Vindication for the Bush Critique

McClellan also makes clear how baldly Bush broke his original pledge to fire anyone involved in the leak. In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday, McClellan told Tim Russert: "I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which is if you were involved in this any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it. . . .

"The president said he was going to restore honor, integrity. He said we were going to set the highest of standards. We didn't live up to that. When it became known that his top adviser had been involved, then the bar was moved. And the bar was moved to, 'If anyone is indicted, they would no longer be here.'"

A Bizarre Relationship With the Truth

McClellan also describes a bizarre relationship with the truth within the Bush White House. His central thesis -- which also serves as his own personal defense -- is that the persistent lack of candor that afflicted the White House regarding key initiatives such as the Iraq war just sort of happened. There wasn't any real intention to lie; it was just well-meaning people getting caught up in the political game that consumes modern-day Washington.

Here's how he explained his own experience it to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown Thursday night: "I got caught up in the Washington game in terms of the spinning and obfuscation and secrecy and stone walling and things like that."

But when, time and again, the "lack of candor" conveniently furthers political goals, how are we not to conclude that it is, well, pretty much the same thing as lying?

Consider the way McClellan describes Bush in one particularly seminal case study. Recalling a conversation he overheard between Bush and a supporter in the 2000 race, when questions were being raised about Bush's possible cocaine use as a young man, McClellan quotes Bush as saying: "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember."

McClellan notes the absurdity of such a statement, then writes: "I know Bush, and I know he genuinely believes what he says. He isn't the kind of person to flat-out lie, particularly when speaking in private to a supporter or friend. So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It's the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious: political convenience. . . .

"In the years to come, as I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. . . .

"Bush is certainly not the first or last politician to deceive himself, but the extent to which he resorts to self-deception beyond personal matters, which one can argue should be off-limits anyway, and the sincerity with which he embraces self-deluding beliefs amount to a personality trait that goes directly to larger issues of characters and leadership style and carry over into real issues of governance."

Saying something that you know "deep down" isn't true, for personal gain -- isn't that the definition of lying?

What McClellan Doesn't Know

McClellan repeatedly insists that Bush and his top aides were not actually liars (with the exception of Rove and Libby, of course). He writes near the end: "As I've detailed in this book, the campaign mentality at times led the president and his chief advisers to spin, hide, shade and exaggerate the truth, obscuring nuances and ignoring the caveats that should have accompanied their arguments. Rather than choosing to be forthright and candid, they chose to sell the war, and in so doing they did a disservice to the American people and to our democracy. However, this is not the same as saying they deliberately misled and lied."

And yet, as McClellan himself notes, most key decisions were made in secret by a small circle of advisers. Sometimes, he acknowledges, it wasn't even a circle: "Cheney had greater power and influence than any other vice president in history, and no one really knew how extensively he wielded it. Being shut out from his thinking and from the ways he advised the president left a large black hole in my understanding of what was really going on inside the administration."