Tepid Defense of Scottie

I think this is right:

But unlike most liberal journalists and bloggers, I think McClellan deserves quite a bit of credit for going public with this, even at this late date. Writing this kind of book could not have been easy for him. He has undoubtedly lost friends. Many of his former colleagues will never speak to him again. If he’d written the kind of anodyne snoozer that Ari Fleischer did, then surely he’d be set for life on the wingnut welfare circuit. But now? Well, let’s just say he’ll never eat lunch in that town again. And it’s not like the liberals are eager to embrace him with open arms, either.

Kathy has a good point; while we think a lot about the benefits of tell-all books (lots of exposure, book sales, historical re-evaluation, etc.) but there are also some very real costs, as McClellan is going to find himself shunned by the people most likely to give him jobs and invite him to dinner. It’s true enough that Scottie is still responsible, as everyone in the Bush administration was, for the crimes that have been committed over the past eight years. Still, disgruntled former administration hacks really should be given a strong incentive to write this kind of memoir; it’s critical to our understanding of the administration that we get these kinds of testimonies, and as such I’m willing to cut Scottie a little bit of slack.

I suppose it’s also possible that I’m just a wee bit sympathetic because Scottie was such a bad liar; you could almost see the sweat dripping down his face as he went into another whopper.