Dread Scott

If nothing else, Bob Dole sold a whole lot more Viagra today. As Scott McClellan took his love to the other side of town, the party scorned continued its withering dismissal as Bob Dole unleashed the email equivalent of a four-hour erection.

“There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues,” Dole said to McClellan in a Thursday email disclosed today. “No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits and, spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, ‘Biting The Hand That Fed Me.’ Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years….if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high-profile job.”

Dole winds up for a big finish. “That would have taken integrity and courage but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively. You’re a hot ticket now, but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?”

If Bob Dole had this kind of righteous piss and vinegar coursing through his antediluvian bloodstream in 1996, he might have become President. Oh wait, he had it in 1976 and 1988 during his prior two shots at the Executive Branch, and that’s why he’s our most beloved seething ex-Senator. For those of us who crave longevity and venerability, we can only wish he lets slip the direction to his fountain of rage. What most of us know about mortality and the dangers of unbridled enmity, Bob Dole’s scold was the kind of venomous missive that has left younger men prone on the floor clutching their chest, their eyes staying open for their dying breath and foamy saliva bubbling from their unrepentant rictus.

Scott McClellan is going to have to spend some time between now and December drastically overhauling his Christmas list, and with his declaration today that he’d be willing to testify before Congress about the Valerie Plame outing, he might do well to advertise on Craigslist for a food taster.

There are a lot of people in the GOP’s Big Tent very angry at Scott McClellan this week. I’d like to say that I have better things to talk about on VeepsBlog, but the last three days, it doesn’t get much better than this, and every day there’s another half-dozen logs on the fire.

Set your Google News Alerts to “Scott McClellan book reaction” at the peril of your bandwidth. I would strain my index finger out of commission hitting F5 if I tried to keep up with every new dispatch on Huffington Post.

The White House and their surrogates have dug in and their primary talking point is lamenting their once-favorite Indian who has strayed so far from the reservation.

The further you get from legitimate GOP circles and the more sordid and scathing the declamations get. FOX News’ Fox & Friends Caustic Chatty Cathy, Gretchen Carlson, cautioned Thursday morning, “Scott McClellan better not have any skeletons in his closet. I hope he didn’t do anything that he doesn’t want the world to know about because we all have, and all of his secrets are going to be coming out.”

A more ominous and potentially-salacious caveat came from outed White House Press Corps infilitrator and retired male prostitute Jeff Gannon yesterday. “I can say without fear of contradiction, that I knew Scott better than any other White House correspondent or Washington reporter.” I’m not even sure I want to conceive the implications of that loaded statement. I imagine that this is just Jeff Gannon throwing a grenade into the mix to put another quarter in his fifteen minutes of fame, and in my wildest imagination I can’t conjure up the picture of the two of them spooning, but this is the 21st Century and a brave new world, where any Republican is susceptible to the love that dare not speak its name, so anything’s possible. If Gannon and McClellan have found sympatico, I wouldn’t begrudge either of them, but it seems a bit unlikely to me.

No, Thom Hartman on Portland’s Air America affiliate KPOJ said this morning before his national show what I thought but I hadn’t yet apprehended: Scott McClellan yesterday on his first round of news shows since the early excerpts of his book came out–that, unlike his days on the podium in service to the Bush Administration, he looked like a man entirely at peace.

That’s a good spot to be in, especially as his world is in the process of changing in a way he cannot have possibly imagined. Or maybe he had imagined it, working for as long as he did within the Bush Lair and the duplicity that was as prevalent as oxygen. For as much as they professed surprised as Scott’s “betrayal” this week, McClellan delivered an advanced copy of his book to the White House on April 23, and met with White House counsel to vet potential security and executive privilege issues, and no one said boo to the content of the book. But it’s five weeks hence and they’re all there with their talking points.

Because all guns are aimed at Scott’s kneecaps, and given the bunker mentality of the Bush Administration, there’s no way they are going to give any quarter. He’s agreed to testify before Congress on the lies that he claims he witnessed while he was working in the service of BushCo–lies that so many people believed for so long, without the inner-circle corroboration that Scott McClellan has brought to the table.