Hard words for Bush
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- May
- 28
The Iraq war “was not necessary” and a “serious strategic blunder.”
President George Bush’s administration sold it to the American people with “a political propaganda campaign.”
His national security team did little “to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so.”
“The Washington press corps were “complicit enablers” in the run-up to the war.
When Hurricane Katrina struck, the administration “spent most of the first week in a state of denial.”
“Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign.”
All of those statements are from the former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, in his upcoming book: “What Happened: Inside the White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”
That’s the reason this story is newsworthy. The statements otherwise wouldn’t have merited a mention, which makes you wonder just how out of touch Washington is.
The book is to be published by PublicAffairs next Tuesday. Politico.com first reported on its contents yesterday.
But harsh as his assessment is, none of it is any different from what many people have been saying for years now.
McClennan also writes that when he told reporters that Karl Rover and I. Lewis Libby Jr. were not involved in leaking the identity of CIA operative, Valerie Plame, he had been deceived.
He did not know for two years that he had been repeating a lie, he said.
The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt here
FILE PHOTO: A Dec. 13, 2005, photo of then-White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan during his daily briefing at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 2:07 pm by Noreen O'Donnell.
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I’ve always deplored the practice of former administration members writing about a president while he is still in office. David Stockman did it, Donald Regan did it, and now this guy. I’m sure there have been others. I think it’s a dishonorable thing to do.
There’s little question that things have gone wrong with this administration. But if McClellan really was appalled by what he saw, he should have resigned and told the country why at the time, not defended it and waited over 2 years to tell his ‘story.’
It seems he just wants to sell books, and wrote what he thought would sell the most books. It just adds another reason to hold politics and politicians in contempt.