McClellan: 'The President Isn't A Liar, He's... Umm, An Idiot!'

Yesterday, Scott McClellan demanded an apology from the media for not calling him on his bullshit more often pointing out their lies on Iraq. This was in response to the Washington Post story about how the Pentagon field report transmitted to Washington stating the infamous trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons was received two days before the President publicly declared "We found the weapons of mass destruction".

McClellan's beef was that some reports (such as one on ABC News) seemed to insinuate that President Bush was aware of that Pentagon report before he made his statement two days later. This was preposterous, McClellan insisted, and called the reporting an "embarrassment for the media". Of course, when asked when exactly the White House did become aware of the report, McClellan said that he didn't know and would 'look into the matter'. So was he just assuming before or lying or... what?

Still, for the sake of argument, let's believe McClellan (tee hee) when he says that the President wasn't aware of the Pentagon report when he proudly told the nation we found the trailers weapons of mass destruction. This would mean that the President of the United States went public and made a major announcement without having obtained all the relevant information. He was so out of the loop, he didn't know his own White House had received a report debunking the very information he was about to present or simply hadn't bothered to read it. Wow. Yea, that's sooo much better than the President just having straight up lied about the findings. Is this the best spin they can do at this point?

As usual, if the White House has to paint Bush as an idiot or a liar... they go with idiot every time.

Either way it says the same thing about President Bush- he is untrustworthy.

And Josh Marshall looks at another McClellan nugget from yesterday-

"I think the CIA will tell you -- and I spoke to them earlier today -- that a finished product like this, a white paper like this, takes coordination, it takes debating, it takes vetting, and it's not something that they will tell you turns on a dime. It's a complex intelligence white paper and it's ... one derived from highly classified information takes a substantial amount of time to coordinate and to run through a declassification process."

I see. So declassification is such a lengthy and complicated process, that the President himself couldn't himself be aware of its findings (or couldn't bother to tell us he was lying about it- whatever they're trying to say here)... but when he wants to punish a White House critic, he can instantaneously 'declassify' a document (or rather- just random parts of it which appear in isolation to help his case) and secretly have it anonymously leaked to willing reporters? Okay then!

And yet, again, the President rushed out to make an announcement when he didn't know/care about the facts. In my book, that's still a lie. And we're just assuming the President didn't specifically know his statement was false when he made it. And if you believe that, I have some yellowcake from Africa I'd like to sell you...