Booooo!

Sure, I should've known it was too good to be true.  And when you think about it for a sec, "Former BushCo crony makes unequivocal statement on administration's misdeeds" just isn't the sort of thing we see from them.

Instead, it looks like McClellan's sizzling expose of life as a minister of disinformation is simply going to be about ass-covering.  So I guess I could claim that my take on the story was half-right.  And if I really wanted to be snide, I'd say I was just too optimistic about the integrity of a 21st-century GOP operative.

After a day of wide coverage and swift reactions on the Web, the publisher, Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs, told MSNBC that Mr. McClellan "did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him" about two senior aides' role in leaking the identity of Valeria [sic] Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. operative, to the conservative columnist Robert Novak and others in 2003.

How does that square with the book excerpt, where Mr. McClellan wrote that "the President himself" was "involved" in his offering false information to the press about the leak? Mr. Osnos offered an explanation to Bloomberg News:

"He told him something that wasn't true, but the president didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said in a telephone interview. "The president told him what he thought to be the case."

I guess that rules out 'lying,' and leaves us with 'incompetent' or 'lying and incomeptent.'  And since when is "the president didn't know what his staff was doing" an acceptable excuse?