I want to congratulate former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, on the great moral courage he’s shown by informing us - several years after the fact - that maybe, it turns out, the Bush administration likes to tell fibs. You know, the kinds of fibs where thousands of innocent people, very much including women and children, wind up maimed or dead.

In case you’ve flushed him from your memory, McClellan is the smarmy boot-licker whose job it was to stand in front of the White House press corps and weave intricate tapestries of half-truths, semantic side-steps, and outright bullshit whenever some reporter actually managed to inquire about why we were invading Iraq.

He wasn’t very good at it. I can’t count the number of times I saw him standing there, red-faced and grinning like a possum, when it became obvious that he wasn’t about to give a straight answer to any straight question that might reveal the administration for what it is— a gang of self-serving, tie-wearing thugs who would piss on your ashes if it served their purposes.

Maybe, as he writes in his new book, McClellan really was mislead by the White House during the vicious (but still relatively minor, given the administration’s innumerable and ongoing crimes against humanity) Valerie Plame affair. But if he thinks that frees him from the responsibility of being a P.R. hack for the hell that’s continuing to be unleashed on Iraq, he’s got another thing coming.

One glance at any given McClellan performance reveals a smug little weasel who could have and should have known better, but had no intention of grasping the obvious. You don’t spin words into little curlicues the way he did by not knowing what those words mean. Maybe he’s now appalled by what he participated in, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t figure out what he was doing at the time. He didn’t want to know, and that’s several significant steps removed from not knowing.

McClellan was a shit-eating yes-man. If you’re reading this in an office right now, there’s one sitting in another cubicle down the hallway. He was a yes-man who couldn’t be bothered by the real truth when his job was to wholeheartedly agree with anything he was told, then disseminate that new-and-improved “truth” to a world that badly needed answers. All he was doing was relaying information, you see. No skin off his nose.

So now he’s written a book about how crafty the Bush administration is, but rest assured that ink stains won’t cover up the blood on his hands. He was a participant, plain and simple, not an innocent bystander.

Way to go there, Scottie. And fuck you.

Paul Tatara