The long knives are out for McClellan

Scotty's tell-all is creating quite a furor - this morning on Isvestia and Comrades Fox and Friends the panel was in full apoplexy. Co-host Gretchen Carlson was beside herself, screaming about betrayal and crowing that he better hope he has no skeletons in his closet, because they would be exposed now that he has betrayed her president!

Somehow, I doubt that possibility escaped him as he was pouring the gas and striking the match to torch that bridge. He grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Texas politics. His mother is the former mayor of Austin, and he was a part of the so-called Texas Mafia that ensconced the idiot prince in the oval. He knew where this train was going to go, and bought the ticket anyway.

The Outrage Machine™ started out voluble, and immediately cranked up to eleven. The smear-machine took a minute to get ginned up, but it is making up for lost time.


Dana Perino dismissed the book and it's contents as the payback of a disgruntled former 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." (Joel Achenbach said he keeps waiting for the rest of that last bit..."Because the Scott we know is a dissembling hack who'll say whatever we tell him to say.")

Karl Rove said called him irresponsible and said that the book doesn't sound like the Scott he knows, instead, he "sounds like a left-wing blogger."

Ari Fleischer told NPR's Alex Chadwick yesterday that he was "saddened" and "heartbroken" and this was a side of Scotty they didn't know existed.

Former White House council Dan Bartlett exploded, calling the book "total crap" and saying that the presidents advisers are bewildered by the charges leveled. "It's almost like we're witnessing an out-of-body experience," Bartlett said of McClellan. "We're hearing from a completely different person we didn't have any insight into."

Condi got around to joining the chorus today. "I am not going to comment on a book that I haven't read, but what I will say is that the concern about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the fundamental reason." Then she promptly tried to hide behind the petticoats of the international community. They shouldn't have gone along if they had doubts, you see. And the time for speaking up? She says that was 2002 and 2003, and it's too late now.

Kevin Corke on MSNBC reported last night that inside the White House they are furious. McClellan was being called "Benedict" and "traitor" and Corke said that when he raised his eyebrows at "traitor" the person he was talking to snapped that "it is what it is."

At Commentary Magazine, Jennifer Rubin sneered that McClellan was the "hackiest hack of all" - but don't get too excited - she doesn't label any of the other members of the administration as hacks, just Scotty.

Finally, McClellan seems appalled that there was a “propaganda” effort to sell the war. I assume that he is not a total naif and that he did not spend his entire adult career in press relations only now to learn that selling,–i.e., encouraging the public to support your position–is the central facet of his job. If he didn’t get the facts or the facts were wrong or unkown people, from unknowable meetings, lied that is another matter. But throwing around the word “propaganda” is the type of thing people do to sell books and get splashy coverage from the media. (That would be the same media that vilified him for incompetence.) There’s plenty of insightful criticism of the Iraq war’s mismanagement and plenty to learn. It won’t, however, come from this shabby effort.

Apparently Jennifer is cool with being propagandized. Some of us, however, are not cool with it. Besides that, it is illegal for the government to propagandize the American people.

On "360 with Anderson Cooper" last night, Cooper was derisive. "No one resigns anymore. I don't understand. No one stands on principle and resigns. Everyone, I guess, waits to write a book."

And I don't have to tell you that the Übermenschen at the Corner are in a full-on fury.

And then there is Mike Turk - the man who directed the online campaign for bu$h and ¢heney in 2004. Matt Stoller snagged the following comment off of Turk's Twitter feed...

"Feeling for Scott McLellan. Nice getting savaged for saying what everyone knows to be true anyway."

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Media bias borders on mental illness

Via Media Matters, Craig Crawford, columnist for Congressional Quarterly, answered Joe Scarborough's "assertion that former President Bill Clinton is 'divisive' " during the Jan. 26 MSNBC's Morning Joe. Snip (with emphasis):

CRAWFORD: You know, I have sat down here in Florida for the last month. And I have watched the coverage, and I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney [Spears], he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club. I mean, we've gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, "Well, where's the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign?" you're accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons. I mean, I think if somebody came out today and said that Bill Clinton -- if the town drunk in Columbia [South Carolina] came out and said, "Bill Clinton last night was poisoning the drinking water in Obama precincts," the media would say, "Ah, there goes Clinton again. You can't trust him." I really think it's a problem. You know what? You guys make him stronger with this bashing. This actually is what makes the Clintons stronger.

According to Media Matters, Crawford's remarks followed a video clip cued up by Joe's co-host Mika Brzezinski in which Bill Clinton said (with emphasis):

[T]hey have systematically polarized the country, the right-wing Republican faction has. They first took over the Republican Party. And then they performed reverse plastic surgery on all the Democrats, right? ... And it worked for them every single time, except with me.

Joe then pontificated, "it's amazing how divisive he is compared to [Democratic presidential candidate] Barack Obama, who asks Republicans and independents to vote for him. And here's Bill Clinton fighting the right-wing Republicans. It's just like 1998 all over again, isn't it?"

[Keep reading... more after the jump.]

No, Joe, it's you and your kind that spread falsehoods -- like you did with Margaret Carlson -- and who refuse to hold Republicans accountable for using polarizing tactics. Like you do. How many news consumers have been informed of the unprecedented obstructionism by Senate Republicans? Are media reporting the facts about who's behaving divisively? Hell, no. The dumbed-down script for more than a decade is it's Clinton's fault and Hillary is polarizing.

When media manipulate the narrative into potshots at either Clinton and the Democrats, they keep the heat off the culprits responsible for the damage. It was the GOP that injected divisive issues such as the racially-exploitive southern strategy, attacks on abortion, gay marriage, and "amnesty" for illegal aliens, to name a few. They continue to misuse the Iraq war to taint Democrats as defeatists waving the white flag of surrender for advocating troop withdrawals. Forget that a majority of the nation supports leaving Iraq. That's an inconvenient fact the mainstream press corps readily dismisses when given a chance to bash Democrats.

That's how Big Media plays the game -- distorting and fabricating "evidence" -- and some foolish dupes fall for this crap. As Bob Somerby and Media Matters have documented for years, our mainstream press corps has unfairly attacked Al Gore and the Clintons sometimes with little proof other than innuendo, worthless trivia, and sometimes with blatant lies. And still do.

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, expect to read and hear how divisive Barack is. Think it won't happen? Pat Buchanan has already floated a trial balloon raising the alleged rift between Hispanics and African-Americans. Earlier on Hardball, he insidiously alluded to Obama's campaign phrase -- "Yes, we can" translated "Sí, se puede" -- as "the cause of the illegal immigration movement and the amnesty movement." If you read of Buchanan's views on the invasion of America, his remarks weren't intended to flatter Obama's can-do message. At Faux News, Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama provided E.D. Hill with the opportunity to spout (with emphasis):

...Barack Obama, who has -- I mean, on his website, you look at it and sort of the whole thing is devoted to "I'm a man of change because I want to get away from all that -- the hate speech and the partisanship that you've seen in Washington." Ted Kennedy, you know, is that. You know, if you talk about the people of have sort of gone to the farthest wings, Kennedy certainly represents that. So it seems like an odd coming together, unless that's the direction Barack Obama is headed.

Par for the course, you know, of the scurrilous GOP-dedicated network.

Watch for how media begin to transform Obama's anthem of "change" into change for the worse. It won't matter if it's false. Not to them. You can count on our fetid press corps to "swift-boat" the nominated Democratic WH contender as they did in 2004. Using a tested strategy, when they're not yapping at shadows, media lapdogs will idly sit, giving air time to dubious claims without challenging the GOP surrogate or politician smearing the Democratic candidate.

That's the way they sell crazy.

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