This ship is taking a long time to go down and has a lot of rats

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Scott McClellan's Book Coming in April -- Admits Wrongdoing in Clearing Rove and Libby in CIA Leak Case

By E&P Staff

Published: November 20, 2007 12:40 AM ET
NEW YORK To no one's surprise in a world where top White House aides with any president eventually write a book about it, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan will be coming out with his volume in April.

It's called "What Happened" and its publisher, Public Affairs, at its Web site carries this brief excerpt:

"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." [Editor & Publisher]

There is one constant in the Republican/conservative universe: money trumps all. The ultimate loyalty of any good conservative is not to ideology or morals, to goodness and light, to righteousness. No, it is to money and power. As long as the mantra of "morals" and the like lead to money and power, that's where they will head. But now that the emperor's clothes have been seen for what they are (or aren't), the courtiers are turning tail and making a buck by claiming that they were misled, that they were lied to, that they were only following orders. We've seen this over and over again in history, and the slow deterioration of the Bush cult is proceeding in the same way. I just wish it wasn't taking so damned long.
What do his cronies have to lose now by turning on their master and making a few shekels by writing tell-all books, telling us nothing we didn't already know? I mean, these things must be timed carefully because no one would buy a book confirming the obvious after the Bush administration was out of office. There's a certain half-life to these things.
Still, the schadenfreude factor comes into play every time some Bush insider decides to turn and tell all (or at least, some).
It is worth noting, as Salon's Tim Grieve did, that no one in the White House press corp bothered to ask for a comment on this issue at today's White House briefing. Perhaps the subject is so obvious as to not require comment.

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