Great Scott! McClellan is no longer Pinocchio
Posted on May 30, 2008 - Filed Under Politics, Governance
White House press secretaries can only be as candid as their prime sources of information that go into their regular press briefings. Unfortunately for Scott McClellan, George W. Bush and the US president’s senior advisers expected him take on the added burden of being the chief propagandist of a sub-surface agenda pertaining to the Middle East that . . . aside from defying common sense . . . clearly had no direct bearing on the interests of the American people in the first place.
McClellan left the White House two years ago after serving Pres. Bush for almost a decade in various capacities but in his just released memoir ‘WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington’, he asserts that top officials allowed him . . . inadvertently or not . . . to mislead the public on the White House’s role in outing a CIA agent whose husband had declared that intel which was used to support going to war with Iraq was unverifiable at best:
“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 seniormost 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.”
McClellan’s book could not have come at a worse time for Republican presidential bet John MaCain. Earlier this week, the former POW declared that he “would never surrender in
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