Bursting The Bubble From The Inside

We've known for a long time that President George W. Bush has presided over one of the worst administrations in American history. Now comes a book from a former official that seems to confirm those suspicions.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception (out on store shelves next week), has sparked a lot of news coverage. That's because it isn't often we see a tell-all tome about a president from the inside before his term expires, written by someone who used to work for him.

Among the revelations in McClellan's book, if you want to call them that:

• Bush used propaganda to sell Congress and the public on going to war with Iraq, even though there was no real basis for doing so. McClellan wrote that it was all part of what he called a "permanent campaign". With sky-high approval ratings following the 9/11/01 attacks, any opposition was considered heresy.
• The President, according to McClellan, approving the use of Scooter Libby to leak the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame.
• The slow response to the disaster unfolding after Hurricane Katrina because administration officials didn't take it as seriously as they should have.

Keep in mind that McClellan, as press secretary, played the good soldier in parroting the White House line on these and many other issues before his resignation in April of 2006.

The reaction to the book, at least among those who are past and present employees of Bush, can be distilled to this: "How could you do this to us?!" The administration prides itself on its loyalty to the President. Which is fine, unless all that loyalty blinds you to the needs of the country you're supposed to be governing.

McClellan has taken off the blinders, all right. But at what cost to him personally and professionally? Those who are still inside the bubble are wondering: Why didn't he raise these objections while he was on the job? Does he really believe these things, or is he just trying to make a few bucks at the expense of the President?

The mainstream news media is as guilty as anyone for letting themselves be hoodwinked into supporting a misbegotten war. They took the bait on having reporters embedded with troops, used former generals as analysts who--it was later learned--were on the payrolls of defense contractors on the Pentagon's payroll, and generally held back on asking the tough questions for fear of being labeled unpatriotic.

Even today, five years after the war in Iraq started, we're still not getting the full story because it's considered too dangerous to do any decent reporting outside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, unless you're accompanied by an American soldier. If the military isn't spinning the story of the war in their direction, telling the folks back home that things in Iraq are better than they really are, then the White House probably is.

It's not Scott McClellan's fault that he worked for a man and an agenda he was loyal to, until he didn't believe in either of them anymore. It's ours for not seeing through it to begin with.