In our first post on former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan’s explosive book that blasts former President George Bush, Karl Rove, the White House and the Bush administration’s honesty with the American people and Congress, we noted that there would be an attempt to discredit him that would be aimed at obscuring his book’s content.
Is this the ultimate attempt to “get” him? BE SURE YOU READ THIS.
P.S. These efforts at going after him to make him seem like a disgruntled employee will likely backfire. Rush, Sean and their listeners won’t buy the book but it’s already number one on Amazon.com and could provide a ticklish political context for presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain. McCain doesn’t have to worry about the lockstep Republicans who’ll vote for him no matter what. His appeal has been to independent voters and former Reagan Democrats and, in the future perhaps, to Hillary Clinton Democrats.
Even for the large number of people who don’t forget the things McClellan said defending the administration, the frenzied attempt to discredit him makes a lot of people want to order the book. Yours truly was going to skip it…but I’m a hair within ordering it because the people now blasting him clearly seem to have one thing in mind: erasing the message by destroying the credibility of the messenger.
Cartoon by Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune
UPDATE: Here’s the shocked reaction of former White House Press Secretary, the always loyal Ari Fleischer.
UPDATE II: Be SURE to read Dick Polman’s analysis of the Bush team’s goals with McClellan.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.