Brutally Honest

Bob Dole on Scott McClellan

I'm loving it:

Bob Dole yesterday sent a scalding e-mail to Scott McClellan, excoriating the former White House spokesman as a "miserable creature" who greedily betrayed his former patron for a fast buck.

In an extraordinary message obtained and authenticated by Politico, Dole uses his trademark biting wit to portray McClellan as a classic Washington opportunist.

"There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues," Dole wrote in a message sent yesterday morning. "No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits and, spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique."

Michael Marshall, Dole's spokesman and colleague at the Alston Bird law firm, confirms the message came from the former senator and presidential candidate.   "Yes, it is authentic," Marshall wrote in an e-mail.

"In my nearly 36 years of public service I've known of a few like you," Dole writes, recounting his years representing Kansas in the House and Senate.  "No doubt you will 'clean up' as the liberal anti-Bush press will promote your belated concerns with wild enthusiasm. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, 'Biting The Hand That Fed Me.' Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years"

That friends is quintessential brutal honesty.

H/T Michelle for the Dole find and to Mick Wright for summing up the McClellan shenanigans nicely:

It occurs to me that Scott McClellan is the Jimmy Carter of White House press secretaries — totally incompetent while in the job and an utter disgrace afterwards. Accordingly, he was replaced by Tony Snow, the Ronald Reagan of White House press secretaries — positively transformative while in the job, graceful in his exit, fearless in staring down a malady, and deeply missed.

Islam and relativism: A deadly mix

So sez muslim convert Magdi Allam:

Italian journalist and Muslim convert to Catholicism, Magdi Allam, warned this week that Islam is growing as a result of the ideology of relativism that pervades the West and claims that there are many truths instead of one unique Truth.

In an article published by the magazine Mundo Cristiano and quoted by Analisis Digital, Allam explained that relativism, which attributes “equal dignity to everything regardless of the content” has made it possible for extremism and Islamic terrorism “to be introduced and to take root” in Europe, to the point that there are Islamic extremists with European citizenship who “act upon and spread an ideology of hatred and violence.”

Likewise, Allam, who was recently baptized by Benedict XVI, said it was impossible to be a moderate Muslim, because the religion of Islam is “physiologically violent, as confirmed by certain verses from the Koran that defend an ideology of hatred, violence, death and condemnation of those who are not Muslims.  This way of thinking comes from Mohammed,” Allam said, adding that Islam is an “intrinsically violent” religion.

Bald, unabashed, unapologetic, in-your-face truth.  Pass it on.

 H/T Robert Avrech.

When Senator Obama... when?

Via Flopping Aces:

A man of the people

Via TMZ's Photo Gallery by way of Boots and Sabers:

There are more candid shots here.

I'm gonna miss the man, seriously.

Fr. Michael Pfleger: Trying hard to be a hatin' homie...

... in a church filled with 'em.  With props to Tom Elias at The New Editor:

Amazing.  Simply amazing.

Can't this idiot be defrocked for associating himself with a hate-mongering bunch like those at Trinity?

I guess not.

And say Barack... isn't it past time to end your own association with this church?

Soros and McClellan sitting in a tree...

... k-i-s-s-i-n-g:

The company that published Scott McClellan’s new Bush-bashing book is PublicAffairs Books, and their Editor at Large is a guy named Peter Osnos: About The Century Foundation.

The owner of PublicAffairs Books is a company called Perseus Book Group. Here’s their ownership tree: Perseus Books Home.

The firm is owned by Perseus Funds Group (holding company Perseus LLC), a capital management firm that grew from about $20 million in 1995 to over $2 billion now. Big infusions of cash seemed to help it grow exponentially, and it closed funds almost as fast as it opened them. The board has tons of liberals from the Clinton and Carter Administrations, with far-left credentials that almost put Osnos’ to shame.

Including none other than George Soros... yes, MoveOn.Org's George Soros...

Relevant?

I report, you decide.

Explaining the Church of Chicken Little

I've used the phrase on this blog so many times I'm afraid my regular readers will soon start gagging but interestingly enough many others are of like mind.

Reverend Sensing explains, with appropriate and substantiated linky love, why the description is so apt:

Freeman Dyson:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

A true intellectual heavyweight, his essay in the New York Review of Books this month is a very important analysis that I urge you to read in full.

Dyson is not the first to point out that environmentalism has morphed into an actual religion in its own right. In Global Cooling Ain't so Hot, Either, I pointed out:

Michael Crichton and J.R. Dunn have written highly insightful essays about how environmentalism is a religion in its own right. See “Environmentalism as Religion” by Crichton and Dunn’s piece, “A Necessary Apocalypse,” in which he shows how gobal-warming environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. Its deity is Mother Earth (Gaia), for whom human beings are mortal enemies. NBC’s Matt Lauer inadvertantly gave away Gaiaism’s central article of faith thus:

Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives … The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.

My second son was required to take ecology his junior year in high school; he related to me that the curriculum basically said there was nothing wrong with earth that the disappearance of humanity wouldn’t cure.

Yes, that's a teaser and yes, there's more, much much more and yes, it's all worthy. 

Go and be enlightened.

The other Mexicans

You know, the ones the left aren't enamored with:

H/T to the always insightful Gerard Vanderleun.

McClellan: Victim of the false guilt mongers... (UPDATED) (TWICE)

... of the Religious Left.

McClellan explains his dramatic shift from defender to critic as a difficult act of personal contrition, a way, to learn from his mistakes, be true to his Christian faith and become a better person.

You have to love that.  Being true to the Christian faith, at least that invoked by so many on the left, now defined in black and white for you.

Understand Christian that you must denounce anything to do with W. and in fact, you must now sound as if you've been ravaged by the severest case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Oh... and sell a lot of books while being personally contrite.

How quaint.

Wonder if anyone will bother to ask Scotty boy if he's jumped straight into the Church of Chicken Little as well.

UPDATE: Scott Ott, as only he is able, chimes in:

(2008-05-28) — Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who claims in a new book that Bush administration officials used him to promote the president’s policies and to defend top officials, today said he suspects he’s being used unwittingly by his publisher to pass along information “just to sell books.”

“I’m afraid I’ve become the innocent accomplice to another propaganda effort,” said Mr. McClellan. “It turns out that my publisher is engaged in a highly-choreographed campaign to move books through distribution points in cities throughout the country, as well as through internet portals.”

 

The author of What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, said that during visits to his publisher’s headquarters he has seen editors and marketing people stepping into offices for “mysterious private conversations as if they were plotting something.”

“I’m concerned,” said Mr. McClellan, “that, like Bush, I may have engaged in self-deception and convinced myself to believe what suits my needs at the moment — mostly my need to convert my undistinguished White House tenure into an endless stream of cash.”

Mr. McClellan said he plans to “ask a lot of questions and get to the bottom of this, as soon as the checks all clear.”

MORE: Via e-mail, a link to this ABC piece by Jake Tapper:

Before he wrote his own memoir, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was rather critical of those who did the same.

In fact, some of the same language now being used to trash McClellan he himself used to trash previous administration authors.

On the book critical of the Bush White House written in cooperation with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," McClellan said on January 12, 2004:

McCLELLAN: "It appears to be more about trying to justify personal views and opinions than it does about looking at the results that we are achieving on behalf of the American people."

McClellan also took issue with the book by former Bush White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," on March 22, 2004:

McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let's look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry's campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments up on their website that Mr. Clarke made. ...

Q: Scott, the whole point of his book is he says that he did raise these concerns and he was not listened to by his superiors.

McCLELLAN: Yes, and that's just flat-out wrong. …When someone uses such charged rhetoric that is just not matched by the facts, it's important that we set the record straight. And that's what we're doing. If you look back at his past comments and his past actions, they contradict his current rhetoric. I talked to you all a little bit about that earlier today. Go back and look at exactly what he has said in the past and compare that with what he is saying today.

Yes.  Indeed.

 

Holy crap, evidence of life found on Mars

John at Verum Serum has details and even pictures.