points which is odd coming from a long time Republican.
We now know that the Plame leak originated from Richard Armitage who leaked it to Robert Novak, so that pretty much kills McClellan’s credibility on that issue.
I’m going to read the entire book before I make any judgments, but it sounds like he may be a bitter ex-White House insider with an ax to grind.
You can buy Scott’s book HERE
-Chris Jones
McClellan Publisher Deflates Tantalizing Snippet on C.I.A. Leak, Liberals Cry
Just as I suspected, the snippet released yesterday from Scott McClellan’s book turned out to be a misinterpretation. Although, clearly it was done on purpose to generate buzz and of course it worked.
From the NYT:
A 151-word excerpt from the memoir of Scott McClellan, chief spokesman to President Bush in 2006, was not meant to be as tantalizing as it sounded, according to the publisher of the book.
After a day of wide coverage and swift reactions on the Web, the publisher, Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs, told MSNBC that Mr. McClellan “did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him” about two senior aides’ roles in leaking the identity of Valeria Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. operative, to the conservative columnist Robert Novak and others in 2003.
How does that square with the book excerpt, where Mr. McClellan wrote that “the President himself” was “involved” in his offering false information to the press about the leak? Mr. Osnos offered an explanation to Bloomberg News:
“He told him something that wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true,’’ Osnos said in a telephone interview. “The president told him what he thought to be the case.’’
When we wrote about this yesterday, that was clearly one of the possible outcomes, although one that will disappoint opponents of the president who were hoping for him to be directly tied to one of the biggest scandals of his administration.
“Sorry, suckers,” Greg Sargent wrote at The Horse’s Mouth, “It looks like McClellan will actually exonerate Bush for his role in Plamegate.”
What this means is that the far left still has no proof that Bush did anything wrong in this matter. We also know that Valerie Plame and her douchebag husband are both publicity whores and left-wing loons.
-Chris Jones
Ex-White House Spokesman Writes Tell-All Book
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a 400 page book about his time in the Bush inner circle. The book is called What Happened and it chronicles among other things the Valerie Plame leak case.
His publisher released a little taste of what you can expect in the book:
The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
There was one problem. It was not true.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.
Scott McClellan has been a close friend of the Bush family for around 15 years, so I have my doubts that he’s gonna drop any bombshells. It should still make for an interesting read.
-Samantha Giles
Valerie Plame: “I’m not going away”
Outed spy Valerie Plame says she isn’t going away, no matter what the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue want. God help us if that’s true.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone to go away more than covert, super-spy, 007, Valerie Plame. And her husband too.
Even though we all know Richard Armitage is the one who leaked her identity, Plame and her idiot husband continue to peddle the fantasy that the Bush Administration leaked her identity on purpose.
Richard Armitage leaked her identity in passing because he’s a gossip. As Deputy Secretary of State he was one of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq war and was certainly not considered an ally of the Bush Administration.
Of course, Valerie Plame doesn’t plan to let a little thing like “truth” get in the way of her book sales. She was after all so distraught after her identity became public, she immediately posed with her husband for Vanity Fair.
Valerie Plame and her husband are shameless, phony, publicity whores, and are only taken seriously by far left loones. Their “15 minutes” was up a long time ago, and what a painfully shrill 15 minutes it was.
-Chris Jones
Posts
