What Happened

A few interesting excerpts from this AP article on former Bush White House spokesman Scott McClellan's new book:

• The White House responded angrily Wednesday to McClellan's confessional memoir, calling it self-serving sour grapes.
• He reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned.
• The news media, he says, were "complicit enablers" for focusing more on "covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war."
• The heart of the book concerns Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 — at least a full year before the invasion — if not even earlier.
• In Bush's second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was "insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin."
• McClellan ticks off a long list of Bush's weaknesses: someone with a penchant for self-deception if it "suits his needs at the moment," "an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader" who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a man with a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he's been wrong.

I found the complicit enablers comment to be insightful.. so often the talking heads are mere pawns of our leaders and rarely ask the right questions at the right time.