Goebbels Turncoat
Well what do you know: Bush lied and people died after all.
The spokesman who defended President Bush’s policies through Hurricane Katrina and the early years of the Iraq war is now blasting his former employers, saying the Bush administration became mired in propaganda and political spin and at times played loose with the truth.
In excerpts from a 341-page book to be released Monday, Scott McClellan writes on Iraq that Bush “and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”
“[I]n this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security,” McClellan wrote.
I certainly don’t have the time or energy to re-argue the Iraq War or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: our voices are hoarse from reasoning and explaining. All I want to say is that if McClellan is the one responsible for the Bush Administration’s poor justification of its actions—and it sounds like he was—he should be shot for treason. Not Hillary Clinton, you never know what might happen shot; but line him up against the north wall of the White House and blindfold him shot.
Even lowly bloggers like ourselves offered better arguments, more vehemently asserted, than did Bush’s spokespeople. Now we know why. This pudgy little ham sandwich didn’t feel like doing his job.
I’m sure there will be a firestorm of media attention, all pointless, since McClellan offers only his dated opinions, not new facts—and all over a President who will be gone in a few months.
If you wan a better critique of the Bush Administration’s acts and justifications, read Douglas Feith in yesterday’s WSJ. Unlike the meaty mouthpiece, he was actually involved in forming policy, not undermining it:
In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.
President Bush no longer stressed Saddam’s record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy.
…
That’s a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.
…
The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.
Now, this might learn you something. (Fat, sweaty) kiss-and-tell books are eventually pulped and forgotten.