if nothing else good comes from this administration, maybe it's put the "pick dumb ones and they'll stay loyal" theory to rest once and for all

you wanna know what really chaps me about this whole mcclellan book thing?

is it, you ask, the fact that here's yet one more asshole from this administration whose first-person accounting of his own and others' incompetence and duplicity are being met not with the ostracism and disgrace which used to accompany such revelations, but rather with the lucrative book deals and speaking gigs with which america so richly rewards such people today?

or maybe because, with all his high-flown talk of his loyalty to the "truth" being greater than his loyalty to the president, he's pretending not to know that, as white house press secretary, it was nothing more or less than his goddam job to get out there and do what every white house press secretary before and after him has always done and always will do; namely, lie, spin and deflect the search for truth every single fucking day (and that his real sin was not that he did it, but that he did it so badly)?

or could it be because he's being given a forum on such national venues as good morning america and today to spout his self-serving drivel, and getting away pretty much unchallenged by folks who should by all rights--considering his self-admitted ill-treatment of same during his tenure as white house press secretary--be ripping him to little-bitty shreds?

nope, it's none of those things.

don't get me wrong--all of the foregoing is beyond egregious, but after almost eight years of the bush administration, i'm pretty much deadened to shit like that. what i feel here is something much more basic and visceral, maybe even irrational: utter and bottomless contempt for someone who, when left by his own innate inadequacy few options, elects to not only bite the hands that fed him so richly, but then attempts to wrap such craven chickenshit betrayal in the cloak of nobility and service to his country.

i mean, here you have a guy who, were it not for george bush and karl rove, would be toiling away in obscurity in some cubicle somewhere. instead, he--like so many others in this administration--was vaulted into a position of national prominence so far above his level of competence as to be almost incomprehensible.

and how does he repay his benefactors for that taste of the nectar of power that he would never in a million years have experienced otherwise? naturally, with treachery of the most base and cowardly kind.

i'm telling you, i wouldn't piss on this asshole if he was on fire.

[and for you partisans out there: had i been writing a blog back then, i'd have said pretty much the same thing when that little kiss-ass lickspittle george stephanopoulos threw former mentor bill clinton under the bus at the lowest point of his presidency for no other reason than to further his fledgling media career--happened a decade ago and still pisses me off.]