Scotty Beams Over to the Dark Side

How's that for mixing my sci-fi movie metaphors? Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has learned the lessons taught by other former Bush White House officials: If you want to sell a book, blast the president and you'll be loved by the media forever:

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's memoir about his time at the Bush White House turns out to be far more scathing than predicted, Politico's Mike Allen writes.

In his "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception" (Public Affairs, $27.95), McLellan writes about the war in Iraq that President Bush "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. … [I]n this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security."

The White House "spent most of the first week in a state of denial" after Hurricane Katrina, McLellan writes. "One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath."

He hammers former senior presidential advisers Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for having "at best misled" him about their roles in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name as retaliation to a negative op-ed against Bush from Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. "(T)he 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," McLellan writes. "I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood. 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."

I always thought he was a poor fit for the job and was regularly manhandled by the press. He'll get the kid gloves treatment now - everybody in the media's best friend. If you want to read it, you can order it at the link above.

UPDATE: Lots of new articles on McClellan's book (such as this one) and the more I read the more McClellan sounds like a bitter little man who was clearly overmatched in his job and is striking back at the man who took that job away and gave it to the infinitely more talented Tony Snow. He also lashes out at every major player in the administration. Karl Rove pretty accurately describes him as sounding like a left-wing blogger.

And speaking of left wing bloggers, if Scotty thought this book would buy him some love from the dark side, just look at this review from DailyKos:

MASSIVE JEERS to Scott McClellan. The latest former Bush lapdog---he was press secretary from '03 to '06---to come out of the woodwork has several juicy nuggets in his hot-off-the-presses tell-all book. Bottom line: he confirms everything that we dirty hippie bloggers were screaming about at the top of our lungs, but which the traditional media ignored because...well, because Scott McClellan stood at his little White House podium and denied it all, lying out of his fat little elitist face as the stenographers printed his crap without scrutiny.

And that's just the beginning. It gets worse. The Weekly Standard blog tells us what we can expect in the coming days:

The Coming Resurrection of Scott McClellan

Ask fifty Washington reporters for an assessment of Scott McClellan and forty-nine of them will give you some version of this: He's a nice guy who was in way over his head. (Most of them will be tougher in their analysis of his intellect.)

Given the imminent release of McClellan's "surprisingly scathing" book about the Bush administration, in the words of super-reporter Mike Allen, expect him to be praised as insightful and wise beyond his years in the coming weeks.

McClelland and his editors clearly knew that the way to the media's heart is through McClelland's former friends and colleagues. It's a pretty disgusting performance.