Yesterday it was made public on Politico.com that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir would expose a little bit more than just his own mistakes while serving Bush from 2003-2006. As several pundits in the mainstream media have noted, the revelations in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong with Washington, are not new. My favorite excerpts (from the book and the Politico article) are:
- “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
- ‘McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.’
- ‘Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.’
In the mean time, current Press Secretary Dana Perino released a written statement today that, among other things, said that “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.”
Today, President Bush will attend two private fundraisers for Sen. John McCain and was at the U.S. Air Force Academy to give the commencement speech for the graduation ceremony. I’ll let the reader to draw their own conclusions from that.
Here we observe the President chest bumping an Air Force Academy grad. A busy schedule indeed…
The book hit’s shelves next week.