I read What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception this evening. While I believe McClellan’s regrets about participating in the cover-up of the White House’s breach of national security and disclosing a CIA agent’s identity are authentic, his excuses are not sufficiently honest.

He repeatedly points at the “scandals of the Clinton years” as nearly as bad or worse than the Iraq War deception and Plame outing, blaming the “culture of deception” in Washington. Other than the former President’s wandering manhood, those “scandals” were largely the invention of the Republican party’s “perpetual campaign” to discredit liberals and, particularly, the Clintons. Whitewater, for example, yielded nothing of consequence and didn’t even involve the Clinton’s conduct in the White House. They were inventions of the right, carried out for political purposes.

The permanent campaign McClellan decries is the creation of his party. His kind assessment of President Bush, as a strong but misguided leader who fell prey to the culture of Washington, is a fantasy.

Bush, Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby showed up carrying the seeds of deception and a strategy of misguiding the people. They weren’t infected by Washington, even though Washington has its share of liars, cheats, and philanderers who always place political gain above the public interest. McClellan should be smart enough to see that he was fooled by Bush’s campaign rhetoric as well as the staff of the Bush White House.

McClellan wants to protect his former colleagues and his president and, even now, is failing to examine his thinking as completely as he would like to believe. The book is excellent grist for the political argument about Iraq, but its author hasn’t completely examined his experience with the intellectual honesty he invokes at the outset. The problem came to Washington from Texas.

Technorati Tags: Bush Administration, self-deception, Scott McClellan

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