June 1, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Cult of Deception
By MAUREEN DOWD
WA****NGTON
They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And
every
Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.
So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bu****es, to
reveal "What Happened," as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from
a
genial, humble, bipartisan good ol' boy to a delusional, disconnected,
arrogant, ideological flop.
Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White
House
press secretary - Secret Service code name Matrix - takes a stab at
illuminating Junior's bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family
black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous
screw-up.
How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White
House
and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?
It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm
Gladwell's
best seller "Blink," about the value of trusting your gut.
Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging
to
all concerned.
It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any
facts
or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of
grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly
sandwiches,
those snap decisions can be ruinous.
We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His
conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.
In Wa****ngton, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that
cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more
narcissistic and practical than that.
The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy's sake, and the
sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged
only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own
reputations are at stake.
It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell's blood boil. What
really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping
into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet
failed
to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney's garbage; and that W.
showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.
Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A.
facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative
memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the
fall guy on W.M.D.
McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim - "The truth shall
set you free" - until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie
Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told
him about not being the leakers.
"Clearly," McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a
Victorian romance, "I had allowed myself to be deceived." He felt
"something
fall out of me into the abyss."
And that was even before "the breaking point," when he learned the worst
about his idol - that the president who had denounced leaks about his
warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking
classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized
Dick
Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence
Estimate.
"Yeah, I did," Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force
One.
His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was "as if discussing something no
more im****tant than a baseball score."
He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be
just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000
bid, ludicrously telling a sup****ter that he couldn't remember, from his
wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.
"He isn't the kind of person to flat-out lie," McClellan said, but added,
"I
was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably
was not true." He'd see a lot more of it over the next six years before
Bush
tearfully booted him out.
W.'s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi - labeled
"sometimes
too accommodating" by the author - scoffed: "The president was very clear
about the reasons for going to war."
She's right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he
was
very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very
clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn't work out, he
was
very clear about it being that we can't leave because we can't leave.
He was always wrong, but always very clear.
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