May 30, 2008--"Not the Scott We Knew"

Indeed, the Scott McClellan the Bush White House knew was the quintessential gofer.

Just like the gofer the Nixon White House thought they had in John Dean. But, as we know form the case of Dean, a spurned gofer can be a dangerous person. Especially if you are involved in various nefariousnesses.

When “sad” old Scott (how all the Bush apologists are now referring to him) two years ago resigned as Press Secretary, George Bush, standing by his side and tearing up, said that he looked forward 20 years hence to sitting on the porch with Scott, in rocking chairs at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reminiscing about the good-old-days of his administration.

Anyone who believed that the patrician Bush would even remember a long-ago servant much less hang out with him was delusional. I suspect that Scott, having quaffed of the Bush Kool-Aid, was the last to realize this.

But I also suspect that this deluded young man quickly came to learn the truth when during his two post-White House years nothing good or lucrative came his way. No jobs as “analyst” on Fox News (see how quickly they scooped up Karl Rove for big bucks), no big-time lobbying assignments, no corner-office corporate payoffs. I’ll bet that up-to-then-innocent Scott began to realize that his old Texas buddy wasn’t eager to pick up the phone on his behalf.

And then along came a publisher blandishing big bucks for a tell-all account about what really happened inside the Bush White House.

This is pretty much what the mainstream media are reporting about McClellan. Calling his motives into question. While the White House is in full talking-point defense. Not only calling this “sad,” but also saying in lock-step, using the exact same language, how they are “surprised” by what Scott wrote and how “this doesn’t sound like the Scott we knew.” (See linked NY Times article as an example of this kind of coverage.)

To someone who remembers Watergate, this sounds remarkably like how the Nixonites attempted to discredit John Dean—he was too low level an operative to know firsthand what he was claiming, that he was disgruntled by not being allowed a more role, that ultimately he was only trying to cover his own ass.

What got lost, at least for a whole then, and what is getting lost now as apologists and media flaks focus on motives and try to defend themselves from McClellan’s assertion that the media failed in its job to investigate what was really going on in the Bush White House as they lied their way to war, what was and is being overlooked is that, though yes Dean and McClellan were low-level flunkies, they got it right—they told the truth.