Below The Beltway

As most people who have followed politics since the 1980s know, Bob Dole doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being a nice guy.
He’s got a mean streak in him that showed itself in public, most memorably, when he unloaded on then Vice-President George H.W. Bush during the 1988 Republican Presidential race:
Dole made a more serious [...]

As usual, Peggy Noonan nails it:
the purpose of the book is a serious one. Mr. McClellan attempts to reveal and expose what he believes, what he came to see as, an inherent dishonesty and hypocrisy within a hardened administration. It is a real denunciation.
He believes the invasion of Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” that [...]

It didn’t take long for the White House to join in the diversionary tactic of attacking Scott McClellan rather than addressing the substance of what he’s said:
The White House reacted angrily today to scathing criticisms of President Bush and members of his inner circle that appear in a new memoir written by Scott McClellan, the [...]

Joe Gandelman notes that the effort to discredit Scott McClellan has already begun:
Mark Halperin, noting that the book has dominated the morning news/talk shows, has these tidbits:
NBC quotes a response from a former White House “senior adviser”:
“This book has left many of Scott’s closest friends puzzled and shocked… He never expressed any reservations while [...]

In what I’m sure will be the first of many incidents, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is out with a book that lifts the veil on the inner workings of the Bush Administration:
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American [...]