Pushing Bush to Attack Iran

"'Every press secretary is different. Every press secretary starts off with a clean slate with me,' Abramowitz explained, offering positive views of former spokesman Tony Snow and current press secretary Dana Perino. 'They are both very aggressive defenders of their boss, but I don't think that they lied to us point blank the way McClellan did. One goes into this understanding that everything they tell you is filtered through being an aggressive defender of the president.'"

Steven Pearlstein writes in his Washington Post column: "McClellan may have a detail or two wrong about who knew what when, but he pretty much nailed it when he described how Washington has been overtaken by a 'permanent campaign culture' with its constant spin and exaggeration and shading of the truth, all in the service of 'manipulating the narrative' to partisan advantage.

"What McClellan is describing is a dynamic in the political marketplace that can be found in other competitive markets -- labor markets, product markets, financial markets -- a dynamic often referred to as an 'arms race' or 'race to the bottom.' It's the kind of competition in which players -- acting rationally to maximize income, or to defend, attack or push a policy agenda -- wind up producing an irrational outcome that leaves everyone worse off. . . .

"As Terry Hunt, the Associated Press's veteran White House reporter, noted last week, spinning is nothing new to Washington, but it 'accelerated markedly' during the Clinton and Bush years. The reason everyone did it was because it worked -- or so it appeared. The conventional wisdom was that the only way to defeat spin was with more and better spin, creating an arms race in truth-shading, exaggeration and ignoring inconvenient truths.

"Somewhere around 2006, however, that began to change. An increasingly cynical public began to see through the deception, to discount the spin and to turn on politicians who practice it. . . .

"Now that McClellan has stepped forward to add his voice to this chorus clamoring for collaboration, the Washington of spin and deception has responded in the only way it knows how: questioning his motives and integrity. Bush loyalists see a sleazy effort to sell books, while cynics in the media are outraged that it took him so long to speak up. What nobody has yet challenged, however, is the essential truth of what McClellan has to say about the dysfunctional nature of American politics and the urgency of reestablishing a culture of candor at the highest levels of government."

Climate Change Watch

AFP reports: "US experts and environmental activists on Tuesday slammed President George W. Bush for threatening to veto a far-reaching climate change bill which is before the Senate for debate.

"'We have had seven years of President Bush trying to mislead the country about the science of global warming and the urgency of taking action,' Dan Lashof, climate center director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told a news conference.

"'Now he's trying to mislead the country about the economics of taking action.'"

The New York Times editorial board writes: "The Bush administration has worked overtime to manipulate or conceal scientific evidence -- and muzzled at least one prominent scientist -- to justify its failure to address climate change.

"Its motives were transparent: the less people understood about the causes and consequences of global warming, the less they were likely to demand action from their leaders. And its strategy has been far too successful. Seven years later, Congress is only beginning to confront the challenge of global warming."

Irony Watch

Bush delivered the final commencement address of his presidency on Saturday at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

Scot Lehigh writes in his Boston Globe opinion column: "Our poor president - no, make that our exceedingly poor president - is obviously irony impaired.

"How else could he go to Furman University on Saturday and celebrate his time-tested - and now, time-graded and time-failed - theme of personal responsibility? Unless, that is, he intended to offer himself as a counter-example to the idealistic young collegians. . . .

"[H]ere's what took the commencement cake: Bush's warning to graduates to avoid amassing too much debt. . . . 'My advice to you is not to dig a financial hole that you can't get out of. Live within your means.' . . .

"It will take years to work our way out of the hole we're now in. A significant part of the sacrifice will fall on the young, who as taxpayers will have to help repay the debt rung up in this era, even as they build their own lives.

"And make no mistake: Much of the blame for that burden lies with a president who prefers preaching responsibility to practicing it."

Goodnight Bush

Joe Garofoli writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about " Goodnight Bush," the recently published parody of the best-selling children's classic "Goodnight Moon," and just the latest of "several recent political humor books that could be described as Good Riddance Lit. . . .

"It's full of lines like 'And a quiet Dick Cheney whispering "hush." ' The accompanying image: The vice president, wearing bunny slippers, with a shotgun across his lap. . . .

"The book is a visual critique of the Bush administration, from the culture wars to the Iraq War, with the only constant being George W. Bush, clad in a 'Mission Accomplished'-era flight suit, curled up on his bed."

Among the other lines: "Goodnight Constitution. And goodnight evolution." And: "Goodnight old growth trees. Goodnight detainees."

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Cartoon Watch

Pat Oliphant on the next White House tell-all; Bruce Beattie on Bush's book idea; Dwane Powell on the men behind the curtain; David Horsey on the Bush bubble; Tom Toles on the Cheney family tree; Pat Bagley on the Bush-Cheney inbreeding; and Ann Telnaes on Cheney unbound.