Trent Duffy’s evisceration of Scott McClellan’s memoir, which Steve Hayes and Jaime Sneider comment on below, is well worth a read, but to grasp the full extent of McClellan’s dishonesty regarding the Plame affair, check out Robert Novak’s column today. Novak writes:
On Page 173, McClellan first mentions my Plame leak, but he does not identify Armitage as the leaker until Page 306 of the 323-page book–and then only in passing. Armitage, who was antiwar and anti-Cheney, does not fit the conspiracy theory that McClellan now buys into. When, after two years, Armitage publicly admitted that he was my source, the life went out of Wilson’s campaign. In “What Happened,” McClellan dwells on Rove’s alleged deceptions as if the real leaker were still unknown. … McClellan writes that Rove told him the following about his conversation with me after I called him to check Armitage’s leak: “He (Novak) said he’d heard that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. I told him I couldn’t confirm it because I didn’t know.” Rove told me last week that he never said that to McClellan. Under oath, Rove testified that he told me, “I heard that, too.” Under oath, I testified that Rove said, “Oh, you know that, too.”
Perhaps this choice excerpt from McClellan’s book, found in Mark Hemingway’s fun review, best explains McClellan’s reckless disregard for the truth:
Writing [the book] wasn’t easy. . . . The quest for truth has been a struggle for me, but a rewarding one. I don’t claim a monopoly on the truth. But after wrestling with my experiences over the past several months, I’ve come much closer to my truth than ever before. [Emphasis original]
Lots of people are speculating that McClellan wrote this memoir simply to cash in while he still could, but that postmodern passage leads me to believe that perhaps McClellan is angling to become an Obama Supreme Court appointee.
