Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

[I don't believe I have ever posted about a book I have not read, but I'm going to make an exception today—but keep in mind I'm working off secondary sources, which inevitably carries the risk that I may be misinformed.]

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has reportedly penned a confessional memoir admitting, inter alia, that “Bush relied on 'propaganda' to sell the war”; “the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war”; and suggesting that Rove and Libby conspired to obstruct justice.

I think the horrors of the US torture policy and the US Iraq policy have been so clear for so long that the time for civility is long past.

So, assuming the published book summaries are correct, in the main, I agree with Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday where it is written:

MASSIVE JEERS to Scott McClellan. The latest former Bush lapdog—-he was press secretary from '03 to '06—-to come out of the woodwork has several juicy nuggets in his hot-off-the-presses tell-all book. Bottom line: he confirms everything that we dirty hippie bloggers were screaming about at the top of our lungs, but which the traditional media ignored because…well, because Scott McClellan stood at his little White House podium and denied it all, lying out of his fat little elitist face as the stenographers printed his crap without scrutiny.

Once again, we come face to face with a White House official who could've done the right thing…but instead decided that the lives of American troops, Iraqi civilians, Katrina victims, and a network of covert CIA operatives were worth less than the luster of his master's lapel pin. When our country needed him to tell it straight, he hid behind propaganda and spin and bogus talking points and outright bamboozlement.

He told us to our faces we could trust him, when all along he knew that he was committing deception on a massive scale with horrific consequences. The lies he left in his wake, placed end to end, could reach the moon and back. He helped put the welfare of a handful of maniacal warmongers ahead of the welfare of the country. The time to reveal the way the Bushies were “restoring honor and integrity to the White House” was back then—-years ago—-when such revelations might've done some good. Instead, he waited until 2008 for his conscience dump.

I could certainly have done without the personal appearance slur, but most of the rest of it seems a reasonable response to, as the Kos writer puts it, “341 pages of, Hey, I was just following orders.” (Although from the sound of it, the memoir is actually more along the equally ignoble lines of, “the noble good-hearted Tsar was badly served by his evil counselors.”)

But I do not agree with this absurd call to action. There are much better ways to protest.