McClellan's other villain

[EV_Ares]

Forget Bush, Rove and Cheney - Scott McClellan fingers the US media for its complicity in selling the Iraq war.

You don't have to be George Orwell to know that certain words mean certain things in regular life and other things in politics.

The word of the week, in this context, is "sad". In regular life, sad means, you know, sad. Unhappy. Upset. Not glad. In politics, sad means, "I am furious at so-and-so about such-and-such, and I think he is a contemptible idiot and I desire to crush him, but I don't want to let on that I'm furious, so I'm just going to call him 'sad', which suggests that so-and-so isn't really occupying much of my time, while it also connotes my contempt."

Rudy Giuliani was the master of "sad" when he was mayor of New York. Say some bunch of liberals on the city council cooked up a scheme to transfer funding from the police department to after-school social programmes. Or say a group of street artists, reacting to a mayoral crackdown on their ability to vend their wares, called him a fascist. Giuliani would invariably dub such moves "sad", a word he would utter with softness, mock affection, even, as though he were concerned for his enemy's mental health.

But the truth is, you know someone got under a politician's skin when they get a "sad" in response. So I was interested to note that that was the word White House spokeswoman Dana Perino used when asked by reporters to respond to the explosive new book by her predecessor, Scott McClellan.

I'm as happy as the next liberal that McClellan has exposed his former minders as a pack of thugs and liars. And their reactions, from Perino's above to Karl Rove's assertion that he "sounds like a left-wing blogger", are a sure sign that he's rattled them in a major way.

But I want to direct our attention to McClellan's other villain, because this allegation deserves its day in the sun too. America's political reporters, McClellan wrote, became "complicit enablers" of the Bush administration's push for war. Here, I find myself in total agreement with Rove. McClellan does indeed sound like a left-wing blogger. And God bless him for it.

The American media still have much to be ashamed about from that time and to atone for. That a flack, and a conservative one at that, has now called them out should make the shame that much worse. But Washington is a city of laughter and forgetting. The only people who'll remember the shame are the ones who don't need to learn its lessons.

Rest of the article by Michael Tomasky, The Guardian @ the link:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_tomasky/2008/05/mcclellans_other_villain.html