When Karl Rove said yesterday that Scott McClellan's book "doesn't sound like Scott," I assumed he was saying that McClellan had changed. But now I'm wondering if Rove and other Bush defenders are trying to insinuate that McClellan is the victim of his liberal editor or ghostwriter or something.
To wit, here's Ari Fleischer on Fox News yesterday:
“There are just parts of here that don’t sound like Scott McClellan.”
“It’s got his name on it and Scott knows that and he said the chips will fall wherever they may, that’s what he told me yesterday, but on principle and on policy this doesn’t make any sense to me because if it did, I think Scott would have expressed it privately and repeatedly.”
And here's Brent Baker on NewsBusters:
Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros.
How long before the Bushies start saying that, like Charles Barkley in his autobiography, McClellan was misquoted in his memoir?
P.S. Before the usual flying monkeys start portraying Peter Osnos as a Democratic operative, it should be noted that he's no fan of Obama's--or at least he isn't a fan of how Obama's conducted himself in the book business, where, according to Osnos, he's shown "questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."
--Jason Zengerle