Another rat leaves the ship

By: D. H. Williams @ 1:11 PM EST

Former Bush loyalist Scott McClellan has written a tell all book entitled: What Happened – Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

McClellan is the latest Bush administration official to attempt to deny personal responsibility for years of deception and criminal activity.

On the Iraq war:

“Through media manipulation and outright compliance the Bush Administration was able to mislead the American people about the real reasons for going to war with Iraq.”

“The White House made a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”

On Bush’s Cocaine use:

“The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.”

“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”

On Plame Gate:

“He [Bush] too had been deceived, and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that Rove and Libby held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

On Bush’s lack of intellectual curiosity:

McClellan writes that the president, He convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,” and has engaged in “self-deception” to justify his political ends.

“President Bush has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader. He is not one to delve into all the possible policy options — including sitting around engaging in extended debate about them — before making a choice,” McClellan wrote. “Rather, he chooses based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions. Such was the case with Iraq.”

On Katrina:

“He [Bush] spent most of the first week in a state of denial” and “allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.”

Mr. McClellan blames Mr. Rove for one of the more damaging images after the hurricane: Mr. Bush’s flyover of the devastation of New Orleans. When Mr. Rove brought up the idea, Mr. McClellan writes, he and Dan Bartlett, a top communications adviser, told Mr. Bush it was a bad idea because he would appear detached and out of touch. But Mr. Rove won out, Mr. McClellan writes.

On Cheney:

“Cheney always seemed to get his way,”

On Rice:

“I was struck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation,” he wrote. “No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview, including the WMD rationale for the war in Iraq, the decision to invade Iraq … and post-war planning and implementation of the strategy in Iraq.”

Scott McClellan who was part of the original Bush team from Texas was a deputy in then Governor Bush’s press office and served with the President until 2006 when he was forced out as White House Press Secretary.

All ready on the defensive former Bush propaganda minister Karl Rove was on American Pravda, aka Fox News last night claiming, “McClellan had been out of the loop on many matters and never expressed his concerns while working for the administration.”

Story originally broke by Politico.

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