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.
The guy is trying to figure out how Bush deceived himself...how Bush thinks and rationalizes...
What absolute delusional arrogance. Then he admits in these quotes that he has probably deceived his own self about his motivations for this book and how the publishers deceived him...
fruit-cake.
Posted by: xtnyoda | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 10:04 PM
Oh, puleeze! He signed off on the final draft - how can he now claim that he didn't know what the publisher was doing?
Greedy stupid ungrateful . . . .
Posted by: Mommynator | Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 08:01 AM