Lamar Smith – character assassin

That’s what New York Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler called Texas GOP Rep. Smith during the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Scott McClellan’s comments in his new book. Although the hearings got cut short for debate on the new FISA bill, the Dallas Morning News’ political blog has some outtakes.

Grandma Strayhorn’s sonny boy still hearts Bush

Despite admitting that George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves were behind the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war, Carole Keeton Rylander Strayhorn (but shorthorn, not longhorn) scion Scott McClellan, former White House press secretary still loves his old boss.

Yes, his new autobiography is a tell-all in many ways, but Scott still sounds like he’s been knocked around like one of the turncoat Texas House Dems from a few years back:

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”

Not only “like” but “admire.”

Scotty does get higher marks for calling the pre-war MSM to account:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

That said, I will get the book, checked out, that is, as soon as it becomes library-available.

Seriously, though.

You just admitted the man you refer to as “Bush” in the third person, not “the President,” lied us into war, and you still “admire” him?

More here, with video.