WHATEVER qualities George W. Bush brought to the presidency, the ability to inspire loyalty in others obviously was not among them.
The evidence seems to suggest, in fact, that you'd probably have to go back to the Borgia court to find anything close to the miasma of feral self-interest that must hang in the air during one of this administration's staff or cabinet meetings. If you worked with this crew, you'd want to wear a Kevlar undershirt to the office.
"What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" by Scott McClellan -- the second of Bush's four press secretaries -- is the latest tell-all sensation in a series that actually began during the president's first term. Truth to tell, though, there's never been anything in presidential history quite like the stream of self-justifying memoirs this administration already has generated. Departed secretaries of State and Treasury have had their says, as has a director of Central Intelligence and an attorney general and assorted speech writers, political aides and the military commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions.
McClellan, who went to work for the then-governor of Texas when he was 30, is the first of Bush's Austin-based inner circle to turn on his former boss. Though his book doesn't formally go on sale until Monday, a week's worth of non-stop media reports have made its major allegations fairly well known. According to McClellan:
The president went to war against Iraq to secure his place in history and to spread democracy in the Middle East. Because he and his aides knew the case for war couldn't be sold to the American people on that basis, the president deliberately oversold and misrepresented intelligence on Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorism and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in what amounted to a "propaganda campaign."
Presidential political advisor Karl Rove and former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby lied to McClellan about their roles in the Valerie Plame affair, leading him -- in turn -- to lie to the media.
Rove's influence led Bush to give politics primacy over policy, even when dealing with national security, and played a particularly strong role in the administration's abominable response to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.
Vice President Dick Cheney "always seemed to get his way" and "simply could not contain his deep seated certitude, even arrogance, to the detriment of the president."
