The White House is disappointed and confounded as to why former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan would write such a damning tell-all book, What Happened, and have it released before the ’08 elections. Brent Baker at NewsBusters.org seems to have the reason pegged: Just the well-heeled ‘Progressives’ playin’ their usual game, with McClellan the willing dupe, the usual useful idiot this time.

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan’s new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his editor did ‘tweak,’ in Scott’s word, a lot of the writing, especially in the last few months.”

The release of McClellan’s book was a well inside the ‘A’ section of the LA Times yesterday, but today a blurb for the reactions to it made page one, below the fold, (Some headlines altered for online version). No kidding.

Dana Perino, Bush’s current press secretary, offered a part-starchy, part-sympathetic appraisal. In a statement delivered to reporters in Colorado, where the president was about to speak at the U.S. Air Force Academy commencement, she said: “Scott, we know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House.

“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,” she said.

Later, she said Bush was “puzzled” by McClellan’s account. “He doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years,” Perino said, adding that Bush was “disappointed that, if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of.”

Does the article bother to mention the publisher or such strong anti-Bush connections contributing to the work? Are you kidding? Crickets chirping . . . Back at the NewsBusters’ piece, Matthew Sheffield provides this update:

The media’s lack of interest in pursuing the Soros angle of McClellan’s story is a perfect contrast to Katie Couric’s charge that former press secretary’s critics were somehow coordinating “talking points.”

It’s also interesting to note that when it came to former Clinton admin officials writing tell-alls, the liberal press took a decidedly negative approach.

No MSM bias now . . . nah, never! Tell-alls — who reads this stuff? I don’t want to know ya!

Technorati Tags: What Happened, PublicAffairs, Scott McClellan

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 9:22 am and is filed under Decision '08, Fever Swamp Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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