All this Kabuki. What else is the White House team going to say? In hindsight, Scott got it right? We're saving it for our memoirs? Is it really so mystifying as Howard Kurtz expresses that McClellan held firm to the White House line and didn't publicly betray doubts when he was spokesman -- and now he does? Kurtz: "The question is inescapable: Now he tells us?" Of course, now and not then he tells us. What's the least bit mystifying about that? How can a long time Washington reporter like Kurtz not expect that a White House spokesman is in the bubble and on message and deceptive and not terribly self-reflective or soul searching or sincere with reporters when they are doing that job? especially a spokesman for this administration?

Even as the White House defaults to the long now familiar permanent campaign MO of trying to discredit him in every which way ("hypocrite," "Soros," "left-wing blogger" "didn't speak up at the time"), McClellan's message (misled the country, the war was unnecessary, propaganda, deception, permanent campaign, in denial) hurts them far more than they can hurt him. And honestly, has there been any McCain news in the past day? He's receded to the background as the White House and McClellan lob rockets at each other over the most controversial episodes of our national life under this administration that many people had put behind them.

Update: More from Mike Allen: "'The White House would prefer that I not talk openly about my experiences,' he said in a lengthy, at times combative interview with anchor Meredith Vieira. 'These words didn’t come to me easy. … I’m disappointed that things didn’t turn out the way we all hoped they would. ... I have a higher loyalty than my loyalty necessary to my past work. That's a loyalty to the truth.'"

Update II: McClatchy's Jonathan Landay & Warren Strobel offer a must-read memo to McClellan explaining "Here's What Happened":

. . . The responses to McClellan from the Bush administration and media bigwigs, history-bending as they are, compel us to jump in. As we like to say around here, it's truth to power time, not just for the politicians but also for some folks in our own business. [...]

The news media have been, if anything, even more craven than the administration has been in defending its failure to investigate Bush's case for war in Iraq before the war.

Here's ABC News' Charles Gibson: "I think the questions were asked. It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.” And “I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently."

Really?

Or this from NBC's Brian Williams: “Sadly, we saw fellow Americans — in some cases floating past facedown (after Katrina). We knew what had just happened. We weren’t allowed that kind of proximity with the weapons inspectors [in Iraq]. I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and, yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like. The tone of that time was quite extraordinary.” And this: "“It’s tough to go back, to put ourselves in the mind-set. It was post-9/11 America."

So the Pentagon tells the media what kind of reporting is in- and out-of-bounds?

Hogwash. Hogwash! HOGWASH. [... ]

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents....

Go read the rest.

More from Newsweek's Michael Hirsch. "The words of the supposedly 'disgruntled' McClellan seem chillingly sane."

Posted by Laura at May 29, 2008 11:29 AM