Scott McClellan was the first White House press secretary that once-and-future BTC News White House writer Eric Brewer had the opportunity to question. McClellan’s response was so memorably robotic that Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin devoted the top of his column to it the next day. New York University journalism prof and press critic Jay Rosen also devoted considerable attention to McClellan’s stonewall style, and the White House press strategy it represented, at his PressThink blog during and immediately after the years McClellan ruled the press room roost.

Now, McClellan says he was duped, lied to and misled as he defended or denied, or sometimes both simultaneously, various administration horrors from the press room podium. His new book takes both senior White House officials and the press to task, the former for lying a lot and the latter for helping them get away with it. Oddly, the press focus in the wake of the book’s release is almost exclusively on the White House end of things, and the back and forth between current and former White House officials and McClellan, rather than on the substance of McClellan’s charges and, heaven forfend, the press role in enabling McClellan and his masters.

McClellan says in his book that White House officials lied to him about the outing of then-covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson, and in their campaign to sell the invasion of Iraq using bogus intelligence. He describes a to him strangely incurious George W. Bush. Perhaps most astonishing, considering the source, is his assertion that the “liberal media” were too deferential to the White House and too incurious themselves during his reign, and that of his predecessor Ari Fleischer, for their own and the country’s good.

We can safely say on that last score that things haven’t improved much since McClellan left the White House.

Judging from the reviews of the book, McClellan is dead on in many of his criticisms of both the press and the Bush administration, the result of an epiphany similar to those reported by former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, former faith-based initiatives aide John DiIulio, Colin Powell deputy Lawrence Wilkerson, and Powell himself. Like their Saul-and-donkey moments, McClellan’s comes far too late to do any of us any good other than by way of “I told you so.”

The question McClellan’s account begs, at least with respect to Iraq and the Plame outing, is how he could possibly be that stupid. There he was, at the epicenter of a tectonic shift in governing philosophy and technique, with more information available to him than to anyone this side of God, and he couldn’t figure out that he was trapped in a den of cheats and liars? Tens of millions of people figured it out all on their own, even without the help of the lapdog press McClellan marvels at, and he couldn’t?

As Ari Fleischer’s deputy, McClellan would have been charged with keeping on top of the various press reports in opposition to the administration’s marketing scheme for the Iraq invasion. He would have seen the thoroughly reported Knight-Ridder stories questioning key elements of the campaign, and the skeptical stories by the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and other unbamboozled reporters even when those stories were tucked away on page A-18 and overshadowed by the front page stenography committed by reporters such as Judith Miller at the New York Times and Susan Schmidt and others at the Post. He knew some of those reporters; knew how unlikely it was that they would go to print with unfounded stories. How could he avoid at least the inklings of a doubt?

The Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson story broke the same week Fleischer resigned and McClellan ascended to the press room podium. The administration went after Wilson with a vengeance following his New York Times op-ed piece debunking the charge that Iraq was attempting to purchase large quantities of uranium ore from the African mining nation of Niger. How could he not suspect administration connivance when Wilson’s wife, Valerie, was outed as a CIA agent within days after the administration began to push back? Yet, he says, that’s exactly what happened, and he is shocked, shocked! that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove—Karl Rove!—lied to him about their involvement.

When McClellan issued his non-denial denial to Eric Brewer about whether or not what is popularly known as the Downing Street Memo accurately reflected that the administration was determined to invade Iraq long before the actual date came due, and that evidence was adjusted to fit that policy, are we to believe that he didn’t tailor his response to avoid making a statement he knew to be untrue?

I have to confess that watching tapes of McClellan’s performances in the press room left me with the impression that he was, in fact, a little dim. Yet there he was, in his thirties, in one of the toughest and most sought after jobs that politics has to offer, doing an astonishingly fine job of denying information to the press, to the extent they actually pressed him for it. Is it possible he arrived there with his naivite intact, and without the common sense possessed by the legions of people who didn’t buy the administration’s bullshit?

Maybe so, but the odds seem ever so slender.

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