Day: May 28, 2008

A portent of things to come for Scott McLellan, via the Fox News website:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday that it’s clear former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is “disgruntled” about his time working in the Bush administration.

Perino was responding to McClellan’s new book, which slams President Bush on domestic and foreign issues, such as Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, and says Bush was not “open and forthright on Iraq” and was slow in his response to Katrina.

“Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” Perino said. “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.”

Nothing about whether his allegations are true — just name-calling, revving up for the full assault of smears and character assassination to come, especially if the book is a big seller.

McClellan should avoid dark alleys for the rest of his life, as should his entire family.

McClellan’s book offers another indication that George Bush used cocaine over a period of at least 20 years

In his new tell-all book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs), former Bush flack Scott McClellan says the first time he caught George Bush lying was during the 2000 campaign when Bush was being accused of having used cocaine:

UNDER THE INFLUENCE
An amateur wedding video shows George Bush obviously quite high in 1992, years after he was supposedly clean and sober.

McClellan tracks Bush’s penchant for self-deception back to an overheard incident on the campaign trail in 1999 when the then-governor was dogged by reports of possible cocaine use in his younger days.

The book recounts an evening in a hotel suite “somewhere in the Midwest.” Bush was on the phone with a supporter and motioned for McClellan to have a seat.

“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.'”

“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”

“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”

In the years that followed, McClellan “would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment.” McClellan likened it to a witness who resorts to “I do not recall.”

“Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment,” McClellan wrote, adding, “In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind.”

And McClellan linked the tactic to the decision to invade Iraq, a decision based on flawed intelligence.

“It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy,” he said of the cocaine rumors. “But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare,” he wrote.

In 2004, Eric Boehlert, writing in Salon.com, reported on allegations that Bush was restricted from flying during his time in the Texas Air National Guard because of cocaine use:

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