The White House had no official comment on the allegations themselves.
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan charges in an explosive new book that President George W. Bush used propaganda to sell the Iraq war, prompting angry rebukes from current and former Bush aides.
“In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage,” wrote McClellan, the first Bush insider to write a book criticizing his former boss and fellow Texan.
It was a dramatic break from the close-knit Bush inner circle by the mild-mannered, 40-year-old McClellan and it drew instant condemnations on Wednesday from former White House colleagues who wondered why he stayed in the job.
“If he thinks he’s going to ingratiate himself to his critics, he’s sorely mistaken, and unfortunately, the only friends he had, he just lost,” said Dan Bartlett, who served as White House counselor. **
McClellan, in “What Happened — Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” presents himself as a one-time true Bush believer who mistakenly fell in line behind “the campaign to sell the war” in Iraq.
** Now that the neocons have circled their wagons as the liberals continue to mount their attacks, it would be wise to recall the following words by CFR’s historian and Bill Clinton’s teacher, Carroll Quigley (from his “Tragedy and Hope”, 1966, p. 1247-48):
”The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy… But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies.” — Ed.