Scott McClellan..Connecting the Dots

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10649.html

Exclusive: McClellan whacks Bush, White House
By MIKE ALLEN
Politico

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In a small sign of how thoroughly McClellan has adopted the outsider’s role, he refers at times to his former boss as “Bush,” when he is universally referred to by insiders as “the president.”

McClellan lost some of his friends in the administration last November when his publisher released an excerpt from the book that appeared to accuse Bush of participating in the cover-up of the Plame leak. The book, however, makes clear that McClellan believes Bush was also a victim of misinformation.

The book begins with McClellan’s statement to the press that he had talked with Rove and Libby and that they had assured him they “were not involved in … the leaking of classified information.”

At Libby’s trial, testimony showed the two had talked with reporters about the officer, however elliptically.

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

McClellan also suggests that Libby and Rove secretly colluded to get their stories straight at a time when federal investigators were hot on the Plame case.
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Scotty's throwing the next layer of necessary Collateral Damage under the bus to save King George?

I hope he has a good lawyer.

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Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair
By Jason Leopold
January 31, 2007

Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at a trial by attorneys prosecuting former White House staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case.

Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy's stinging rebukes of the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson's wife's covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.

But Cheney's notes, which were introduced into evidence Tuesday during Libby's perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, call into question the truthfulness of President Bush's vehement denials about his prior knowledge of the attacks against Wilson. The revelation that Bush may have known all along that there was an effort by members of his office to discredit the former ambassador raises the question: Was the president also aware that senior members of his administration compromised Valerie Plame's undercover role with the CIA?

Further, the highly explicit nature of Cheney's comments not only hints at a rift between Cheney and Bush over what Cheney felt was the scapegoating of Libby, but also raises serious questions about potentially criminal actions by Bush. If Bush did indeed play an active role in encouraging Libby to take the fall to protect Karl Rove, as Libby's lawyers articulated in their opening statements, then that could be viewed as criminal involvement by Bush.
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pubrecord.org/cheneys-handwritten-notes-implicate-bush-in-plame-affairItemid=8
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5ux6l6

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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/05/mcclellan_communicates...

May 30, 2008
McClellan Communicates!
By Jonah Goldberg

Not since America's most revered feckless crapweasel, former Vermont Sen. James Jeffords, switched parties have Beltway Republicans been more eager to sew a half-starved ferret into someone's body cavity. In this case, the desired victim is former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan....
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But in interviews, McClellan's argument boils down to the fact that the White House employed a high-pitched media campaign to persuade the American people and push the press to more favorable coverage.

Apparently this is something new in McClellan's eyes. Perhaps such visitor-from-Mars cluelessness will prompt him to report in his next tell-all that when you pull a hidden lever behind a white bowl in the Oval Office bathroom, a sudden burst of water appears and then swirls down the bottom. Some of a suspicious bent might guess that such a system was invented for Bush to quickly jettison damning documents.

Or maybe the "propaganda machine" in the White House is something newer and more surprising than flush toilets. But I doubt it. Propaganda is a scary word -- and can be a scary thing -- but it's worth keeping in mind that even a White House press release is technically propaganda, as are those guests of the president at State of the Union addresses. The Clinton administration fine-tuned its propaganda effort by releasing pretend TV news stories -- "video news releases" -- that the press sometimes utilized in lieu of real reporting. The Bush administration continued this practice, but only then did critics shout "propaganda!"

Longstanding Bush critics like McClellan's use of the "P" word because they think it proves they were right all along: that "Bush lied and people died," as that shopworn refrain goes.

The problem is that's not quite what McClellan seems to be saying. "I still like and admire George W. Bush," McClellan writes in his memoirs. "I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people. 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."

McClellan's only legitimate beef seems to be his unjust treatment during the Valerie Plame investigation. But that complaint doesn't sell books or get the sluices of journalistic saliva raging. Use of the word "propaganda" and charges of dishonesty about the war do, which is why he uses them. But McClellan concedes in interviews that even when he was an important cog in the "propaganda machine," he never witnessed anything that seemed at the time to be deceitful or untrue.
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Things that make you go, Hmmmm.