Wednesday Morning Massacre: McClellan 'Resigns', Rove 'Demoted'

The White House's idea of a staff shakeup- focusing on some of the least consequential positions and amounting to little more than a game of musical chairs between existing staffers- continues this week, a sure sign that the President's tanking poll numbers are being heeded at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And you thought he didn't listen to the polls. Well, the President is the decider and he decided he's in big trouble.

From the AP: White House Staff Shake-Up Continues

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove gave up some of his responsibilities and White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced his resignation Wednesday, continuing a shake-up in President Bush's administration that has already yielded a new chief of staff...

The McClellan exit seems to be getting the bigger press. As I noted in my last entry, the White House's main concern is PR, hence Scotty has to go. It sucks for him; he was only doing his job, it wasn't his fault the lies are becoming increasingly harder to sell. How much talent does it take to tell reporters you can't comment on an "ongoing investigation", anyway?

Scott McClellan will rename in the positition until a replacement is chosen. My personal choices for the new Press Secretary include Sean Hannity, Jeff Gannon, Powerline's John Hinderaker, or Baghdad Bob. Among the actual possible replacements is Fox News' Tony Snow, a job he and his colleagues have been doing for five years already. Also up for the job are Dan Bartlett (counselor to the President) and Dan Senor (former coalition spokesman after the invasion of Iraq).

None, unfortunately, will have that scared, cold-sweat look Scott made so endearing every day.

President Bush on McClellan: “One of these days, he and I will be rocking in chairs in Texas talking about the good old days of his time as the Press Secretary, and I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now that I can say to Scott: job well done.”

Why Texas? Why not on Trent Lott's new porch when you fulfill your promise to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast bigger and better than even before? Ohhh, I'm sorry, I forgot we're supposed to have forgotten all those lofty promises. My bad.

The bigger news, of course, is the change of status for Karl Rove.

Karl Rove's position hasn't changed. He is still Deputy Chief of Staff, he is just giving up his duties on policy development to Joel Kaplan (who had a hand in disrupting the 2000 recount) from the Office of Management and Budget (question- does Mr. Leaky still have his security clearance? Answer: Yes.). At first, this sounds like Rove is in bigger trouble than they have been letting on. Either that or the White House wants him off the policy beat (where he did what exactly?) so he can concentrate his evil energies full-time on what he does best... helping to smear and scheme the Republicans to electoral victory. Any Democrats have adopted dark-skinned babies or made enemies out of people who served in a war at the same time as you? Be forewarned.

The congressional elections, as I noted the other day, are important to the White House. They need to make sure the President's rubberstamp Republican accomplices stay in control. Or else they might face their greatest nightmare- accountability. The permanent Republican majority has been one of Rove's main goals. Now that their hubris is causing it to implode, it's not surprising they want him on 24-7 damage control.

Will it be enough to stop the implosion? We'll find out in November. But one thing is clear, these are desperate times at the White House. As Josh Marshall notes, "the real story here continues to be that things are so bad at the White House, the level of denial and secrets to be kept, the self-bamboozlement and bad-faith so profound, that they just can't manage to bring in any new blood." Yup. They're scared. They should be.

And that's all for today's cosmetic White House "shake ups".

Stay tuned tomorrow for the resignation of Barney the dog.