The McClellan Hit Job

Leave it to the Democrats and/or their leftist pals in business and media to do their best to malign Republicans in the Presidential election run-up. Their latest effort is to use the blunt instrument of a tell-all book by a failed presidential press secretary to clobber the lame duck president on his way out and smear an entire Republican administration in the process. The hope here is to tar Republican candidate John McCain with the alleged taint, all the better to boost the chances of the sainted Barack Hussein Obama in this fall's presidential sweepstakes.

The Washington Post's review of Scott McClellan's "Culture of Deception" today, penned by longtime book critic and die-hard liberal Jonathan Yardley, gives the book a softball assessment, endorsing McClellan's low-key damnation of the "most unpopular president in American history" as yet another compelling chapter the media-manufactured "truth" we've been bludgeoned with over the last 8 years or so. (Actually, what ever happened to Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, Chester A. Arthur, and John Quincy Adams who were easily as "despised" as Bush? Or how about Lincoln early-on in the Civil War?) Once having written a phony narrative, the left-wing media never gives up on the story.

Too bad the conservative blogosphere is out there shredding McClellan's feeble attempt at justification for his wretched handling of White House communications. In point of fact, the appointment of McClellan, a now-former Texas cronie of the President's, was a poor bit of HR R&D by Mr. Bush, a belly-flop for which he paid dearly while McClellan was muffing press curve balls. For which he is paying again as McClellan tries to restore his tarnished reputation with the media's favorite weapon, the "tell-all" attack book on a Republican.

Like many Republicans who'd like to be liked by the media before they die, McClellan is, with his weakly documented book, trying to attack the Republican administration of which he was a part in order to get some kind of moneymaking gig with the media like many Democrats before him. Won't work, Scott. The left will never trust you. But they'll be happy to use you for a couple months as a tool to discredit the Republicans before dumping you like they did with Cindy Sheehan.

But wait, there's more. As you might suspect, George Soros money is behind the publisher of this latest hit job. Soros has been burnishing his rep by providing economic patter to the media over the spring, making Republican-damaging gloomy assessments on the economy even as he profits from it via manipulating his billion dollar portfolios. He maintains his sanitized profile as an investment sage while using his profits to undermine the economy, the government, and most of all, Republicans. Helping underwrite McClellan's book effectively makes McClellan Soros' unwitting stooge. But, as he often proved in front of the media, you can never accuse Scott of being the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Now we learn that McClellan's Soros-supported editors "shaped" McClellan's original proposal in a way designed to rewrite the story to cause maximum damaging PR to the Bushies, according to an astute piece in The American Thinker:

An examination of published reports reveals that Scott McClellan's kiss-and-smell betrayal of George W. Bush is a far cry from the book McClellan started out to write and was shaped into an offensive tome by a publisher with close ties to George Soros.

And McClellan was further incentivized to push potentially damaging material, true or not, by being given a very small advance for such a book. Thus, the book would have to be written to fly off the shelves for McClellan to pocket a meaningful profit for his time. And there's no better way to do that these days than by "shaping" your manuscript to indulge the left's fetish with Bush Derangement Syndrome. The American Thinker's William Tate elaborates further, discussing comments made by McClellan's actual editor:

A book's editor and its author work extremely closely--with the author sweating over every word, every detail, and the editor helping shape the pacing and overall tone of the manuscript. Kaufman told the AP that as McClellan wrote the book the "tone began to be directed toward issues and events that some people would rather he not be straightforward and candid about." (Emphasis added.)

The lesson in all this? Don't bother buying "tell-all" books by either Republicans or Democrats with an axe to grind. They either started out as a pack of self-justifying lies or were transformed into same by unscrupulous editors or publishers with dollar signs in their eyes and dreams of another Nixon-like presidential scalp dangling from their belts. What the hell can you believe anymore?