Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:05:57 AM
McClellan tries to walk a fine line between echoing Bush haters and saying utterly irresponsible things. “Closing the Book on McClellan”
The most extraordinary aspect of McClellan’s book is the sense that he
stumbled into a reckless, propagandizing administration and did its
bidding for years without realizing how nefarious it was — until he
left and decided to write a book. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion
that he has shaped his views to the marketing pressures of the
publishing industry. If so, it is a shameful end to an undistinguished
public career.
The story he sells isn’t even there. “What Happened?”
McClellan’s only legitimate beef seems to be his unjust treatment
during the Valerie Plame investigation. But that complaint doesn’t sell
books or get the sluices of journalistic saliva raging. Use of the word
“propaganda” and charges of dishonesty about the war do, which is why
he uses them. But McClellan concedes in interviews that even when he
was an important cog in the “propaganda machine,” he never witnessed
anything that seemed at the time to be deceitful or untrue.
This all bespeaks a level of sophistication few ever credited McClellan
with when he stood at the podium looking like a McDonald’s cashier
flummoxed by an order. He’s hawking books by making people think he’s
charging the Bush administration with wholesale dishonesty when he’s
not even making that case at the retail level. He’s claiming the role
of insider with behind-the-scenes insights, but he admits it never
occurred to him that there was any dishonesty at work until he left the
White House and began ruminating on what he could put in his book.
McClellan’s book has all the inherent interest of one of his briefings. “Mouth McClellan”
If McClellan’s provocative language is stripped away, what he is saying
is unremarkable. In its zeal to persuade the public of the case for
war, the president’s team ended up “obscuring nuances and ignoring the
caveats that should have accompanied their arguments.” In retrospect,
that’s inarguably true. “However,” McClellan adds, “this is not the
same as saying they deliberately misled and lied.”