"A man with a conscience" - words Bush and Cheney hate to hear

Scott McClellan appears to be a Republican with a conscience - the kind of person that I am sure Rove had hoped he, Cheney, and the Republican Congressional leadership (including Gingrich) had driven out of the Republican Party.



Not, mind you, that I don't think the money he will make from his book is negligible to Scotty. It better not be. He has burned his bridges to the conservatives. He'll never get wing-nut welfare like I. "Scooter" Libby has done since he fell on his sword and was convicted to protect Dick Cheney.

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Addendum 3:51 PM CDT
The New York Times has a good article on the reaction to Scotty McClellan's revelations. In particular, Karl Rove,political strategist; Frances Fragos Townsend, former domestic security adviser; Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary, and Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to the president, are all using similar terms to describe McClellan as a disaffected former employee of the White House who appears to have been influenced by publishers to pump up sales of his book by making outrageous, untrue accusations.

The terminology they are all using - in concert - appears to have been crafted by White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino. It's a highly organized White House push-back against McClellan, something that he clearly knew to expect.

I'll bet those people, Bush, Cheney and Rice are all looking around them wondering who the next "person of conscience" will be. "Conscience" is clearly a word they don't recognize fondly.

Also interesting. Over at Huffington Post Arianna entitles her post "Scotty Come Lately" and asks "What took you so long" about McClellan's revelations. More interesting than McClellan's revelations, which anyone who reads the blogs knew about long ago, is the way the Inside the Beltway based media has come to attention and saluted the story which they have previously ignored.

This action on the part of the inside the beltway media seems to be a reaction to (1) hearing the story publicly from one of the premier inside the beltway individuals (Scotty) and at the same time, (2) represents a reaction to his highly credible accusations that the media didn't do its job in the run-up to the war.

The media still won't listen to anything from outside Washington, but they are clearly going to be a lot more aggressive about the administration from now on - now that it's a Democratic administration, just as they always have been.

So for the political media, this reaction is just more of their continued incompetence and general irrelevance. They are just taking advantage of Bush's long lame duckness to start early.