Just one other point, which I’m sure someone else has probably already made amidst all the hubub which I haven’t been following that closely from the road (I’m in Milwaukee this morning). I keep hearing McClellan say that he’s doing this to improve the tone in Washington, to get us beyond the partisan rancor, blah blah blah. But, unless his grasp of how the media and politics works is even shallower than we all suspected, he must know this is nothing but a convenient lie. By publishing the book while Bush is still in office — rather than waiting until he’s gone which, frankly, would have been fine with me — he is throwing chum to Democratic partisans. But once again “partisanship” is defined solely as something Republicans do when they don’t go along with Democrats. But this time it’s a Bush loyalist buying into that definition. There’s already talk of congressional hearings stemming from the book’s allegations. That’s hardly the post-partisan response McClellan was supposedly hoping for. Has he expressed disappointment? Could McClellan really not see that this was the predictable, inevitable and obvious result of his book? I hope that when Russert interviews McClellan this weekend he actually gets at some of the glaring inconsistencies in McClellan’s explanation.
I normally don’t much care about peoples’ “motives” for writing a book. Writing a book isn’t a crime. But when authors try to claim the high road and cast their intentions as purely noble, when they clearly aren’t, it’s worth exposing that fact.