Scott McClellan defects from the Dark Side?

And what the hell does it say about the American press when Bush's own press secretary complains that the media were too compacent in the run-up to the war?

Gosh, that's so brave of him to come out and make these criticisms years after they're of any use to anyone and long after he runs any real personal or professional risk in doing so!

Such nerve!

Richard Clarke talked about this a little, and he said that it's sort of pointless now, as the world has pretty much figured out Iraq was fucked from the go. The point being that if McClellan had these concerns and doubts, and you know, evidence that Bush and co. were lying blatantly, waiting until now to say anything is hardly praiseworthy. Understandable, I suppose, but this move strikes me more as opportunism than conscience-clearing, and it isn't laudable at this point.

Agreed. I wouldn't call it "conscience-clearing" so much as "hopefully avoiding subpoenas, lawsuits or jail-time".

So, now the Right gets to think he's a douchebag, too? In this divisive political climate it's nice to see some common ground once in a while.

Replace "long after he runs any real personal risk" with "long after there's any risk Bush and his cronies could lose an election or be disempowered by democratic processes" and you have how I feel about the Republican party and the people who vote for it in general.

This kind of behaviour does make it clear that the Bush gang are nothing but political opportunists who never believed a word they were saying and will happily reverse themselves when the winds change, though.

Yeah, fuck him. Along with what everyone else said. What a worthless little toad.

The CNN.com headline for this story cracks me up. White House 'puzzled' by ex-spokesman's book bashing Bush. What isn't this White House puzzled by?

Small, shiny objects. Bells. Tiny, brightly colored plastic balls. Their own reflections. They're kind of like my pet parakeets. Except that parakeets are actually quite smart.

Jesus.

When did he become convinced otherwise?...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/200...OfDYQbgGKs0NUE

Which would sort of make him a "complicit enabler", right?

I say we all download his book off the Internet.

I would say this smells like rats deserting a sinking ship but this boat's already gone down. I have a feeling in the years to come this won't be the last "Hey, I wasn't that bad of a guy but those people I worked for? Fucking pricks...You guys were soooooo right!" books from people who worked in this administration.

Dammit, Zooey, you beat me to it!

But really, I'm SO glad McClellan sang like a canary over this! Gee, all this time, I'd been sitting around thinking the war was good for us! Whew - gotta love that clarification!

Heh. Awesome. Those were the exact same thoughts I had.

Mclellan had an interview on the Daily Show a little while after he left where, while still towing the party line more or less, he already managed to come out a human being. I was surprised then, and I'm more curious now with the NEW interview he's giving Jon Stewart this week. Here's the link if you're curious: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/in...cclellan-pt.-1

FYI

Watch Dan Bartlett respond to McClellan at 4 p.m. ET on The Situation Room

I think you can watch this from CNN.com streaming video but don't hold me to that.

He was never a very good liar, and it was clear that unlike the psychotic ex-Fox anchor and the robotic Dana Perrino, McLellan never seemed comfortable repeating Rove's talking points.

I think this is brave, considering the vindictiveness and sway these a$$holes still throw around in Washington. The end of the Bush administration isn't the end of the neocon dream. There's a lot of money -- some might say ALL the money -- in the Dark Side. That's a lot of scratch to ruin somebody. Just ask Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke or Valerie Plame, not to mention innumerable whistleblowers whose lives were quietly destroyed by these people.

Brave is not a word I would use for this guy, specially when he's trying to sell a book.

This could all be coming to a head pretty fucking quickly.

http://wexler.house.gov/apps/list/pr...srelease.shtml

If he refuses to appear, he's lying and trying to generate sales. If he does appear and it's different then the book... he's lying. If he appears and tells the truth and it matches these snipets... fireworks.

Here's to hoping!

It's good that Down's Syndrome Vampire now has someone who can cover his shift whenever he's feeling under the weather.

Ari Fleischer has been on various CNN shows today and just now he was saying that some of the comments in the book don't sound like Scott. He then goes on to add that he spoke to Scott today and was told that Scott's book editor added things!

That is exactly how this is all going to be spinned because there is already talk of making Scott appear before the House Judiciary committee. All he has to do is say his editor added things or emphasized points that he did not mean.

Yeah, this is slightly less stirring than David Brock's leftward conversion.

If he had a conscience, he would've piped up sooner. Y'know, before more servicemen and women were killed. I think he's an irredeemable scumbag at this point.

Ha. Add McClellan to the "disgruntled" list.

Sure, it's late, but better late than never. To vilify McLellan is pointless. A lot of people knew before, during and after that the case for war was BS. So where are the members of the mainstream news taking this ball and running with it? So far it looks like only Chris Matthews is doing any on-camera soul searching about it. How about members of Congress who "innocently" voted to give Bush authority to go into Iraq and then didn't immediately impeach him for promising to deliver the evidence but never following through? There are so many villains in this trash heap and so many continue to remain silent about the reality of the situation that no matter what kind of tool McLellan was in the past is irrelevant. It's a brave move to do this even now. How many administration officials past or present do you see lining up behind him to give this story some momentum? How about the mainstream press? ... crickets.

It's not a free ride even this many years after the fact. McLellan will probably pay for this transgression from Bushville for the rest of his life.

The problem though, yt, is that he basically torpedoed any credibly he could have by staying as quiet for as long as he did. What happens when an irredeemable scumbag takes on his former scumbag employers? He vilified himself and made any efforts to discredit him far easier. It's already begun.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpu...ttie-sowe.html

It's great that he's finally come out and told us what we've all basically already knew. But I'll shed no tears for Scotty if he winds up paying for his transgression for the rest of his life from Bushville.

What do you mean? This all that's been playing in the news since yesterday, no crickets here. (now that the reporters are being defensive, that's another story ...)

The guy is no martyr, and he's set to make a ton of money off the book. No llores por mi Argentina.

Listen, I wish they'd all walked off their jobs the minute the neocon syndicate took control and rendered them all complicit tools, but that didn't happen. You have to remember the atmosphere in which all this unfolded. (If you have forgotten, watch Bill Moyers's thorough deconstruction of the phenomenon in Buying the War). Yes, McLellan played a big part in the con job but he's the first co-conspirator whose conscience (arguably, I know most people here think he's in it solely for the money) drove him to speak truth about it. I think everyone who's villifying him is not taking into consideration the very real threat speaking out posed to anyone especially at the time but even today. Paul O'Neill was ruined. Richard Clarke's been smeared beyond recognition. Valerie Plame was outed because her husband dared prove that they were lying. This was also in the thick of the post-9/11 haze when anyone raising a single eyebrow was labeled unpatriotic.

I think all this piling on McLellan for at least having the decency, albeit late, to say outright what nobody seems to spend much time on -- the fact that this was a war of choice and everyone in the administration, Congress and anyone who supported this phony war has blood on their hands -- deserves at least some respect.

Meanwhile, Bush is about to bomb Iran. Wouldn't some reflection on how this happened and how to prevent more of it in the very near future be a little more constructive than attacking the (late) messenger?

lol.

ps. what I mean by crickets is substantive support of the message not a chance to "objectively" talk about his revelations while giving equal time to some talking head who says he's "not himself." b*****, please! The corporate media has carried water for the neocons over this war and every other democracy-killing issue and they're bobbing and weaving madly to absolve themselves of any culpability.

Apparently, he's going to be on the Today show this morning and MSNBC tonight. I guess we'll find out if his publishers changed anything or if they were his own words.

I don't know what to make of this if he claims his editor \ publisher changed his book later today.

I know what I'll make of it: he's lying. "Sure, buy my book, but much of it isn't true because my *wink wink* publisher changed it."

Jake Tapper ftw. That's a slam dunk appraisal of the situation.

Notice that none of the talking heads are calling Scott McLellan a liar. The talking points are that the publisher wrote it and that it's all about the money, but very few of the corporate media rubes are saying anything about the revelations themselves. Like, God forbid they actually do their jobs and report the facts rather than defensively cower behind their redefined roles as White House transcribers.

I'm glad at least Waxman is paying attention to the content of McLellan's story.

Here's some refreshing and damning candor from a member of the press. This is Jessica Yellin, who has worked for MSNBC and ABC and currently works for CNN, talking to Anderson Cooper:

Link to more + video on crooks and liars

Cooper: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the President?

Yellin: Not in that exact...they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces.

Holy Shit! Editors editing someone!!! Quick, launch an investigation!!!!!!!

That's the same. smug/retarded reaction we always get from the right. Yes, moron, we know that news pieces get edited. But when they're edited in such a way as to change the theme or the tone of the piece, or to cut out an important truth, that's just as bad as censorship. Also, you left out "They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes. That was my experience." Keep on picking those cherries.

Like you just edited Jessica Yellin to keep what you could stomach and lose the more controversial line. See, you could have a job at a corporate network!

Isn't it curious that the talking heads aren't talking about this quote from McClellan's book:

How do you think the families of the thousands dead and maimed in these wars feel about Bush's "legacy of greatness"?

I was already well convinced that you were an idiot, but did you seriously just omit several paragraphs of what someone said to make a half-assed and obvious point?

Yes, because Good Morning, America! is known for its hard hitting critical news stories. They're deeply embedded with the current administration and coordinated their news stories to fit the White House agenda. They're the champions of conservatism.

While I don't doubt they edited and toned down her pieces to fit the show's format, I see no evidence of critical truths omitted or censorship. Stories are edited all the time to fit the styling's of the news organizations demographics. I don't buy into a story that originated from a current CNN employee airing on CNN, bashing rival networks.

edit -- forgot a piece.

edit again... now if she said CNN was behind it, that's another story and I'd buy into it, or heck, Fox News I'd expect it.

Snaieke, up until a few decades ago there was something called the Fairness Doctrine, and part of the Fairness Doctrine required that companies using the people's airwaves report the news as a public service to keep people informed about what was going on in their country and the world. As Reagan and then Clinton chipped away at the Fairness Doctrine, combined with the ratings (and therefore advertising) success of 60 Minutes, the concept of news began to change. It increasingly sacrificed reporting of the news for profiting from the National Enquirer-ization of the news. From Clinton through Bush 2, as anti-monopolistic rules were drastically relaxed and the airwaves fell into the hands of a limited number of large, octopus-like corporations, the circus mentality of the news organizations found its most useful calling -- shaping the news to suit the corporation itself and its political enablers and advertising partners.

So when you say "Stories are edited all the time to fit the styling's of the news organizations demographics" you have to understand that by its very nature it is censorship. It's a subversion of the whole concept of "news" that does a disservice to the people whose airwaves the networks are using. It becomes more than that when it involves the case for a war that has killed almost 5,000 Americans and anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million Iraqis. Those people are gone, and many more have had their young lives destroyed by this war. It is a big deal. We're not talking about punching up a story with shaky-cam and dramatizations, we're talking about something akin to state-sponsored propaganda -- the same kind of thing Americans have always decried about Soviet Russia, the Nazis and countless other dictatorships -- which helped a president take a nation to war for nothing.

You have access now to more information than you did before this little conspiracy of yours started. There are more news channels, more news information and more news sources than there has ever been in the history of the world. I just don't buy into your wack job conspiracy of state-sponsored propaganda.

Also, your little poster child has already changed her story and has been discredited as being a nut job.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080529/D90VJ11G4.html

Oh and she's not available for questions... perhaps the corporate overlords got to her??

Thank Christ that huge powerful corporations have people like Snaieke defending them against broadside attacks from message board comments.

Snaieke - So what if it's MSNBC involved as opposed to another network? Their biased coverage has been no less egregious than any of the other networks. Sure, they have Keith Olbermann, but he's one counterbalance against an opposing scale piled with turd.

There was the debacle with Ashleigh Banfield, an anchor who made a speech about the bias of the media's war coverage at Kansas State and was subsequently demoted and marginalized, the continued presence of Chris Matthews, and a handful of other things that, while not as blatantly biased to the point of beating the public over their thick skulls with propaganda like Fox News, still lead one to suspect that something's afoot, and not just because they want to appear "fair and balanced". Regardless of which network is involved, not all of this can be coincidental.

But let's not let that stop you from condescending to yt and doing your damnedest to discredit her opinions by bringing up Good Fucking Morning Fucking America.

McClellan "happy to testify"

This is going to be all kinds of awesome.

You can't convince the far-left that the media isn't controlled by evil corporations and government propaganda, just like you can't convince the far-right that the "Media Elite" isn't out to get them with their "Liberal Media Bias".

Both sides of the political spectrum have these irrational fears. I find it interesting that they are so alike in this way.

Any person with half a brain who reads or listens to a decent-sized spectrum of news sources out there can figure out the accurate situation on any current event. It's people who stay within their small little comfort zone of a few internet sites or cable stations for their news that get a biased view of the world, it's not some sinister force exerting it influence over the population. It's self inflicted with their own closed minds.

You do know that well before Oberman had a show, Matthews was very vocal on MSNBC on his anti-war stance. I even remember him confronting students at the naval college on this issue. For some reason, people seem to forget this all the time.