RUSH: The guy that published Scott McClellan’s book is a guy named Peter Osnos. He is a huge, far-left liberal. His publishing house is affiliated with The Nation magazine. His company has also published The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. This man’s name is Peter Osnos, and so far six books have been bankrolled by George Soros. So there is a George Soros connection to the Scott McClellan book. In addition, this guy, Peter Osnos, has ripped me.’A reporter and editor at the Washington Post during the 1970s and 1980s before going into book publishing, Osnos pens a weekly column for the left of center The Century Foundation. In a March column he denounced Rush Limbaugh as ‘bombastic, aggressive, and mean,’ bemoaning how the late William F. Buckley Jr. left behind ‘a right-wing culture that tends to be as coarse and leaden as his demeanor could be buoyant,’ charging Buckley provided ‘unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit that was distinctly and consistently malevolent.” So that’s the publisher. This is the guy who published McClellan’s book. This is probably the guy who wrote McClellan’s book.
It is stunning to me to listen to everybody out there who knew McClellan say that they have never seen anything like this from him, or heard anything like this from him, that he never once spouted anything like this. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to McClellan. The left is going to use him up here. Scott, they look at you as a nerd. You are a useful idiot, and they’re going to give you about 24 or 48 hours here of a lot of attention, and, yeah, your book’s gone to number one, you’re going to make some money off of it, but they’re going to throw you away as soon as they’ve used you. As soon as they’ve gotten everything out of you that they can, they’re going to toss you aside, and you’re going to be friendless. You’re going to have nobody. Because what you have done is not just dishonorable, it is ungrateful. Scott McClellan, nobody would know who you are were it not for George W. Bush. George W. Bush kept you — your incompetence — out of loyalty. This is the kind of thing that just irritates people to no end, especially your friends. What’s even happening now a little bit, folks, it’s starting to trickle out out there, even some of these people on the left are saying, ‘I don’t care what he’s saying now; we knew this all along. Why, why didn’t he say this earlier?’ The left is not totally embracing this guy.
I hope this happens. All this is gonna do right now is just add to his book sales, but I hope this happens because he doesn’t have any information! He wasn’t in any of the meetings! He was a deputy for all those years. He had no input in policy. At times he even complains in the book about being kept out of the loop. He was not a big-time player. He doesn’t have anything substantive to tell these people. He probably didn’t write this garbage that’s in his book. So let Wexler call him up there and let him tell Wexler and the House Judiciary Committee, ‘Well, I really don’t know what Rove and Libby talked about, I just assumed. It was behind closed doors and the timing. I never actually saw Vice President Cheney.’ The reason he can’t stand on two legs on this is because everybody knows what the leaker was. The leaker was Richard Armitage. Everybody knows what a travesty of justice this whole case against Libby was. Everybody knows the real two liars in this whole case were Wilson and Plame. I mean, this is just classic. I hope he ends up there, and I hope these guys demand everything from him that he purportedly knows, because under oath we would most likely find out he doesn’t know diddly-squat about what’s in his book because he didn’t write it.
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RUSH: George Neumayr at the American Spectator today has an entirely different take on the Scott McClellan business. He says: ‘The talking point [of the day] from the White House regarding Scott McClellan’s surprisingly non-bland memoir is that ‘this is not the Scott we knew.” Neumayr says, ‘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…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?’
And it goes on, but here’s the conclusion: ‘In this case, the Bush administration’s self-inflicted wound was to hire a stooge who it first manipulated and then released into the world to be manipulated by others. They handed him talking points and he read them to millions; then his new masters handed him talking points and he wrote them up into a bestselling book.’ So Neumayr is a little: The White House deserves what they got here, to a certain extent because they knew they had an idiot. They knew they had a dullard. They knew they had a stooge who couldn’t put his own thoughts together. They had to do it for him, and then they replace him with Tony Snow, and Tony Snow wins immediate accolades. Everybody says, ‘Oh, how great! What a great improvement.’ McClellan is out there fuming and simmering over this and getting angry. So the stage was set and it was just a matter of time before the left got their hooks into McClellan. Let’s go to some of the sound bites from him this morning on the Today Show. Meredith Vieira interviewed him. One of the questions was, ‘You had to know, Scott, that this book of yours was going to cause a firestorm.’
RUSH: This just frosts me. This is just… Scott McClellan, you are using the language of the left. ‘A lot of Americans like me would like to see us move beyond the bitter partisanship that exists…’ Don’t you understand, you dolt, your job was to help your president prevail? This is an ideological battle! And as far as the president working with other people, what the hell? Where were you? What do you think he was trying to do? Have you ever heard of the new tone? He let Ted Kennedy write the education bill, for crying out loud. He’s got the Kennedy family up there eating popcorn, watching Kennedy movies in the White House Theater. He went out of his way to bring Democrats into the White House for policy purposes. You had to be there. This is an example of how out of touch this guy is or else these are not even his words. Blame Bush for the partisan divide? This is a president who would never attack Democrats! This is a president who would never lead a conservative movement against liberalism but rather tried to accommodate them, and tried to end all of this so-called rancor that went on during the Clinton years. This is flummery. Here’s the next bite. The next question from Meredith Vieira: ‘Karl Rove says this doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like left-wing bloggers. The administration has come out and said that you’re disgruntled, that you’re just mad because you got pushed out of the job and this is your way of getting even.’
MCCLELLAN: One of the most defining — two — two defining moments that caused me to become increasingly dismayed and disillusioned with the way things were going in Washington, DC. One was the revelation that I had been assured — and Karl Rove and Scooter Libby both, I asked them point-blank: ‘Were you involved in this in any way?’ Both assured me in unequivocal term: No, we were not involved in this. The other defining moment was in early April 2006 when I learned that the president had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the vice president and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters. And we had been out there talking about how seriously the president took this selective leaking of classified information, and here we were learning that the president had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.
RUSH: (Big sigh.) Uh, Scott? The National Intelligence Estimate? The president does not leak it after he declassifies it. I am doing my best to stay NPR-type composed here. It is impossible for something to ‘leak,’ Scott, that has been declassified. To assign nefarious motives to the president for declassifying it…? Do you not remember, you idiot, that the Drive-By Media and the Democrats were clamoring for this? How in the world can something be ‘leaked’ when the president declassifies it? It’s not possible. Semantically, etymologically, this is not possible. Also this business about Rove and Libby involved? Hey, Scott, have you ever heard the name Richard Armitage? They were not involved in the leak. Scott, if you had any gonads, you would understand that what happened to Scooter Libby is one of the major travesties of justice that has occurred in our lifetimes in the US legal system. Leak a declassified document? Vieira then said, ‘You seemed to stop just short of saying that President Bush and his administration flat-out lied.’
MCCLELLAN: What happens was that we got caught up in the excesses of the permanent campaign culture. We got caught up in trying to sell this war to the American people. Much of that information was based in what could be substantiated, but at the same time as we accelerated the buildup to the war, uh, the information that we were talking about became a little more certain than it was, the caveats were dropped, contradictory intelligence was ignored. Uh, intelligence that had a high level of confidence was combined and packaged with the intelligence that had a low level of confidence, and together that made it sound like the threat was more urgent and more grave and gathering than it really turned out to be.
RUSH: This is a guy who doesn’t have the slightest clue what he is talking about. This is left-wing liberal talking points. His book is filled with fiction. President Bush delivered 24 major speeches on Iraq over two years starting in September of 2002. In October of 2002, Congress cited no fewer than 23 reasons when it overwhelmingly gave President Bush the right to remove Saddam Hussein. Isn’t it interesting, Mr. McClellan, that the people who voted and gave the president permission — he did not act unilaterally — are now saying they were lied to? They had nothing to say about this. They had nothing to do with this. They want to wash their hands of it. They want to wash their hands of victory; you want to wash your hands of victory. There was no ‘permanent campaign.’ That was the Clintons. The Clintons didn’t govern. They campaigned.
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RUSH: Michael in Butler, Pennsylvania, you’re next. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you doing?
RUSH: Never better, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Okay, I want to say that it’s a pleasure to call you from Butler. I’ve been trying for a lot of years. We’re the only county in the state that actually voted for Lynn Swann. That tells you how conservative we are.
RUSH: I appreciate that. That’s nice to know.
CALLER: Hey, I wanted to get back to when you were talking about Scott McClellan. I was watching Morning Joe, and Mika was trying to make the point big time that there’s collusion in the White House and they’re all using the same terms talking about how confused and upset they were from the reaction of Scott McClellan in his book, and I almost fell out of my chair when David Gregory actually corrected Mika twice and said, (paraphrasing) ‘No, I feel the same way. If you’re working in the White House office of media, you’re working with the press and for the president, and you have to get along with both,’ and he couldn’t believe that this guy did this. So I think it goes directly to your point that Scott’s sold out, or as you say, and I believe entirely possible, this thing was ghost written and now he’s stuck with it.