Little Scotty: Stooge

I remember watching Scott McClellan, acting as the Whitehouse Mouthpiece, and I often felt sorry for him. It was quite obvious that unlike Abu Gonzalez, he didn’t relish the dodging and lying part. I didn’t really get it until I watched Abu dodge and lie in front of Congress. Both of these guys were merely willing stooges. I always knew that Abu was a willing stooge. But I hadn’t quite pinned that on Scotty. In some part of me I still saw him as just so totally un-equipped to do the job he was hired for. Pity was what I felt actually.

Well, no more. He was a willing stooge just like AGAG but without the zest for the job.

As Athenae points out in her excellent post he stayed on the job until April 2006.

May 27, 2008

Fine With It, Vol. 347

Via the Crack Den, oh goody, another participant in the bloody Bush war machine now tells us all how the whole thing went so terribly bad:

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

Let me just double check here. When did McClellan leave the White House?

April 2006.

April 20FUCKING06.

So let's review for a moment. The whole thing was a train wreck, Bush was gonna kill the party, not to mention a few thousand American men and women in uniform, not to mention a few hundred thousand Iraqis, not to mention outing a CIA agent and torturing some innocent people and sending Americans to secret prisons and spying on them illegally. The whole thing was a flaming train wreck with FAIL icing, and McClellan was privy to all of this, and he left the White House in April 2006, when the train was not only off the tracks, but had careened into a gorge, the fire had been put out, the goats evacuated and most of the cargo salvaged, and NOW here he comes, to tell us that he had a sneaking suspicion the engineer was not entirely up to snuff before the damn thing ever hit the rails, the fuel was inadequate and one of the porters was playing with a Zippo? SERIOUSLY?

And we're supposed to do ... what now, with this? Wer'e supposed to ... I dunno, give him some kind of cookie? Throw him a party? Pat him on the back with cable news appearances and guest columns because, like Dougie "I'm Not A War Criminal, But I Play One In The Government" Feith, he's courageously telling the truth a half-decade after it would have fucking helped us at all? He's asking for recognition here that doesn't involve being put in the fucking stocks? He's asking that we mark his courage in telling his "inside story," or something? Because unless this is public atonement, unless every page, every paragraph, hell, every predicate ends with "I'm sorry," unless this is penance of some kind, unless he's apologizing, I'm not for one second inclined to listen.

I wrote months ago that we could expect a parade of these stupid fools marching down the National Mall declaring themselves newly enconscienced and full of horror at what Bush had done to fuck up whatever perfection they themselves had planned for a Republican presidency. Feith wasn't the first, that was either Gingrich or Fucking Ari, but now they're coming fast and furious, counting on us to be so riveted by their performances as actual human beings that we don't dare ask the only question worth asking of these opportunistic scum-feedling cockroaches:

WHY WERE YOU FINE WITH IT UNTIL IT NOW?

Because you were, you ten-a-penny fascisti, you kitchen appliances, you insults to the memory of anyone who's ever called himself a public servant. You were fine with it when Iraqis and poor Americans were dying, you were fine with it while cities were being wiped out, you were fine with it while innocents at home and abroad were being tortured and deported and driven insane, you were fine with it when the lies were exposed as lies and you were fine with it when the crimes were called crimes. You were fine with motherfucking everything until it started to get uncomfortable in just one place: the voting booth.

Then you started to sweat like the guilty bastards you are, then you started looking over your shoulder for the villagers with pitchforks and torches. Then you ripped off your BUSH ROOLS DEMS DROOL shirts and put on some nondescript fucking polo and backed away, muttering, "not us, man, we were never even THERE" while you stuffed your big Republican foam finger down the garbage disposal. Then you gave a shit about American lives, then you gave a shit about the mortgage and the gas pump, then you gave a shit about the coffins coming home. Until then, you were fine with it, you were happy as clams, you were dancing a fucking jig and anybody who so much as whispered "Constitution" was a terrorist-appeasing pussy. You were fine with it until you realized you couldn't hump it across the finish line one last time.

So don't you dare come to me now, with your declarations of knowing all along that we were gonna get fucked. Don't you dare come to me now with your explanations of how you knew, way back when, that the liars were liars and the crimes were crimes. Don't you dare come to me now, try to tell me a story, because while it was happening, you were fine with it, and that's the only part of your bloviating on and on that I can even fucking hear. You were fine with it. Don't you dare come to me now, try to tell me anything else, and expect me to give you the courtesy of not turning my back in the street.

Until April 2006, McClellan worked for these people. Until April 2006, he was fine enough with what he now abhors that he kept right on cashing the checks.

A.

Say “Amen!”