Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s story held up under the scrutiny of questioner Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Thursday night. While our initial reaction was to scoff that it took McClellan so long to come around to admit the lies of the Bush administration, after seeing the interview we think he deserves some credit for his contribution to setting the record straight on this most abysmal time in American history. He came off as a truth teller, not a partisan spinner, at least in this appearance.

I guess now’s the time to talk about it, since it will help sell his book…

The first details are beginning to leak out now from the first “tell-all” book by a former Bush White House staffer, and the news is about what we expected and confirms what we have been reporting for years. Perhaps now more Bush voters will finally get the message.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, is a “surprisingly scathing memoir,” according to Politico.com. McClellan, who resigned after he found out he was lied to about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby’s involvement in leaking the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame-Wilson in an act of political revenge against her husband Joe Wilson, writes that Bush “veered terribly off course” and he was not “open and forthright on Iraq.” He also confirms what we’ve known all along: The Bush White House, under the political direction of Rove, had a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war. He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides 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. The aides – Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, and Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff – “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

He also says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

The eagerly awaited book, while recounting many fond memories of Bush and describing him as “authentic” and “sincere,” is harsher than reporters and White House officials had expected, Politico reports.

McClellan was one of the president’s earliest and most loyal political aides, and most of his friends had expected him to take a few swipes at his former colleague in order to sell books but also to paint a largely affectionate portrait.

Instead, McClellan’s tone is often harsh. He writes, for example, that after Hurricane Katrina, the White House “spent most of the first week in a state of denial,” and he blames Rove for suggesting the photo of the president comfortably observing the disaster during an Air Force One flyover. McClellan says he and counselor to the president Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea and thought it had been scrapped. But he writes that he later was told that “Karl was convinced we needed to do it – and the president agreed.”

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” McClellan writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClellan was press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006.

Bush and his advisers, McClellan writes. “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

The book begins with McClellan’s statement to the press that he had talked with Rove and Libby and that they had assured him they “were not involved in … the leaking of classified information.”

At Libby’s trial, testimony showed the two had talked with reporters about the officer, however elliptically.

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, 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.”

McClellan also suggests that Libby and Rove secretly colluded to get their stories straight at a time when federal investigators were hot on the Plame case.

“There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss,” he writes. “It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. … Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card’s office], … Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. ‘You have time to visit?’ Karl asked. ‘Yeah,’ replied Libby.

“I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. … At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. …

“The confidential meeting also occurred at a moment when I was being battered by the press for publicly vouching for the two by claiming they were not involved in leaking Plame’s identity, when recently revealed information was now indicating otherwise. … I don’t know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic? Like the whole truth of people’s involvement, we will likely never know with any degree of confidence.”

McClellan repeatedly embraces the rhetoric of Bush’s liberal critics and even charges: “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Even some of the chapter titles are brutal: “The Permanent Campaign,” “Deniability,” “Triumph and Illusion,” “Revelation and Humiliation” and “Out of Touch.”

“I think the concern about liberal bias helps to explain the tendency of the Bush team to build walls against the media,” McClellan writes in a chapter in which he says he dealt “happily enough” with liberal reporters. “Unfortunately, the press secretary at times found himself outside those walls as well.”

“I read about the Don Siegelman investigation, uh, hear … uh, heard about it in the, uh, new … new … newspaper,” Rove stutters on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.

As we recall, that’s also how he said he found out about outed CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson. Right.

Which investigation? Which newspaper? Let us guess, the friendly one owned by the Newhouse chain, just to get confirmation? If he was so not interested in the Siegelman case, as he has claimed in the, uh, newspaper, because he was so busy working in the White House, why was he so interested in reading The Mobile Press-Register and the Birmingham News?

“And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress … by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”
- Revelation 14:19-20

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

When John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in the 1930s, the United States was on the verge of coming apart due to the Great Depression, caused largely by run-amok corporate capitalism and an attitude on the part of Big Business, including Big Oil, that workers had no rights except as serfs in their kingdom.

Since we now face another Great Depression thanks to king Bush and his corporate cronies, perhaps it is time to revisit the Biblical theme of the grapes of wrath. Especially since the right-wing Republican attack machine keeps eluding to it and, as usual, in a way that shows they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

Glynn Wilson

Jill Simpson seems to have the ability to bring Republicans and Democrats together. She is shown here with two people you will never see in the same picture again, a couple of the biggest political opponents in Dekalb County. That’s the local dentist in the cap, Marvin Barron, the brother of the powerful Democrat in the Alabama Legislature Lowell Barron. On the other side, that’s a Republican rabble rouser who is trying to get the Bush Justice Department to investigate Barron, Jimmy Dan Kilgore. He drives around town in a pickup truck with a sign in the back that says, among other things, “Anybody But Barron.”

It’s also coming up on the one-year anniversary of the filing of the now famous affidavit of Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson that is now part of an ongoing probe into how the Bush administration turned the U.S. Justice Department into a full-blown election wing of the Republican National Committee.

And then there’s the news that Bush’s evil brain Karl Rove, who left the White House under a cloud of disgrace last August, was finally subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee this past week, followed by a new appeals court filing by former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman asking that his political conviction be thrown out.

Former Bush Aide Karl Rove Subpoenaed in Probe

Siegelman Asks Appeals Court to Throw Out Conviction

If you have been keeping up with the headlines, you knew that.

But if you have been depending on the corporate media in this country for news, you may not have heard about how the right-wing attack machine is still doing everything it can to try and discredit Ms. Simpson as a bona fide Republican whistleblower.

The darling blogger of the right-wing nuts leading this attack is a so-called conservative lawyer named John H. Hinderaker, who is best known for attempting to debunk the human causes of global warming and Darwin’s theory of evolution – in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence. He constantly takes up Rush Limbaugh’s tired and false theme that the American press has a “liberal bias.”

On Monday, May 19, Hinderaker promoted himself, a hit piece he wrote for the Powerline blog and a story on the Website of the conservative Weekly Standard on one GOP blog by calling Jill Simpson a “lunatic conspiracy theorist (and darling of the nutroots).”

Just so you will know, “nutroots” is a term coined by the Election 08 blog on March 10, 2006. It is a play on the name commonly used for liberal grassroots groups known as the Netroots.” Once used strictly by conservative blogs in reference to their liberal counterparts, the term entered the formal political lexicon when Sen. Orin Hatch used the term on the Senate floor on September 12, 2007, to describe MoveOn.org’s “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” advertisement in the New York Times.

But there is a real question about who the real nuts are in this story. The headline to Hinderaker’s hatchet job on Ms. Simpson was: “A Conspiracy So Lunatic…”

The evidence suggests, however, that Hinderaker is among the lunatic fringe, not Jill Simpson.

In the lead smear, Hinderaker calls Ms. Simpson “an unusual woman” and describes her, based supposedly on unnamed sources, as “a very strange person” who “lives in her own world.”

It is obvious what he is trying to accomplish with this nonsense. But we suspect anyone who knows Hinderaker might say the same thing about him. Does he claim that he is a normal, mainstream model of good behavior who lives in the world of reality? Of course not.

He doesn’t believe in science at all, apparently, which may make him normal in various religious cults operating on the fringes of American society, but not in the educated world where facts matter.

He says Ms. Simpson “has scratched out an uncertain living in DeKalb County, Alabama.”

Any cursory check of her career shows she has done quite well as a lawyer over the past 20 years, not only representing the good people of her part of the world in divorces, bankruptcies and Social Security cases, but also representing clients with multi-million dollar contracts who work directly with federal emergency officials to clean up after major storms such as Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Simpson is also described as “the daughter of rabid Democrats,” which is such a patently stupid lie that any cub reporter could check and find out not to be true. As I reported in the five part series I did telling Ms. Simpson’s story almost one year ago, her father was a Democrat who knew George Wallace well, but her mother’s entire family were lifelong Republicans.

I have sat at the dinner table with Ms. Simpson’s mother and listened to family stories and talked politics, so I happen to know she is a huge fan of Republicans such as Tom Delay to this day, who awarded her the National Leadership award for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2003. She was somewhat shocked to read that she was considered such a “rabid Democrat,” Ms. Simpson said, considering that she also sat on the RNCC Business Advisory Counsel as a special adviser and honorary chair.

This lawyer blogger, who has no training or credentials as a journalist, claims Ms. Simpson was “rarely if ever been known to participate in politics as even a low-level volunteer” and this whopper: “Those who know her in DeKalb County scoff at the idea that she is a Republican at all.”

Well, it just so happens I was present at Jill Simpson’s property auction two weeks ago and interviewed about 20 people who have known her all her life who said she was a die-hard Republican who volunteered to work for GOP candidates in races all the way back to the 1980s, including the races of Governor Bob Riley. As I have reported before, she never claimed to be a paid staff member of those campaigns, so there is no credence to the attack on her on that front. Like many lawyers who are politically active, there is ample evidence her volunteer work as an investigator and her army of volunteers who post political signs has made a difference over the years.

But that does not deter Hinderaker’s libelous attack on her.

He goes on to say Ms. Simpson’s “house and law office were on the auction block. Rumor has it that she is leaving DeKalb County for good and heading for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Jill Simpson, who barely got by in Alabama, is now toasted by the national Democratic party and featured on network and cable news. All this because she has testified – without a shred of supporting evidence – to a conspiracy so vast as to be not just implausible, but ridiculous.”

Ms. Simpson has openly admitted that turning against the Bush and Riley political machines hurt her law business for the past year, which is not surprising when you study the cases of whistleblowers in other cases – especially those who take on the Bushes and Karl Rove.

Siegelman still clings to the idea that his support of Al Gore in 2000 and his opposition to Bush was behind the initial investigation of him. Considering the evidence of a Justice Department turned rogue now coming up in cases in state after state, this should not come as a shock to anyone. So why does it still elude the understanding of right-wing bloggers and the corporate press in Alabama?

The grapes of wrath indeed.

As a matter of fact, Ms. Simpson held an auction of some of her extensive property holdings in order to buy a house and open a law office in Washington. She sold her burned down house for $57,000, not bad in a depressed market. And she sold her law office and an out building next door, along with the land next to the Rainsville City Hall and a city park, for $300,000. Not exactly a pauper’s return on her investment of about $65,000 a number of years ago. The city wanted the land anyway to fill out it’s growing municipal complex. Her office building may very well be used for the new Dekalb County satellite courthouse.

She rejected the bid on a 38-acre farm she still owns with a $150,000 lake on it. And she is keeping the house in Rainsville where she still lives with her mother and three children. When she is away working in DC, her secretary will still be working full time on her practice in Rainsville.

Yet without ever having met Jill Simpson, Hinderaker goes on to attack her mental health and the work of CBS’s “60 Minutes” on the story, all while defending the disgraced Karl Rove. He repeats the myth perpetrated by the Birmingham News that she has somehow changed her story several times over the past year.

Since I told the whole story based on an on the record interview almost a year ago, I can attest to the fact that the story has never changed. It’s just a complicated story with a host of characters, and different news outlets pick up on different aspects of the story in the retelling.

My favorite line in Hinderaker’s uninformed rant comes near the end, when he says, “Simpson’s story is unbelievable and contradictory on so many levels that it cannot bear a moment’s inspection.”

So that’s why he is spending so much time and space trying to debunk it?

Then, in his defense of “the architect” of Bush’s elections and the man who turned the Alabama Supreme Court into part of the right-wing conspiracy, he says with a straight face, “Karl Rove has become the man who cannot be libeled.”

As a lawyer, Hinderaker should know better. He knows that Karl Rove is a public figure and a former high-level public official and therefore would face a high bar in claiming libel in any court of law in this land.

Ms. Simpson, on the other hand, was unknown to the general public one year ago and has never held a government post, so it would be much easier for her to claim that he is libeling her – and win.

Of course that’s not the real issue here. No one is suing anyone for libel, at least not yet.

There is an all out fight going on for the political soul of the country, however. And from this vantage point, where facts matter, it looks like Hinderaker and his ilk better look out for true believers like Jill Simpson, as well as the power of the pen from real journalists, bloggers or otherwise.

And they might want to look out over their shoulders for the wrath of God. Somehow we don’t think if Jesus were to come back today he would be hanging out with the liars and thieves who have been running this country into the ground for the past seven and a half years. Let the river of blood flow – with their blood.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
- Battle Hymn of the Republic

Now for a suggestion from Jill Simpson on how to compel Karl Rove to testify about his knowledge of White House involvement in the political prosecution of Don Siegelman.

Perhaps House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers should send out the Sergeants at Arms of the House to arrest Rove and drag him before the committee. It would constitute a new use for the office to be sure. But in these uneasy times, why not turn to the Constitution itself to save it?

Those of us in the “reality-based community” are tired of seeing the letter and the spirit of the Constitution shredded in the name of corporate monarchy. Holding Rove and Bush accountable are essential steps to restoring the world’s trust in pluralistic democracy.

“The truth is still marching on,” Ms. Simpson said, as she said it would last summer when she was humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic when the first attacks on her hit the press.

“I’ve marched myself to Washington, now we’re going to march Karl Rove up there to testify,” she said in an interview Sunday. “We’re not going to give up until the truth marches on.”

This is free-lance writer and author Craig Unger interviewed March 24, 2008 on the subject of “The Christian Right.” He is working on a little “October Surprise” piece for Vanity Fair magazine on Jill Simpson and the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Now that the right-wing Republican bloggers are calling Ms. Simpson “the darling of the nutroots,” perhaps it’s time to teach them a little lesson about what that means – and what it’s like to be crushed under a wine press of credible information like dried up old grapes. (Watch for Part 2 in Sunday’s column).

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Today I am revealing for the first time why I am giving up playing golf for the good of the country. I’m not making this up.

I will not play golf again until George W. Bush moves out of the White House permanently.

Bush gives up golf?

In case you missed one of Bush’s latest lies, check out Mike Allen’s interview with him for Politico.com.

“For the first time,” The Politico reports, “Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.”

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights, according to the Washington paper.

Bush warns of Iraq disaster

This assertion was not challenged by the reporter or any other national news organization. So let me fill you in based on information from inside sources who have played golf and other sports with Bush.

If you watch the video clip from the link, you will see that Bush’s body language reveals that he is a pathological liar. He is incapable of telling the truth about anything, apparently.

Bush quit playing golf because he was not any good at it and it was taking too much of his time. He took up mountain biking in 2003 and that has been his sport of choice since, that is until he crashed into a Scottish police officer while attending the G8 summit.

Bush bruised in bicycle crash

Now, sources say, Bush mostly mounts the White House treadmill with Condi and they like to take a “hot tub” together while talking about foreign policy and other things, like how the spamming operation is progressing in Paraguay designed to shut down all the liberal bloggers in the world.

And, they like to talk about how they can plant the seeds for John McCain’s victory over Barack Obama for president. Like going before the Israeli Knesset and, without naming Obama, attacking his willingness to open negotiations with Syria and Iran.

In case you were busy playing golf or something this week and missed the story, Bush said, “some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

Bush went on to compare a willingness to meet with “terrorists and radicals” to the pre-World War II “appeasement” of Nazi Germany, which makes absolutely no sense at all as a comparison – unless you understand the Karl Rove doctrine of saying the opposite of what you mean to confuse the masses.

Obama Strikes Back at Bush On Diplomacy (Lie)

It’s not even the word Bush should have used if he had any idea what he was talking about. Appeasement means giving up something to get something in politics, like John F. Kennedy did with during the Cuban Missle Crisis – or like Ronald Regan did with the Iranians during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Of course, Reagan is the one who supposedly established the U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists – all while his envoys negotiated with Iran to sell them arms in their war with Iraq at the time, all to help fund the U.S. war against the alleged Communists in Nicaragua. As you may recall, another George Bush was involved in that transaction – as vice president.

It’s a classic case of misdirection and double speak. But considering Bush has the lowest presidential approval rating since pollsters have been asking the question, it does not appear to be working anymore.

Poll Shows Bush Ratings At All-Time Low

So my giving up golf has nothing to do with the price increase at Roebuck Golf Course and the elimination of the twilight special, or the fact that I am so out of shape from living in the Birmingham suburbs that I can’t walk 18 holes anymore.

I am swearing off golf until Bush is out of the fucking White House. What are you giving up?

Glynn Wilson

The Radiators of New Orleans rock the Do Dah Day Festival in Caldwell Park Saturday on the Southside of Birmingham.