What Happened

I would add a couple of words in there to make it more salty, but I'll keep it clean.

I read former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened.

I am not impressed.

If you did not like Bush and ran out to buy this book in order to hear all the dirty little secrets about the Bush administration, hoping to hear about how corrupt and incompetent they are, this is not that book.

This is a book where a boot licking weasel tries to have it both ways. He's trying to essentially say that everything we believed was right, but we just botched the execution. I'm not particularly impressed with Scott as a great thinker of the day, especially after listening to his analysis. In the few times where he actually brings up a thorny and interesting subject, rather than taking it on and analyzing it a little, he says "that would take a whole other book to explore that subject." This is code for, "if we looked closer at that, we'd see even more glaring flaws in our ideology, so let's just skirt by the issue." More than anything else, it's a regurgitation of the endless stream of talking points that the Bush Administration is so famously known for, a strange continuation of the endless right wing propaganda, while also trying to somehow point out its flaws and explain why he wasn't responsible for where it went wrong.

Some times, he does incredible reversals. He talks about this horrible contentiousness in Washington, and how Bush wanted to rise above it and play a more honorable game, but the evil media or the evil entrenched politics of Washington sucked him into behaving just like everyone else. Then he starts bashing the Clinton administration. He has the gall to say that all this attack politics got completely out of control in the way that the Republicans continually attacked Clinton, and then to imply that it was Clinton's moral failings that brought it all on, or worst yet, the way Clinton defended himself helped cause the partisanship.

He spends a lot of time talking about what an attack dog Rove was and how he put politics above all other considerations when it came to making decisions. At the same time, this is the guy he strove to impress more than anyone else and he heaps praise on him for what a smart operator he is.

The way he spins the run up to the Iraq war is that Bush never really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction, that all he really cared about was spreading Democracy and Freedom in the Middle East, but that he did not feel the American people would buy that, so he was a little disingenuous about why he REALLY wanted to go into war.

He gives little glimpses about how the personalities in the White House inter meshed and worked together. He says that Vice President Cheney would never give his opinion to President Bush in front of anyone else, and even within the staff, no one really knew much about what he thought or just how much influence he had.

I hope Scott makes enough money from this book to live on for the rest of his life, or that he has a plan for a career outside of politics, because there's nothing in this book that will endear him to either party. In the end, it's a sad book, of this lonely little man that just wants acceptance for himself and validation of his ideas to a polarized public that is unlikely to give him either.