Week of May 26, 2008

The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings. And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network [CNN] at the time ...They would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive.

There are several kinds of Washington memoirs: “I Reveal the Honest Truth,” a kiss-up-and-tell designed to settle scores (nod to honesty optional). “I Was There at the Start,” designed to make the author appear to be the linchpin of history. And, most tedious: “I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract.”

Scott McClellan’s memoir is the latest entry in the latter genre. Among his far-too-late admissions, President Bush’s former spokesman reveals that he knew the war in Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” but the White House decided the best course was “to turn away from candor and honesty.”

This is the same Scott McClellan who presumably had a big role in creating the White House’s communications strategy and joined in the “culture of deception” with such zeal that we lost count of the times he ridiculed critics of the war and questioned their patriotism.

So the spin begins -- former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes a book blasting the Bush administration for, well, pretty much everything -- and the noise machine sets out to destroy him. Last night, shortly after Politico.com broke a story about the book's contents, Tucker Carlson and Karl Rove went on MSNBC and Fox News, respectively, to begin the McClellan bashing.

The points were tired, and certainly familiar to the likes of Richard Clarke -- that McClellan was irrelevant ("the lamest press secretary in American history," according to Carlson, and"goes to show how out of the loop he was," says Rove). Both also said that McClellan was implicated in everything he alleged, since he didn't speak up at the time, so why should we care, etc.

But both Carlson and Rove -- and this is minutes or even seconds apart, on different networks -- ended their interviews with this charge:

CARLSON: There is no way he put together those words by himself. Complete sentence after complete sentence after complete sentence, I don't believe he's capable of it. I'd like to know who his ghost writer is. It's just appalling.

[...]

ROVE: Well, two things. First of all, this doesn't sound like Scott. It really doesn't. Not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger.

It's odd that they both simultaneously made this ghostwriter charge, and doubly odd because Rove specifically admitted at the beginning of the interview he had never seen the book. Strange indeed.

The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution.