Scott McClellan's Lee Atwater Moment

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is trying to get himself some Lee Atwater-style absolution without having to die a horrible death from a brain tumor to do it.

Keith Olbermann reported last night on how McClellan throws his former boss under the bus:

It was always clear that Scotty was really uncomfortable with the kind of utter horseshit he was required to spew as part of his job, but the fact remains that he did it -- and in the process, helped to bamboozle an incurious nation. And even in this horrifying expose of what many of us have always known, or at least suspected, about the Bush Administration, he still falls under the spell of the towel-snapping frat boy:

I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

So what are we to take from that? Those of us who have known all along that George W. Bush was NOT the second coming of Churchill, Reagan, or whatever other major figure into whose boots the media tried to cram this intellectual lightweight and chronic, lifelong fuckup, have vascillated between thinking that he's either completely evil or Dick Cheney's useful idiot -- the affable guy the Republicans turned to to be their own grinning, charming rogue after eight years of another one. That their grinning, charming rogue was a moron was immaterial. If McClellan is truthful, and not trying to salvage his sorry ass in the face of the famously vindictive Bush family, then we have to come down on the "idiot" side of the fence, although Bush's faux-religiousity and refusal to ever acknowledge any fallibility played right into their hands as well.

Either way, I suppose we could be grateful for McClellan for pulling the curtain away on the bloodstain on this nation's history that is the last eight years. It just would have been more useful if he hadn't waited until it was nearly over, until after over 4000 families had lost their sons and daughters and tens of thousands of American young people had lost their limbs, parts of their brains, and in many cases, their ability to cope.

But perhaps the most telling part of what's been reported about the book is, as Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discussed at the end of the clip last night, how it may very well implicate Dick Cheney and Karl Rove in a criminal conspiracy. Of course, to actually DO anything about these revelations would require a Congress and a Democratic Party that cares more about doing what's right than about what Tim Russert might say -- and we don't have that. So when the door closes on the Bush Administration; when he turns the keys over to whomever is going to succeed him, leaving an American economy in ruins, Iraq in a quagmire, and in all likelihood, a wider conflagration in the Middle East after his bombing of Iran, he can walk off into the sunset hand in hand with Dick Cheney, each grinning from ear to ear, with visions of millions of dollars in speaking and lobbying fees dancing in their heads, knowing that there's no one in Washington who has the fucking balls to use the laws they're pledged to uphold to hold these criminals accountable for the atrocities they have committed against this country and against humanity.

As for Scott McClellan, I'm sure he thinks this book will allow him to sleep at night. But I for one hope that the images of the dead in Iraq haunt him forever.