Dear George

Remember Scott McClellan? He's that charmingly useless White House Press Secretary who came between Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow. You know--the one who always looked like he might have to run out of the press room and throw up. Well, he's got a book out, and it seems that perception wasn't far off:

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

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

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” 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.

This will get obviously get interesting.

UPDATE: This is hilarious:

Decrying the Bush administration’s “excessive embrace of the permanent campaign approach to governance,” McClellan recommends that future presidents appoint a “deputy chief of staff for governing” who “would be responsible for making sure the president is continually and consistently committed to a high level of openness and forthrightness and transcending partisanship to achieve unity.

A Deputy Chief of Staff for Governing? Presidents following George W. Bush should elevate the task of governing to the level of a Deputy Chief of Staff? How bold. Perhaps the president could devote, say, 20% of his time to it as well?

I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.