Former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan’s new “tell-all” book is hardly telling at all. In “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception”, McClellan recounts stories of a White House driven by politics, unable to admit mistakes, and a president either too blinded to care or too gullible to know what was happening.

Regarding the war in Iraq, McClellan writes:

“The Iraq war was not necessary.”

Regarding the Bush administraton’s response to Hurricane Katrina:

“[the White House] spent most of the first week in a state of denial [and] allowed our institutional response to go on autopilot.”

On Bush’s reluctance to admit wrongdoing:

“Still another motive for Bush to avoid acknowledging mistakes was his determination to win the political game at virtually any cost. Bush was not about to give the Washington media anything critics could use to damage him and his reelection effort.”

OK. Think we all pretty much knew this… It would be one thing to have quit while these activities were going on rather than continue to defend them from behind the White House podium. Barring that, it would have been admirable if McClellan had vowed to give all, or a hefty percentage of the book’s royalties to charity. Perhaps to help wounded Iraq war vets. But he did neither of those. Instead, he stuck around the White House, apparently knowingly repeating the lies and deception of the administration to the press, then wrote a memoir detailing those lies, from which he will keep all of the spoils.

It is said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel; clearly that’s been replaced by the political memoir.