Politics Excerpt from Some Excerpts
posted by on May 28 at 8:50 AM
The Wall Street Journal today has published excerpts from Scott McClellan’s new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. McClellan worked for Bush for eight years, eventually becoming White House Press Secretary. (“I know the president pretty well,” he writes.) The Wall Street Journal’s editors have titled the excerpts “Scott McClellan’s Confession.”
To this day, the president seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for the war and the driving motivation behind it, and unconcerned about how the case was packaged. The policy is the right one and history will judge it so, once a free Iraq is firmly in place and the Middle East begins to become more democratic.
Bush clung to the same belief during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC News in early February 2004. The Meet the Press host asked, “In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?”
The president said, “That’s an interesting question. Please elaborate on that a bit. A war of choice or a war of necessity? It’s a war of necessity. In my judgment, we had no choice, when we look at the intelligence I looked at, that says the man was a threat.”
I remember talking to the president about this question following the interview. He seemed puzzled and asked me what Russert was getting at with the question.
This, in turn, puzzled me. Surely this distinction between a necessary, unavoidable war and a war that the United States could have avoided but chose to wage was an obvious one that Bush must have thought about in the months before the invasion. Evidently it wasn’t obvious to the president, nor did his national security team make sure it was. He set the policy early on and then his team focused his attention on how to sell it. It strikes me today as an indication of his lack of inquisitiveness and his detrimental resistance to reflection, something his advisers needed to compensate for better than they did.
More excerpts (they’re amazing) are here.
President Narcissist.
January 20th please hurry up.
Fuck this McClellan character and every other asshole that comes out with a tell all book years after all the info matters.
Try speaking the truth before all hell breaks loose next time, fuckwad.
@2 - well said.
Wow… scathing, indeed. While it’s sad knowing that nonsense spouting Bushbots like McClellan will never be held accountable for their crimes officially, it is some comfort knowing that Barbara Bush and a twelve gauge pipe wrench will soon help him shuffle off this mortal coil.
You’d better start sleeping with the lights on, Scotty.
Plus ya just gotta love how he has the balls to blame the White House press corps for dutifully printing Bush’s lies like the grotesque, sycophantic, spineless fools that they are.
I'll tell you what I'd like to excerpt...an enormous whozeewhatsit!!!
I'm with @2. A lot of damn good this does us now.
a little late to the party, scott. in other news, water's wet. NEXT
Jesus Christ, Scott, just say what everyone's thinking: LOW IQ.
Lack of inquisitiveness, my ass.
It's not going to redeem Scotty.
Nonetheless, I do loves me some Republican on Republican violence.
I might borrow his book from the library.
Can’t wait to head over to the PI’s blogs and see how their psychopathic, right-wing commentors are reacting to the news that another of their own has become a left-wing, moonbat, pole-smoking, America-hating, communist traitor.
That should be a hoot.
You see, it’s all just this huge anti-Bush conspiracy—and 70% of Americans and 100% of the rest of the world are in on it!!
So why didn't he tell the Grand Jury what he knew so Karl Rove would be in GITMO being waterboarded right now?
Conspiracies aren't real, unless they are.
We wouldn't know but 10% of what's been going on in that madhouse if it weren't for the constant stream of semi-sane people who have fled it and told their tales of terror.
It's going to take us a decade or two to figure out what the hell just happened. And it'll all be reported on page B6 of the newspaper (well, figure of speech, in 10 yrs.) and only us Nerd Patrol will know about it.
Watergate looks so effin' quaint in hindsight. Heck, Spiro Agnew had to leave office because of felony charges, and he didn't even shoot anybody in the face!
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