McClellan: Bush farewell sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/McClellan_Bush_farewell_sounds_like_Charlie_0116.html

You know things are bad when your former spokesman is comparing you with a character on Charlie Brown.

Or if you're a Republican president and they're going on MSNBC's Countdown.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann grilled former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan last night about the president's farewell address to the nation. McClellan, who turned critic after exiting the White House, didn't exactly wax elegantly about his onetime boss.

"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have tarnished our government's moral standing in the world," McClellan said. "If you look at the speech it was really a feel-good farewell speech. It was designed one final chance to burnish his legacy by highlighting his humanity, showing his humanity, his compassion, his inner decency and good intentions."

But "there are really two problems they don't seem to get," Bush's ex-press secretary remarked. "First of all, the public trust. The president long ago sadly lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. Unless he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people they are not tuning in."

"It's the same song," he continued, "and just a different variation of it. It's like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher. The... reason he lost the public trust was because of his actions and his policies and the way he went about those policies or implementing those policies and selling those policies to the American people. I think that you can't -- it's terribly mistaken to think good intentions and your inner decency will somehow outweigh your actions and policies and the way you went about them with the American people. They're terribly mistaken if they think the American people think that is more important than what he did while he was in office."

Charlie Brown's teacher was represented in movies as a voice made by a trombone with a plunger -- continually squawking but never making sense.

Ironically, it was McClellan who sang the Bush song as spokesman for the White House during some of its most tumultuous periods -- declaring that the White House had no involvement in the outing of a CIA officer while the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney was obstructing justice in the investigation. McClellan said that he'd been lied to, and this betrayal resulted in a harsh tell-all, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, released earlier this year.

"I suspect the next big platform for trying to sell his legacy will be Karl Rove's book," McClellan told Olbermann. "I suspect that in that book it will be an attempt to shift responsibility and put blame everywhere else for everything that went wrong during the last eight years whether it was the Katrina response, whether it was the basis for the Iraq war, the prosecution of the Iraq war or the economy or the poisonous Washington environment, responsibility lies everywhere else except with this president. That is a terrible mistake."