Below The Beltway

A new Senate report says that the White House wasn’t exactly candid when it came to the true extent of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq posed in 2002-03:
President Bush and his top aides repeatedly exaggerated what they knew about the threat from Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as the administration pressed its case [...]

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 [...]

Just so you know, it isn’t your job to go to Iraq and convert everyone to Christianity:
BAGHDAD, May 29 — The U.S. military suspended a Marine on Thursday for distributing coins quoting the Gospel to Sunni Muslims, an incident that has enraged Iraqis who view it as the latest example of American disrespect for Islam.
The [...]

An interesting exchange from last night’s Anderson Cooper 360:

This much is true; during the lead-up to the war, there were several segments of the media that were, quite obviously, in the tank for the war. Judith Miller at The New York Times was one. The entire Editorial Board of the Washington Post was another. The [...]

An extended interview on this morning’s Today Show:
The former Bush administration pitchman making explosive election-year charges about how the White House handled the Valerie Plame case and built the case for invading Iraq said Thursday that he went to Washington to change it and became “disillusioned” when he realized he was just a pawn in [...]

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 [...]

Despite the fact that the public justification for going to war in Iraq was the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the real fact of Saddam Hussein’s unwillingness to comply with a United Nations backed inspection regime — a reluctance that, given the fact that there were no weapons to begin [...]

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 [...]