Like his boss, Mike McCurry was a great speaker-- charismatic, funny, surprising and verbose. Joe Lockhart, too, was not bad as White House Press Secretary, and God knows they had to field a lot of uncomfortable questions from what journalists proudly call "the firing squad."
(That the White House press room no longer houses contentious reporters is another lamentable point, but I digress. I dislike bashing the main stream media; it's rote. And too easy.)
Actually, one needn't even look to the previous administration for an example of verbal acrobatics. Ari Fleischer masterfully built brick walls around the President faster than journalist could load their questions. So why, then, in God's name must America wake up everyday to Scott McClellan, one of the least articulate men to be allowed in front of a microphone since Eddie Vedder was still performing? Watching this guy fight with Helen Thomas-
an old lady!- is like watching a deaf mute in a singing competition-- it's just not a fair fight. So unfair, in fact, that
Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair's intense, elite (and elitist) media pundit, writes this month that McClellan's continued employment is all part of the grander Rove scheme.
On first read, I thought, "Oh how brilliant! I always knew McClellan was a bumbling gnome of a man, but I thought he was a mystery of Washington bureaucracy. I am too daft to understand the acute genius of this particular Bush loyalist." But that was before today.
In this morning's Washington Post you may have noticed this blaring headline:
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War. In it, Joby Warrick writes that in 2003 Pentagon-appointed scientists issued a unanimous report denying the Bush Administration assertion/hope/wet dream that trailers found in Iraq were mobile weapons laboratories. Then, two days later, Bush told the American people that these trailers were DEFINITELY weapons of mass destruction and the smoking gun no one believed would be found in Iraq. Sadly, the Mission Accomplished banner was nowhere to be seen. Here is the must-read portion of the
Post story:
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward,
was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even
as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it
was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now --
had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological
weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous
findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the
president's statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks
later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year,
administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the
trailers were weapons factories.
The PR job done on America was a travesty. False information was selectively leaked to discredit the naysayers, negative reports were purposely ignored and hidden and the few men and women who did not tow the party line were unceremoniously fired. And today, instead of gravelling before the feet of the American public and piously begging forgiveness, Scott McClellan, punching bag extrordinaire, had the gall to
demand an apology from the media for even reporting it because, he said, this information was old news. But past is prologue, and now this war is a damn tragedy. Remember, no one in the history of the American judicial system has been convicted of a crime as it was happening; the acused sit before a jury of their peers
after the crime has been committed. Does that make it old news?
McClellan is not a scheme to keep information from the press or elicit sympathy because he's so damn relatable. Scott McClellan is a disaster and today should be thrown in the dustbin where Rumsfeld, Stephen Cambone, Douglas Feith, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales shoudl have been dumped a long time ago. Let's all agree to stop feeling sorry for the chump, and start treating him like the grown up he is.
