Letters to the Editor
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A Bit of Decency
On looking back at the sword-crossing that went on in the White House Press Corp. briefings,I remember feeling angry at the spectacle of what seemed to me to be a fairly decent man-McClennan- telling lies to the Reporters and vis-a-vie the country when what we really needed was more honesty and candor.But so be it.At long last-though far too late-it is refreshing to see a Bit of Decency among these Liars and Thieves who have brought us right up to the brink of total collapse !! Maybe a little bit of that famous CONservative RELIGION TAKING ROOT FOR REAL !!!!!!
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Conservative Religion
Conservative Religion is a contradiction in terms, at least in the US. Here Religion, at least the version that dominates ourpublic discourse, is extremely Liberal in its objective of controlling every aspect of American thought, word and action.
The Religious Conservatives who serve the Bush Administration will, when it is their turn to excoriate McClellan, declare with full vigor that he will burn forever in Hell for telling America that the Bush team was deceitful and incompetent.
Fortunately for McClellan, the national media will bury this story in a hurry, they have no desire for the debate to start shifting from the Bush Team's deceit to his other point about American reporters failing to live up to their job.
Better to go back to debates on Barak Obama's pastor or Hillary Clinton's reference to RFK.
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Clean
Now all he has to do is repeat himself.
On a witness stand, during Bush's and Cheney's trials for capital offenses.
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A Bit Of Decency?
Surely you jest...Who ever said lawyering was the second oldest trade....
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" I say better late than never."
And I couldn't agree with you more. This fellow, like all people, seeks redemption. It is a simple human ambition. Who are we to judge?
And the sooner those fake-christian impostors on the neo-con right can force feed themselves this basic, human, and humane, reality, the sooner they, too, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, might have a shot at something 'approaching' redemption. And if they don't seek that, fine, we can always strike up Nuremberg for the True Believers.
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McClellan
"Watch McClellan's old press briefings and you'll see a man who is deeply uncomfortable in these shackles. His eyes are wary, his manner stiff -- his evasions actually sound like evasions."
Funny, but I never saw any such comments by anyone in the press during McClellan's tenure that he was in anyway unconfortable at his briefings.
To read in such reticence now strikes me as a little ridiculous.
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His loyalty was misplaced
If you ask them why McClellan didn't speak up earlier, the answer will be: He was a press secretary, not an ombudsman. If you ask them why he didn't resign, they'll tell you that a good flack, like a good soldier, follows orders. The cause is what matters, not the individual's pangs of conscience.
But this is precisely the point. What's forgotten is that the "cause" is supposed to be loyalty to the constitution and to the American people. The "good soldier" defense just doesn't cut it, or have you forgotten Colin Powell's disastrous U.N. speech. Powell's mistake was exactly the same, his loyalty went to the Bush administration rather than where it belonged.
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asdf
I agree with Bayard that McClellan often looked conflicted, and I recall it being commented on at the time. So I'm not surprised at the tone of his memoir.
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An apology is not repentance, not remorse
First of all, I want to second what PaulW said: the "good soldier" defense doesn't cut it. In good old fashioned civics, "I serve the president" contains the implied, unstated assumption "as long as that does not violate still higher duties" (namely, to things like ethics and the constitution). In the creeping authoritarianism of the current age, we're supposed to simply accept the dropping of that silent clause. But we can't: it's not good enough to say that your job required you to lie and deceive.
My second comment has to do with the string of apologies that have emerged from prominent war backers, neocon and neolib alike. Quite often, they take the fake apology route: "I didn't realize so and so would be that incompetent!" etc. The attempt to shift the blame is transparent.
It seems like McClellan is not doing that. But even so, seemingly straightforward apologies along the lines of "I failed in my duties" don't seem to match the scale of the disaster.
What we need as a nation--and what these people need for themselves, I think--is a moment of real repentance, of real public remorse. Think sackcloth; think ashes. I know that may sound extreme, but I think if you run someone over while driving drunk (on power, in this case) you don't get to wash it all away by apologizing. An apology's time may come; but the first thing you do is turn yourself in, and admit guilt without yet seeking to absolve it.
I am struck by a recent scene in China, reported in the NYT, when an official presumably complicit in the building of faulty schools--that collapsed and killed children--sat down on his knees before a group of furious parents and begged them to cease their fury. I don't know how sincere that was; I don't know if it worked. But I am struck by the fact that we have no such gestures in our public life any more. We're all about "accountability" but lack a sense of shame, a sense of remorse, a sense of being truly devastated by what one has done. Until we see that, it's hard to see any given apology as merely a tactic, an "apology" meant to excavate oneself from a given situation.
When the architects of this war hold a press conference and cry about their sins, then I'll feel like we may be getting somewhere. That may sound horribly idealistic; but all these "apologies" followed by book contracts, speaking tours, and continued op-ed appearances as an expert in think tanks and tv shows is corrosive to our democracy--absent displays of repentance.
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Commented on at the time
Here's Jonathan Chait of the New Republic [29 March 2004] describing Scott McClellan as White House press secretary:
…when forced onto difficult terrain, [Scott McClellan] is the picture of discomfort. He averts his eyes from his questioners, often appearing to recite from prepared talking points on the podium. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, the frequency of these shifts depending upon his level of anxiety. (At the highest level, his rocking grows so violent that he steadies himself by gripping the podium with both hands, as if to keep from toppling over.) Like a bad card player, he overcompensates for his uncertainty with emphatic gestures--folding his lower lip, furrowing his brow.
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McClellan signals his discomfort not only through his appearance but through the substance of his replies as well. While not exactly a skilled orator, in normal circumstances he's capable of stringing coherent thoughts together…When he has to dissemble, though, his sentences become short and choppy, and he relies heavily upon pat phrases.
Chait, who, in an earlier TNR piece [10 June 2002], had called what the prior White House press secretary Ari Fleischer did "a system of disinformation," compared McClellan to Fleischer:
McClellan's ineptitude is made all the more noticeable by the contrast it poses with Ari Fleischer, his syrup-tongued predecessor. Fleischer could spin elaborate webs of obfuscation, leaving the press corps mystified and docile, albeit somewhat resentful as well. Every sentence he uttered came out in the same bored affectation. The most outrageous lie sounded, in his telling, like a truism so obvious it barely deserved mentioning. Most people find such behavior deeply unnatural. When asked a direct question, our natural impulse is to answer it honestly. The capacity to do otherwise is useful for any press secretary but particularly so for the current administration, whose domestic agenda has never commanded popular support and which relies heavily upon secrecy and message discipline. Fleischer was in this sense the perfect Bush press secretary. His ability to prevaricate and dodge, without betraying himself through physical or verbal tics, represented a kind of genius. Alas, what came so easily to Fleischer utterly eludes McClellan. If the two of them ever sat down at a poker table, Fleischer would probably walk away with all of McClellan's money and the shirt off his back.