Bush vs. Scott McClellan

It is one of life’s ironies that the so-called “value voters” – the evangelicals and Christian conservatives from the religious right -- were instrumental in installing a president (George W. Bush) who tortures the truth at every opportunity. That Bush is a prevaricator par excellence is not even disputable. His misrule has been predicated on lies, spin, and the subversion of the reality-based community. For instance, the Bush administration spun fabricated evidence to sell the Iraq War, while whitewashing scientific evidence that contradicted their stance on global warming. The end result is an ideological bubble that has burst in the public’s face. One victim of Bush’s mendacity is poor little Scott McClellan, the president’s hapless former press secretary who was asked to disseminate falsehoods on his boss’s behalf. As McClellan explains:

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

McClellan, of course, is referring to his role in vouching for the veracity of Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, effectively telling the public – falsely – that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson after her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times debunking a central argument in the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq – namely that Saddam was allegedly trying to purchase uranium from Niger.

The ferociousness of the administration’s counterattack is startling even by the standards of Bush/Cheney. But there were good reason why the vice-president’s office, in particular, was so intent on attacking Wilson in a way that would send a message to other potential critics and whistleblowers. As Crain Unger reports in his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to suggest that some key neoconservative figures may have been involved in a 1999 burglary at the Nigerian embassy in Italy.

The break-in, as it happens, was the source of the forged documents that Bush later cited in his infamous State of the Union Address (the sixteen words about Saddam allegedly trying to acquire uranium from Africa). However, by the time of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, the intelligence community (and much of the administration) recognized that the documents in question were dubious, yet the words were actually re-inserted in the president’s speech!

Was Bush in the dark while Cheney pulled the strings? Did the neoconservatives in the VP’s office fear Congressional, media, or public scrutiny might reveal that key neocon figures might be connected to the forged documents. It is clear that Libby’s lies regarding the Plame leak were not just much ado about nothing; they were a smokescreen intended to protect higher ups and perhaps a conspiracy that brought the country to war by deliberately providing Congress and the American people with false intelligence. Instead of getting to the bottom of the leak, as Bush promised, he had his press secretary lie to the American people and then he commuted the sentence of a convicted perjurer. Well, I guess the Libby case proves that telling the truth isn’t always necessary to set you free.

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