McSame Blasts Bush

At this point in the arm-wrestle for the White House where brute exaggeration is too often employed, it is prudent to take only the words of the candidates themselves.

That is why John McCain's long litany aboard his Straight Talk Air last Wednesday is so revealing as "McCain Lambastes Bush Years.... "We Just Let Things Get Completely Out of Hand.' " (Washington Times)

And, this isn't just the slant of McCain's scorned "liberal media." As they say, "thanks to the miracle of technology" McCain's frustrated outburst was caught on tape by the Washington Times reporter.

Here's what McCain.... trying to distance himself from the eight-year reign of his party's President Bush.... had to say:

"Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously.

"Those are just some of them.... We just let things get completely out of hand."

McCain also noted how the Bush administration is failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers. In short, McCain lashed out at The Decider for dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat while leaving the country in a shambles.

So Bush did this all by himself? Where was Senator McSame during those eight disastrous years?

According to boasts by McCain during the 2008 campaign.... when he needed the GOP base and parroted the GOP "trickle down" mantra that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" .... McCain opined that President Bush did "a great job in leading the country," and that he had "voted with the president 90 percent of the time." McCain strongly affirmed that on "transcendent" issues, "the most important issues of our day," that he was "totally in agreement and support of President Bush." (YouTube)

But now, with the country teetering on the edge of financial collapse, McSame is trying to distance himself from The Decider's deeds.

His attempts to avoid blame are being trampled by the stampede of GOP faithfuls distancing themselves from McCain with endorsement of Barack Obama for president.... Christopher Buckley, son of conservative-movement icon WFB, and a now former-columnist for the National Review; Colin Powell, GOP Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Bush's first Secretary of State; and the latest Bush insider to do a mea culpa for his role in the administration, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

Now it's the electorate's turn to speak. For an angry, misled and lied-to country, an accounting is coming.

November 4. Vote. It matters!

Bush Spinning in Place....

The Bush administration, and their heir-abhorrent John McSame, are now saying that we are overcoming al Qaeda in Iraq.... of course they fail to mention that al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq until we invaded and set the stage for them.

McCain is loudly trumpeting that our troops are at pre-surge levels. Well, actually we have 155,000 troops on the ground in Iraq... the pre-surge level was 135,000.

What to believe.

As Scott McClellan, former Bush White House press secretary, makes clear in his just-published memoir, the Bush White House operates in constant campaign mode, spewing propaganda steadily in order to manipulate public opinion.

So..... let's step back. Instead of listening to the tornadic spin from those who have everything to lose if Iraq and the fight against terrorism isn't a rosy picture, and be informed by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Donald M. Kerr, and his national intelligence analysis delivered in a speech Thursday evening.

As reported in "Intelligence Official Sees Little Progress Before Bush Exits" (WaPo), Kerr "predicted that the Bush administration would make little progress before leaving office on top national security priorities including an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, political reconciliation in Iraq and keeping Iran from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

"A regenerated al Qaeda will remain the leading terrorism threat... "

As the White House issues it lies and distortions, and McCain promises more of the same, Kerr soberly warns against making intelligence a partisan issue, "The Middle East threats and challenges I've laid out.... are nonpartisan in nature and will confront our nation regardless of who is in the Oval Office..." to receive intelligence briefings.

But, as The Decider made clear about his approach to governing as revealed in a statement as governor of Texas.... "I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican."

And, John McSame promises to slip into Bush's Decider boots and march off the cliff....

McClellan Purges WH Kool-Aid

For three years, until April of 2006, a power-trusting White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, drank the Karl Rove-brewed Kool-aid.

McClellan bellied up to the bar as front man to the White House press corps for the selling of the Bush administration's outrages..... the Iraq war, the evasion of responsibility for outing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, and even the inept administration response to the hurricane Katrina disaster.

It was the perfect political storm.... the leveraging of McClellan's idealism to further the White House's deceptive political agenda.... "Trot out Scottie, he'll say it.... he even believes it. Ha, ha, ha."

Now, given the distance to decompress and reflect on those years, McClellan has purged himself all over the administration's master puppeteers.... Rove, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and even his formerly idealized president Bush in his forthcoming book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

In McClellan's memoir.... part confession, part apology....he describes a White House driven by unrelenting campaign-mode political propaganda, led by an incurious, self-deceiving, and finally off-the-track Bush.

Of course, because of the immediate, and predictable campaign to discredit the book by minions of the Bush administration, an under-siege "McClellan Defends Memoir." (WaPo)

Rove compared McClellan to (gasp) a "left-wing blogger," and Dan Bartlett, former counsel to the president said on the Today show... "He talks about wanting to change the tone in Washington, and yet uses inflammatory terms like 'propaganda machine,' and 'shading the truth.' "

In his defense, McClellan said it took him some time after leaving the White House to come to terms with his experience there. When the Iraq war started, "my beliefs were different" he said in a Today show interview. "I trusted the president's foreign policy team, and I believed the president when he talked about the great and gathering danger from Iraq. I believe the president believed it too. He had convinced himself.... I struggled to come to grips with how things went so badly off course."

As a Bush loyalist, McClellan wanted to believe.... but when he started stonewalling reporters because even he was confused as to the facts of the Plame case, and then lied to by Rove and Libby about their involvement.... he found himself unceremoniously dumped on the front lawn with vague promises from The Decider about sitting in rockin' chairs on his porch in Texas in the years to come while reflecting on the good ol' days.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the rockin' chair.... McClellan found his moral compass.

And wrote a book about his miraged-wanderings in the ethical-desert of the Bush White House.