By Steve Rhodes
Scott McClellan’s book has not really been “reviewed” yet, but in the political world it’s the book-of-the-moment.
And, indeed, it’s a stunner.
But what’s stunning isn’t so much the validation of things we already know – the war in Iraq was a blunder of historic proportions and Karl Rove lied about the Valerie Plame affair – but that the book comes from a former press secretary who stood before not only the White House press corps but the nation and endlessly repeated untruths that amounted to propaganda of the worst kind.
Not that it’s shocking that untruths came from that lectern what’s shocking is that McClellan has actually come clean in an apparent fit of conscience.
That’s the shock.
Look at Ari Fleischer, for example, hitting the talk shows to malign McClellan as a former loyalist whose body must now be occupied by an alien.
Press secretaries know a lot, and what they don’t know they don’t want to know. It’s too bad so many of them go to their graves with their secrets – or in the case of Ted Sorenson, endlessly burnishing the myths that do a grave injustice to the nation they purportedly serve.
Some of the early reports on the McClellan book stake its importance on the notion that this is the first such memoir from a close Bush aide, but you could practically open your own store with the number of books from insiders (Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson) and outsiders (Bob Woodward, John Dean, Kevin Phillips) that fairly paint this administration as the most incompetent, anti-intellectual, mentally unstable, religiously fanatic, authoritarian and anti-democratic bunch of yahoos in American history. Nixon may have subverted the Constitution, but he didn’t rewrite it.
Only the willfully blind can proclaim this administration anything other than an unmitigated disaster.
The timing of the McClellan book is exquisite, and not because we are in the midst of a presidential campaign. The film Recount has just opened and carries with it another reminder that the media McClellan says easily manipulated and enabled the Iraq War also failed to grasp the realities of the 2000 election and what happened in Florida.
Even today, reports of the media’s own consortium aided by the University of Chicago continue soft-peddle the inconvenient truth that Al Gore won Florida.
Here is an AP report that was an exception, cited by Eric Alterman:
“But buried beneath the misleading headlines was the inescapable fact that Al Gore was the genuine choice of a plurality of Florida’s voters as well as America’s. As the AP report put it, ‘In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.’ In other words, he got more votes in Florida than George Bush by almost every conceivable counting standard. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you count ‘hanging chads’ and he won if you counted ‘dimpled chads.’ He won if you count a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot – the so-called ‘Palm Beach’ standard. He even won if you counted only a fully-punched chad. He won if you counted partially-filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully-filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter how you count it, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote counted, Al Gore is our president.”
But the Bushies controlled the narrative. Instead of Bush being asked to step aside in the interests of the nation based on both the popular vote and the obvious facts of Florida – even Pat Buchanan knew he didn’t have very much support in Palm Beach County – Al Gore was asked to be the bigger man and retreat. Why? Why wasn’t it the other way around? Why wasn’t Bush asked to respect the will of the people? Because one side knew better than the other how to whisper the right things in reporters’ ears.
In fact, it was the media’s antipathy to Gore – hard to remember these days – that largely kept him out of the 2004 race.
The media has failed us at the heights of its responsibility: covering presidents (and their campaigns) and war.
Of course, there is nothing new about this. The media loves a great narrative arc with larger-than-life figures whose human touches only prove how extraordinary our (crooked) leaders are. These myths couldn’t exist without aid of the press, as Seymour Hersh shows in The Dark Side of Camelot and Mark Hertsgaard shows in On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.
George H.W. Bush’s heinous campaign tactics in 1988 couldn’t have worked without the media’s compliance. Vowing to not be fooled again, the media turned around and played the fool again buying into the fake, right-wing generated Clinton scandals thinking they were being tough.
When George W. Bush took office, the media laid off; the Democrats are caught on the wrong side of the cycle.
Not that I have sympathy for Democrats in this regard. As Bob Somerby has thoroughly shown us, Democrats and their compatriots in the press are the worst offenders, not only with their own sad narratives and weaker mimcry of the same tactics they deplore in conservatives, but with their own presidential candidate(s) extolling the lore of Kennedy and Reagan, further enshrouding our history and governance in veils of lies.
So add McClellan’s book to the pile. But if you are surprised, you haven’t been paying attention. If you don’t think the next act of America’s great political charade is being played out again right in front of your face, you’re sadly mistaken, and we’ll all pay the price for it.
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1. From “Jake Daniels”:
“that fairly paint this administration as the most incompetent, anti-intellectual, mentally unstable, religiously fanatic, authoritarian and anti-democratic bunch of yahoos in American history. Nixon may have subverted the Constitution, but he didn’t rewrite it.”
That is a fantastic summation and I can only hope history judges him and his “yahoos” as such. Very well written column, I am seething as an American today as the Dunkin Donuts ridiculous cave-in to Michelle Malkin has me wondering what is wrong with this country. I fear that it will take many years to undo what Bush has done, and while the press bears some of the blame, so does the public for taking it.
Posted on May 29, 2008