The White House has now responded to former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir that’s critical of President George Bush, the White House, Karl Rove — and the news media — by using the typical phrase employers use to try and discredit employees who step forward with complaints: he’s a disgruntled employee.
“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad — this is not the Scott we knew.”
More from Perino: “The book, as reported by the press, has been described to the president. I do not expect a comment from him on it — he has more pressing matters than to spend time commenting on books by former staffers.”
So he’s disgruntled (which means unhappy, which must mean that happy employees are gruntled..).
And a “former staffer” which indicates he really doesn’t matter anymore.
The problem for the White House is that there is now a large volume of media material documenting the fact that the Bush administration has a credibility gap problem for traceable reasons.
Meanwhile, be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s column on McClellan’s take on how the news media rather than being a “liberal news media” often seemed like a news stenography pool and wasn’t asking enough tough and challenging questions.
See our earlier post about the campaign now underway to discredit McClellan and his book.
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.