The Existential Scott McClellan

Two more great columns on Scott McClellan. The first is by George Neumayr over at The American Spectator, Scott on the Rocks.

The talking point du jour from the White House regarding Scott McClellan's surprisingly non-bland memoir is that "this is not the Scott we knew." Actually, it is.

What's likely is that just as the White House pushed him to make statements he couldn't cobble together on his own, so too did the editor for this book, What Happened.

At least that's what I deduced from Ari Fleischer's Wednesday night interview with CNN's Campbell Brown. Fleischer said that he asked McClellan if he had worked with a ghostwriter on the book. McClellan said no, according to Fleischer, but allowed that his editor had "tweaked" some of his copy.

"Tweaked" probably means massively rewrote. And if so, why should this surprise the White House? Why is the White House surprised that a dullard they manipulated could also be manipulated by a book editor?

Exhibit A of the thesis of McClellan's guided book is McClellan himself. Why did Bush hire him in the first place?

Some of these defections are due to caginess; this is one probably just due to cluelessness. A sharp and opportunistic book editor probably saw in McClellan an effective puppet and McClellan went along with it.

The next is an insightful piece by Peter Wehner over at NRO, Scott’s Truth vs. Reality. Wehner actually has the book in his hands, and notes that McClellan used a bit of post-modern parsing when describing what happened while he 'wrote' his memoir:

I want to draw particular attention to a paragraph that appears in his preface:

"Writing it wasn’t easy. Some of the best advice I received as I began came from a senior editor at a publishing house that expressed interest in my book. He said the hardest challenge for me would be to keep questioning my own beliefs and perceptions throughout the writing process. His advice was prescient. I’ve found myself continually questioning my own thinking, my assumptions, my interpretations of events. Many of the conclusions I’ve reached are quite different from those I would have embraced at the start of the process. The quest for truth has been a struggle for me, but a rewarding one. I don’t claim a monopoly on truth. But after wrestling with my experiences over the past several months, I’ve come much closer to my truth than ever before." (p. xi)

[Emphasis in original.]

This is a very postmodern outlook that subordinates actual truth for “my” truth. And the validation for “my truth” is not anything objective; it is, rather, based on sentiments which — we see clearly in the case of Scott — can shift like the wind. But what appears to be Scott’s existential journey has led him to make sweeping and reckless allegations that are at odds with reality. He would have us believe that the Bush administration was, at bottom, massively and deeply deceitful and corrupt — but this has only dawned on Scott since he started writing his book, years after the fact. Let’s just say that for these revelations to spring forth as if truth were like a time-released capsule, in which things magically get clearer with the passage of time (and the signing of book contracts), is, well, suspicious. And my former colleagues are absolutely right to point out that Scott not only never raised any objections contemporaneously, in meetings or with his superiors; in fact, he said almost nothing at all, at any time, about anything of consequence.

Ah yes, Scott talks about "my truth", as opposed to the more familiar "truth" that the rest of humanity is familiar with - a "truth" that doesn't contain qualifiers. Scott's subjective rather than our objective truth.

McClellan's turning out to be more delusional than I thought. I predict that when other occurrences like this happen in the future to someone else - when someone fails miserably at his or her job and goes on to publicly fabricate an alternate reality to justify his or her failings, it will be known as "pulling a McClellan".