The Smoking Gun in the Form of Scott McClellan

Posted by GottaLaff , Brave New Films at 1:00 PM on November 21, 2007.

This post, written by GottaLaff, originally appeared on Cliff Schecter's Brave New Films Blog

My patented, award-winning quick notes on today's Thom Hartmann Show. As always, there are many accurate quotes among the paraphrased ones.

The mainstream media is burying the Scott McClellan story today. The question is: How will the media and Congress handle this story? Will McClellan Be John Dean to Bush's Richard Nixon? They were both confidants of the president, and both came out with bombshells.

We still live in a nation where we can discuss these things.

Here are the rationales for impeachment, the things Bush has done: (that and more on the flip)

--Wireless searches of Americans and lying about it. The 4th Amendment is unambiguous. Everyone shall be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Bush tried to lie his way out of this one: "...Constitutional guarantees are in place... We value the Constitution"... Bush is lying through his teeth.

And when he's caught, he says, "There's a process that goes through the Department of Justice...about leaks...My personal opinion is, it's a shameful act for someone to disclose thes very important program in a time of war. It's helping the enemy..." Be afraid! We'll do away with the Constitution, just like Musharraf did.

He's wiretapping the same way Nixon did. What would Gingrich have done if Clinton did what Bush is doing?

--Invading Iraq illegally. And the resolution that the Senate passed that required Bush to write letter in 60 days? -- and he did -- It's a lie.

--Torture

--Unlawful combatant status

--Extraordinary rendition

--Gitmo, the treatment of detainees

--Outing a CIA agent

--The yellowcake forgery

--The grand jury leaks

--Commuting Libby's sentence, if it was done to prevent Libby from implicating Bush in criminal acts.

This is of Nixonian proportions...where is the media?

The President of the United States is revealed by his own press secretary as one of the liars around an act that Bush's own father referred to as a traitorous act. Bush is not the Decider, the Constitution is.

--The Downing Street Minutes says that Bush was fully intending to go to war with iraq, no matter who disagreed with him or what the evidence was. Another bald faced lie.

--The inspectors were in Iraq, Hans Blix was saying we're not finding anything at all. Blix said he had no evidence of WMD. Bush made the inspectors leave so he could drop bombs, and he lied about that. He lied about Saddam kicking out the inspectors.

-- He lied about finding the biological labs.

--Signing statements: Another impeachable offense.

At what point do the lies affect the media? Some blogs, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann devoted time to it, but nobody in the corporate media.

When Scott McClellan lied, there were several members of the media who knew he was lying (those subpoenaed: Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, Judith Miller), and pedaled the lies. They were used to pedal the lies and they went with it. So, treason was committed by 4th estate and the government. The media is failing us.

Scott McClellan is promoting his book 6 months in advance, which would kill it. An author usually drops leaks a month before, which starts the news cycle. This is Scott trying to clear his name, pointing out the lies.

The LA Times placed the story on page 20, on the bottom right hand corner. Here's the story that took up most of the page: Seven remaining Munchkins were honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

All infotainment all the time. Where are the Bob Woodwards of our day?

Mike Huckabee jumped on this last night on Hardball, saying it's a bad time to have a DC address, positioning himself as the outsider, the Republican who can clean up the mess.

The press is paying no attention.

And what about the question of whether Patrick Fitzgerald will revive his case? The NY Times didn't have a thing on that, at least not on their front page.

We have to dig for it. That's crazy. Call your papers. What's going on?

A monopoly means we no longer have a free press. The media has an obligation to talk about what's really going on. It's the only industry that has that protection in the Constitution. Corporations have so much power now, they're afraid to lose their access to power. We have the Money Party now.

9/11 shook up the personality of these people [in the media]. The media are afraid of losing their jobs, their livelihood, they're afraid to tell the truth.

Tagged as: books, bush, rove, libby, mcclellan

GottaLaff is a regular blogger for Cliff Schecter's Blog