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Or maybe the blame lies with the journalists who wrote those first reports on McClellan’s memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. It might take a closer reading than they had time for to tease out what’s actually new and important in it (if anything is). A reporter on deadline would have skimmed the book for the seemingly good stuff, the passages that preach to the choir of Bush loathers who are McClellan’s likely readers.
That some of his own press briefings were “badly misguided” and that the media were “complicit enablers” as Bush primed the nation for war in Iraq. That the Bush administration used “innuendo and implication” to sell the nation on the idea that the U.S. needed to invade because Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, when the real reason for the invasion was Bush’s desire to transform the Middle East. The result was a war that “was not necessary” and a “serious strategic blunder.”
