Scott McClellan’s Book Makes The Case For Bush

I haven’t read Scott McClellan’s book. Unlike Scott, I cannot read minds, so I’m not sure exactly what his motivation was for writing it. But I will venture a guess that it was money. The guy was, after all, unemployed for a while.

Any prominent conservative will tell you that the world is offered to them if they would just change their political affiliation. Power, publicity, money, women (although they’re not attractive women like Rebecca Hagelin or Ann Coulter, more likely they’re hags like Barbra Streisand), all of it is theirs for the taking if they go liberal. It’s helped Arianna Huffington launch one of the most popular left-wing websites in America. It worked with David Brock until he stopped selling books…now no one knows who he is anymore. No less a staunch conservative as Rush Limbaugh has told many times of the left trying to tempt him. It seriously looks like they’ve gotten to McClellan.

So far, the astounding revelations in McClellan’s book are:

- Bush misled America to sell the war in Iraq.

Yawn. Tell us something we don’t know, Scott. While the Drive-By media template is always “Bush lied”, even many middle-of-the-roaders have accepted it as conventional wisdom that the Bush administration “sexed up” or “cherry-picked” the intelligence on Saddam. The liberal wall of sound repeating these assertions has allowed Americans to forget that all of the congressional investigations could find no evidence of this.

That a Bush insider is now saying so does not change that, unless he will reveal overwhelming evidence that Bush could not have honestly ignored. My guess is that the media and the Democrats would have done that by now.

It bears continual repeating: if Bush was lying, then either an entire Democratic party was lying with him, or the entire Democratic party didn’t bother to look at any of the intelligence at all. Read the quotes : Clinton, Kennedy, Kerry, Pelosi, they’re all there.

See, what we neo-con right wing warmongers just refuse to accept is that Saddam wasn’t this horrible dictator that some of those Bible-thumpers say he is. He was just this struggling leader trying to run his far weaker country, victimized by Bush administration propaganda. All of the torture, rape, the mass graves, the atrocities against the Kuwaitis, the gassing of the Kurds (by the way, that sounds like a weapon of mass destruction), all of that was part of a Bush-media campaign forced on the public by those stupid old right-wingers who just want to take away a woman’s right to choose.

- Bush governs in a bubble and does not give weight to anything that contradicts what he believes.

Straight out of Time magazine, who actually did run a front cover of the president in a bubble. Scott isn’t even original.

When one looks at Bush’s policies, it’s hard to imagine that he’s even a Republican but for his firm stance on fighting terrorism. He let Ted Kennedy, the mortal enemy of Bush’s base, write an education bill that rewarded failing schools with even more billions. Kennedy thanked him by leading the movement to stop the confirmation of Samuel Alito. He signed a prescription drug bill into law that could well bankrupt this nation to appease the AARP—who returned the favor by putting all of their members’ money and resources into defeating his plan to reform Social Security. It is doubtful that he could have more of a left-wing view of illegal immigration.

Bush has reached across the aisle more than any president I can think of, no matter how many times his arm gets bitten off by the Democrats. Hardly sounds like someone unwilling to listen to opposing views, even from people who trash him on an hourly basis. It’s hard to imagine how the man could be more open-minded.

And I might add, thus far in his political career, Barack Obama has shown no evidence that he thinks in any way but through the left-wing prism. Obama can show McClellan how governing from a bubble is really done.

- Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and “possibly” Dick Cheney were complicit in revealing Valerie Plame’s “secret” identity, and they lied to McClellan about it.

I hardly know where to start with this one. His evidence of this, according to the news stories I have read, is secret meetings between Rove and Libby that McClellan was not a part of. Did he hold a glass to the wall and listen in?

The Valerie Plame story will not die, despite that no “outing” was committed, and the only thing Scooter Libby was convicted of was a poor memory, for which he was nailed by “independent prosecutor” Patrick Fitzgerald . So apparently Rove and Libby didn’t reveal the name of a covert agent after all. The only thing that has been covert in all of the reporting about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame has been the fact that Plame wasn’t a covert agent.

Somehow no one is questioning why Plame’s secret identity didn’t prevent the Wilsons from appearing on TV shows and on the cover of magazines everywhere, even speculating who would play them in the movie. There’s no way Valerie Plame could ever be successful as a covert agent given her and her husband’s love of the spotlight.

- Bush’s real motivation for going into Iraq was to help bring peace to a long-troubled region.

Here is one of the few points where McClellan doesn’t quite exactly sound like a left-wing blogger, as Karl Rove so precisely and accurately put it. McClellan still thinks Bush is a liar, but that his intentions were good. Only a Washington insider of so many years could damn with such faint praise.

But for all the libs that are going to rely on McClellan for further proof of Bush as Satan, just remember: it wasn’t for oil, it wasn’t for Cheney’s buddies at Halliburton, it wasn’t to expressly kill Muslims and force Christianity on the Iraqi people, and it certainly wasn’t the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

McClellan’s evidence of this (and again, I haven’t read the book) is, well, I don’t really know. That seems a very odd assertion to make without being able to read another person’s mind.

Coming after 9/11, I’m not sure that is even a flawed motivation for removing a brutal dictator. The region’s violence had now extended to our shores. What exactly…and I have asked this a million times and still not heard a viable answer from Democrats…would liberals have had us do in response to this?

- The president ran a perpetual campaign throughout the first term of his presidency.

This is also surprising, since his poll numbers were low enough in 2004 that a phony gigolo who helped us lose in Vietnam was actually able to give him a run for his money. Bush knew what brought his poll numbers up: more air bombing in Iraq. I would think someone trying to drive up his poll numbers would be running a shock and awe show every week.

- Bush was in a state of paralysis during Katrina.

Well, he wasn’t the only one. New Orleans mayor Ray “School Bus” Nagin (D) got himself out of there in a hurry, leaving over 1,000 school buses that could have been used to evacuate people idle. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco (D) ignored the phone call from (surprise!) the president himself, warning her that she should be evacuating the people of New Orleans. By the way, the president declared a state of emergency two days before the hurricane hit. Which didn’t stop her from blaming the whole tragedy on him.

Not to mention Michael Moore, Kanye West and every Democrat alive immediately pouncing on the disaster to score political points against the president, some even blaming global warming for the hurricane. None of them seemed interested in helping the people that were in great need. Guess they don’t care about black people.

While the Democrats were piling on, the president put aside partisanship and called on his father and former president Clinton to join together to request help for the region, once again showing more maturity in his pinky finger than in the entire Democratic party.

And don’t forget William Jefferson (D), the local congressman who sent the National Guard in to get the bribe money out of his freezer. At least he wasn’t sleeping.

- Condoleeza Rice excels at PR and deftly manages her image.

As opposed to the genuine humanist Scott McClellan, who was relieved of his press secretary duties and wrote a book trashing the president, claiming his whole presidency is a bunch of lies, while he himself was just an innocent dupe of the president and his advisors. Certainly, image or fame is not McClellan’s motivation. He desires only to bring the truth of what he learned reading the president’s mind to light.

Condi Rice excelling at protecting her image is news to me…she hasn’t been able to stave off her “image” as a puppet, a token, a shill, or the president’s “brown sugar” (Garry Trudeau’s words, not mine). Perhaps one thing she could do to improve her image with the media is write a book trashing Bush.

---------

McClellan’s book, at least from what has been revealed about it so far, contains no new revelations, no smoking gun, no inside scoop on the Bush administration’s so-called lies about Iraq. He simply regurgitates the same left wing talking points as the Huffington Post, except he occasionally compliments Bush on his sincerity.

But because McClellan played for the conservative team for so long, liberals will of course shout from the rooftops that McClellan has been confirming what they have been saying all along, except for the sincerity part.

But McClellan hasn’t “confirmed” the left wing’s rants…he has only parroted them. The left and the media has succeeded in casting Bush as a liar through amplification, rather than through hard evidence. One would think an insider to the Bush administration would have something new to chew on for a political movement hell-bent on destroying his presidency. That he says nothing new confirms only that liberals will throw anything at Bush.

There is still no evidence whatsoever that the Bush administration was cherry picking or sexing up the intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion, which is the left’s chief motivation for calling the president a liar. Saddam WAS seeking uranium from Niger, and that was the focus of the “Bush Lied” crowd for an entire year.

The more the left cherry-picks tiny bits of evidence that weapons of mass destruction was a Bush lie, the more they make his case. The media runs with every little questionable detail to destroy the entire case against removing Saddam Hussein. Did these people buy the “Mark Fuhrman said the N-word, so O.J. was framed” argument?

And Barack Hussein Obama, who is strongly opposed to divisive personal attacks, immediately jumped on the microphone and said in his unifying, bipartisan way that McClellan “confirmed what many of us suspected all along”. By the way, if you question HIS foreign policy, you're part of the divisiveness that poisons the nation's soul.

Soon Bush will be out of office. And the left will be too consumed with either destroying McCain’s presidency or propping up Obama’s to waste their bile on Dubya anymore. Then the evaluation of his presidency will be up to historians. And if they are honest, they’ll look at the results, not the opinions. And we’ll see whether he’s the worst ever after all, or maybe that his predecessor might have done a better job noticing terrorism.

In the meantime, Bush will continue to do such a great job as president that American citizens like Scott McClellan are still alive to call him a liar.

What Happened to Obama’s “Game”?

For someone who has been following the mess that is the Democrat primary, it’s incredible to think about how people once called Barack Obama charismatic. Today he seems to be nothing of the kind. He’s about as charismatic as B.O., appropriate given that those are his initials.

It’s a common occurrence with liberals. They are hailed as brilliant, charming, sexy, everything Americans everywhere could ever want in our candidate. Then people who don’t hate Republicans from dawn till dusk get a good look at them, and they find that not only is the Democrat du jour human, but in fact often embodies none of the qualities that have been ascribed to them. We’re still trying to get the “nuance” of John Kerry’s plan for Iraq.

In a way, Barack Obama has become a victim of the fawning press he had been (and still is) receiving for so long. If the truth had been told about him from the beginning, Hillary Clinton would be the nominee by now, and while Hillary is hardly known for her devotion to scruples, at least no one believes she is a messiah anyway, so she wouldn’t be crashing down to earth.

I remember having a discussion with a friend who loved Reagan but hates Bush, and she told me why she was voting for Obama over Hillary: “He’s got game”. Which I thought was not only funny, but true at the time. Everyone in the media was talking about what a great speaker he was. The same people who proclaimed Al Gore to be a man of staggering intellect. I never learn.

Take the teleprompter away from Obama and he’s not so spellbinding. He says that he’s campaigned in 57 states. That’s even beyond misspelling “potato”. He claimed that a tornado killed 10,000 people in Kansas, as opposed to 12. Best of all, he says Iran doesn’t pose a threat, because it’s a “tiny country”. Apparently geographical size is the key to a country having an imposing military, with perhaps Canada and Greenland being exceptions. Turns out this guy’s not very brainy.

He stated his refusal to disown his hateful preacher of 20 years and then disowned him just one month later. He doesn’t understand what the big deal is about his association with a known terrorist. He called people who don’t support him religious nutcase racists. This is a uniter?

In response to President Bush’s “appeaser” speech, indirectly regarding Jimmy Carter’s desire to give Hamas everything they need to destroy Israel, Obama went ballistic thinking it was directed at him. He claimed that this was exactly the kind of personal attack that was why this country was so divided.

This statement is nothing if not brazenly hypocritical. Has Barry listened to any of the nonstop bile coming from his own party for the last eight years? Apparently calling the president every possible euphemism for stupid or fascist in every imaginable book is not divisive, but criticizing Obama—which Bush wasn’t even doing—is precisely what is poisoning the nation’s soul.

If Obama can’t handle Republicans…or Fox News…he can’t handle Al-Qaeda. He needs to man the hell up.

And in keeping with his charismatic tradition, Obama and his supporters have now handed us a list of things we can’t say about him. We can’t talk about his middle name “Hussein”. We can’t call him a liberal. The latest is that we can’t talk about his wife now, even as she gets on the stump and trashes the very country where she and her husband (not to mention their devoutly anti-American pastor) are millionaires.

Unaware of how many states are in the union. Dangerously clueless on foreign policy. Elitist and snobbish about rural Christians. A crybaby who whines about “divisiveness” when the idiotic foreign policy of him and his peers is criticized, and who childishly demands that we play by his rules. Shut up and let him eat his waffle, bro.

That’s “charismatic” for a liberal.

The Fairness Doctrine - Balancing High Ratings With Low Ratings

Liberals and Democrats are furious that people like Rush Limbaugh are allowed to speak. They have tried for years to shut them up, from painting them as racists or fascists or drug addicts to downplaying their impact at every opportunity.

Now Democrats are eager to bring back the “Fairness Doctrine”, requiring that any radio station that features a conservative radio show that people listen to must also feature a liberal radio show that people do not listen to. The Fairness Doctrine, in addition to being unenforceable, is designed to get conservatives off the air.

The law of course will not apply to television news, newspapers, college campuses, public schools, or movie studios, all of which are more dominated by liberals than talk radio is by conservatives. The goal of the Fairness Doctrine is anything but fairness.

Rush Limbaugh first appeared on the Philadelphia radio dial on 96.5 FM WWDB. WWDB had existed for years as a talk radio station, featuring views from all sides. But the conservatives were on late in the evening, while the liberals and just outright obnoxious screamers like Irv Homer were on at prime time.

Rush’s time slot on WWDB was noon to 3PM, as it still is today. Back then WWDB insisted on “balancing” his program with the likes of Susan Bray before and Irv Homer after his show, and during Rush’s show, WWDB would run commercials saying “for a different point of view, listen to (someone no one was listening to)”. It clearly pained them to carry Rush Limbaugh, but liberals never turn away the money.

WWDB is no more. Susan Bray, Irv Homer, and everyone else I could think of on WWDB is no longer employed in Philadelphia radio as far as I know…and even if they are, if I don’t know about it, they’re not setting the city on fire wherever they are.

Rush, on the other hand, immediately found a new home on the Philadelphia radio dial, at WPHT 1210-AM. WPHT hasn’t bothered to try and balance him, also carrying Michael Smerconish (a middle-of-the-road local host who leans conservative), Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. After Rush, Hannity is the second most listened-to radio show in the country. Beck is third.

There have no doubt been similar instances in radio stations across the country. Conservative talk radio sells not because it is ideologically to the right by itself, but because it is the only institution of information dissemination—with the possible exception of the Internet—that isn’t forcibly driven ideologically to the left. Conservative talk radio succeeds largely because it is the only counterpoint to an enormous liberal echo chamber that includes almost every nightly newscast and nearly every newspaper in America.

There is nothing currently stopping liberals from participating in talk radio, and heaven knows they have tried. Their only real outlet is NPR, which is forced onto, and paid for by, the taxpaying public no matter how low their ratings. Air America, the liberal radio venture, was given more press and financial backing than all of the conservatives in the history of radio combined, and it was one of the biggest failures in the history of media. The only thing stopping liberals from succeeding in radio is that damned free market that they hate. They don’t sell, period.

It is telling that when liberals are in an arena where they don’t hold a monopoly, they cannot hold an audience worth a squat. Ultimately what that should betray is that Americans have no taste for liberalism. So how, one wonders, do Democrats win elections?

There are a multitude of reasons, and Republicans of late do not have excuses. But one very big one is the media mouthpiece that Democrats have. Remember that Bill Clinton’s crimes were far worse than Richard Nixon’s. It was the power of the media that ousted Nixon and saved Clinton. In 2004, Katie Couric devoted three whole “Today” shows to Michael Moore and his pathologically deceptive and cowardly movie, in the interest of defeating President Bush. The media is currently breaking its back laughably trying to make a radical left-wing America hater like Barack Obama into a palatable uniter.

The media must sell liberalism by passing it off as objective journalism, more evidence of just how unpopular liberalism really is.

Only talk radio stands in their way. And liberals can’t stand it…and once again, they show their maturity level, not by competing, but by whining that it isn’t fair.