Mr. President, it has been an extraordinary honor and privilege to have served you for more than seven years now, the last two years and nine months as your Press Secretary.
The White House is going through a period of transition; change can be helpful, and this is a good time and good position to help bring about change. I am ready to move on. I’ve been in this position a long time, and my wife and I are excited about beginning the next chapter in our life together.
You have accomplished a lot over the last several years with this team, and I have been honored and grateful to be a small part of a terrific and talented team of really good people.
Was he lying then, or is he lying now? Only McClellan, and God, can know for certain…but I note that a very liberal friend of mine is disgusted with McClellan and his book.
UPDATE: From NRO’s Editors:
McClellan tries to walk a fine line between echoing Bush haters and saying utterly irresponsible things. So he specifically stipulates that the administration didn’t lie. But he couches a commonplace point — that nuances were lost in the heat of the debate over Iraq in the run-up to the war — in indefensibly incendiary language. We won’t rehearse the tired debate over the intelligence over Iraq, except to note that the Silberman-Robb commission studied the matter and concluded the fundamental problem was the poor quality of what intelligence we had to begin with.
McClellan makes much of the administration’s emphasis on weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, as opposed to Bush’s desire to transform the Middle East, which wouldn’t have been as palatable to the public. This is an odd sort of supposedly damning charge: that Bush was secretly more idealistic than he let on in public. But the two rationales for the war weren’t mutually exclusive, and Bush talked about the importance of a democratic transformation in the Middle East as well as the dangers of Saddam, even if the emphasis was (appropriately) on the latter.
The most extraordinary aspect of McClellan’s book is the sense that he stumbled into a reckless, propagandizing administration and did its bidding for years without realizing how nefarious it was — until he left and decided to write a book. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he has shaped his views to the marketing pressures of the publishing industry. If so, it is a shameful end to an undistinguished public career.
Yep.
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