Olbermann said "The president's reaction? "He didn't recognize the same Scott McClellan that he hired and worked with for so many years." And he called it sad. He was too busy to read the book though they say they describe it to him. It's a book, Mr. President, three dimensional, pages, words, pictures, I know, sir, not about pictures."
Olbermann noted that "Yes, just imagine how well it would have gone over have Mr. McClellan shared his concern that the president believed the war in Iraq would give him a leg up on a legacy of greatness. Quoting from page 131 of the book, "As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because of the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change. The kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness."
Olbermnann interviewed the Washington Post's Dana Milbank who said "And I suspect somewhere in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald is having a stiff drinking tonight wondering what else he didn't know. But in trying to refute the sort of narrow point that Scott raised in the book about this suspicious meeting he thought between Rove and Libby, they were suggesting - well, we have these meetings all the time. You can bet they probably weren't discussing health care in those meetings."
Remember Cannistraro "[creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches" and how it applies to McClellan?
Olbermann brought up, as the article continues "the idea of the permanent campaign as the operating principle for the entirety of the White House. Does this concept by itself explain a lot of what we've witnessed in the past seven years-the administration has never been concerned with what to do with power just getting it via a campaign?"
Milbank responded "Yes. I mean, nothing is particularly new about the accusation of the permanent campaign. What's happened is the extent to which it seems to have pervaded everything, to point that McClellan is even suggesting that there should be a deputy chief of staff in the White House in charge of governing.
Well, there was a time when that person was actually the president in charge of governing and rest of his White House staff and politics was off in the corner. So, while the permanent campaign certainly predates this president, it seems to have, certainly by this account, become more pervasive than ever before."
On "Countdown" for the 29th at
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24893045/
Olbermann interviewed Scott McClellan who amplified that for W's administration "Everything is centered on trying to shape and manipulate the narrative to one's advantage."
Regarding the book Olbermann stated "It's title, ""What Happened": Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." In its pages, Mr. McClellan alleging, among other things, that the Bush administration used a political propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq, managing the lead up to the conflict in such a way that the use of force would be inevitable; that Mr. Bush after vowing to alter the political equation, viewed and ran the administration as if it were a permanent campaign and instead of trying to do it differently, just tried to do it more effectively and more insidiously and more secretly.
Mr. McClellan writes that in defending the administration, although he was being sincere about the things he said in the White House briefing room at the time he said them, he has, "since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided."
McClellan was used by big bro 43 and Cheney et al and as the article continues " Well, I did when it came to the issue of the Valerie Plame leak episode when I-unknowingly did so. I passed along false information. I had been given assurances by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby that they were not involved in the leak. And it turned out later that they were, but they both unequivocally told me, when I asked them, were you involved in this is any way? They said, no.
And-obviously other times, yes, I got caught up in the Washington game in terms of the spinning and obfuscation and secrecy and stone walling and things like that.
McClellan also substantiates that big bro 43 used 9/11 as a great opportunity, such as Pearl Harbor, to implement his GWOT as the article continues "Well certainly he saw it as an opportunity to look at the war on terror in broad way and to try to implement this idealistic vision that he had of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. I think that's what you're getting to.... Well certainly it was to advance the Iraq policy....Yes.
Well, I don't know what the right word is that I would use, but it was certainly-after 9/11 there was a whole change in attitude by the administration and everything started centering around 9/11 what we were going to do to respond to that. And several people in his administration from the vice president to Secretary Rumsfeld to the president himself and some others took this very broad view that they were going to do some things that they wanted to do probably even before 9/11."
This is substation of what the early 2003 Paul O'Neill book "The Price of Loyalty" said that "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," who added that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11. The bushies are interested in saying that McClellan wasn't involved in all of the meeting. Well O'Neill was and they both get to the same truth.
Olbermann prodded McClellan as the article continues "To that point, you write on page 127 about Iraq: "Bush pulled Rumsfeld aside in a private one on one discussion in late November 2001, as author Bob Woodward confirmed with the president, and instructed him to update the Pentagon's war plans for Iraq. Bush made sure this initiative was closely held, known only by a few people who could be trusted not to leak it. But it meant that, in effect, Bush had already made the decision to go to war, even if he convinced himself it might still be avoided. IN the back of his mind, he would be convinced on Iraq, as on other issues that, until he gave the final order to commence war, the decision was never final."
