From Deseret News archives:
Ex-aide's tell-all has White House 'puzzled' and 'sad'
Tight-knit chorus strikes back against allegations
On Wednesday, McClellan got a taste of life on the other side.
As news of McClellan's new tell-all book in which he calls the war in Iraq a "strategic blunder" and accuses Bush of engaging in "self-deception" dominated the airwaves, the White House and a tight-knit group of former aides pushed back. They sought to paint the former press secretary as a disgruntled man trying to redeem his own reputation after long remaining silent about concerns he is suddenly taking public.
The result was a kind of public excommunication of McClellan, waged by some of the people with whom he once worked most closely, among them Karl Rove, the political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, the former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Bush's first press secretary; and Dan Bartlett, the former counselor to the president.
Their cries of betrayal served as a stern warning to other potential turncoats that, despite some well-publicized cracks, the Bush inner circle remains tight. Their language was so similar that the collective reaction amounted to one big inside-the-Beltway echo chamber.
And all seemed to suggest that maybe McClellan had been hijacked by liberal New York book editors who prodded him to turn out a memoir that did not reflect his own beliefs.
"This doesn't sound like Scott; it really doesn't," Rove said on the Fox News Channel. (In the book, McClellan accuses Rove of being untruthful with him about the administration's involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Wilson.)
"You've heard the way Scott briefed it doesn't sound like him," Fleischer said. He said he could not wait to hear McClellan talk about the book on television, "to see if there's a written Scott and an oral Scott."
Recent comments
This purging by an individual is so fascinating.
It happens with...
shadow | May 29, 2008 at 7:32 p.m.
with this information out now in the general public, I bet more...
Let's see.... | May 29, 2008 at 6:31 p.m.
The Bush administration has been puzzled and sad since the first day...
Mel | May 29, 2008 at 3:26 p.m.
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