What I'm about to say will sound terribly hypocritical coming from someone who continued to draw a paycheck from CNN long after coming to the realization that television news as a whole was a largely unsalvageable proposition. Maybe the only mitigating factor can be that it didn't take getting fired to put me in a position where I felt comfortable enough to complain about the condition of the business; I was doing that for quite some time before losing my job.
The same can't be said about Scott McClellan.
Prepare yourself, because the chorus of "ooohs," "aaahs," and "told you sos" has already begun in response to the supposedly revelatory bombshells that McClellan is dropping on the White House in his new, obligatory tell-all book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Admittedly, the former White House mouthpiece -- for those lucky enough to have suppressed the memories of McClellan's tenure and are having trouble recalling him, think of a perpetually befuddled chipmunk lying its ass off -- does have some interesting inside information regarding his time in George Bush's inner sanctum, as one might expect. But to claim, even for a moment, that the dirt McClellan is dishing now that he's comfortably outside the Pennsylvania Avenue blast zone is shocking or of monumental significance would be horseshit of the highest order. Disclosing that Bush is out of touch and stubborn, or that he relied on propaganda to sell the war in Iraq to the American people -- or even that the White House press corps spinelessly ignored its responsibility to investigate the facts during the run-up to the war -- is truly the definition of old news, even if Scott McClellan is the one disclosing it. You can add to that the fact that McClellan did, actually, wait until now to make his reservations known -- long after they might've done some good -- and that we are talking about the same guy who essentially lied for a living (albeit very badly) for three years. I'm not saying he can't be trusted these days, but it's more than a little amusing that some on the left now seem ready to give him a pass -- this seemingly dimwitted rube who functioned as their public whipping boy for so long -- if not go so far as to lionize him, all because they consider his information so fundamentally damaging to the Bush administration.
The fact is, it isn't -- not one bit.
It's damn easy -- if not downright fashionable -- for Scott McClellan to bash his former boss when the latter has already been leveled by his own bald-faced incompetence and now flounders under the weight of a pathetic approval rating. McClellan should've said something a couple of years ago, when it would've mattered.
These days, the only proper response to Scott McClellan's book is to say, "So what?"