White House “sad” about ex-aide’s disclosures
WASHINGTON _ Considering Scott McClellan’s pedigree, the decision by the former White House press secretary to write a book accusing his former boss of deceitful shenanigans is stunning.McClellan, who was the administration’s spokesman for three years, is a fellow Texan and long-time Bush loyalist.
Brother Mark McClellan, a physician, was a member of the president’s Council on Economic Advisers, commissioner of the FDA and the federal administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. Their mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, was mayor of Austin, Texas, Texas Comptroller and a candidate for governor in Texas two years ago.
So McClellan’s assertions that George W. Bush displayed “a lack of inquisitiveness” and ran a “political propaganda campaign” before taking the nation to war five years ago might be hitting hard in the White House and in the president’s home state.
McClellan writes that Karl Rove and other Bush aides “managed the (Iraq) crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option … Top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war … In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”
McClellan also writes that the administration’s bungled reaction to Hurricane Katrina was “a failure of imagination and initiative.”
What does Bush, a stickler for loyalty, think about McClellan’s book, What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception?
Current press secretary Dana Perino (brought aboard by McClellan) said that the president ” is puzzled, and he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years, and disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of. So I think it’s just a sad situation.”
Perino said this afternoon that the president was surprised at McClellan’s allegations and returned repeatedly to the phrase “sad situation.”
Asked if the president was worried that the book would further undermine the public’s faith in this administration or the Iraq war, she replied, in part:
“I think that the questions about the intelligence being wrong have been answered by the White House. The intelligence was wrong, and we have taken measures to make sure that intelligence failures like that don’t happen again. And one of the ways we’ve done that is by modernizing and improving coordination amongst the intelligence agencies. And by any measure, that coordination is better than it’s ever been in the United States. That doesn’t mean there was anyone purposefully misled.”
Now that a hole has been punched in the dam, will more ex-Bushies start speaking out?
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
But doesn’t it all fit in with the Downing Street memo?
See: http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/