posted May 29, 2008 09:52 AM            

Whether its Saddam or Bush they are still politicians (one a wicked dictator the other benevolent dictator) but both are still dictators. Hehe.. Adolf Hitler may be left brained and Obama right brained - but they both take actions from their brain

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Scott McClellan was one of a few Bush loyalists from Texas who became part of his inner circle of trusted advisers, and remained so during one of the most challenging and contentious periods of recent history. Drawn to Bush by his commitment to compassionate conservatism and strong bipartisan leadership, McClellan served the president for more than seven years, and witnessed day-to-day exactly how the presidency veered off course.
In this refreshingly clear-eyed book, written with no agenda other than to record his experiences and insights for the benefit of history, McClellan provides unique perspective on what happened and why it happened the way it did, including the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, Washington's bitter partisanship, and two hotly contested presidential campaigns. He gives readers a candid look into who George W. Bush is and what he believes, and into the personalities, strengths, and liabilities of his top aides. Finally, McClellan looks to the future, exploring the lessons this presidency offers the American people as we prepare to elect a new leader.

posted May 29, 2008 12:01 PM            

Scott McClellan says Rove talked to Libby. My God, what could the President's principal adviser possibly have to talk about with Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff...except exposing Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all and that proves the administration was retaliating against poor Joe Wilson; Rove and Libby were talking and it couldn't possibly have been about anything else.

Of course, it later turned out Joe Wilson was lying through his teeth and that Saddam did indeed seek to purchase uranium from Niger. And it turned out Joe Wilson was forced to admit to the 9/11 Commission that he took literary license with the truth...meaning he lied. And it turned out that a State Department official outed Valerie Plame, Richard Armitage and that Armitage was dead set against invading Iraq and not at all working as an agent for Bush when he tipped off Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun Times who printed the story about Valerie Plame.

But hey, these are just little details that don't really matter, do they?

And comparing an American President to Saddam Hussein and calling them both dictators is just a little detail deserving no notice. The fact Saddam exited the office of dictator by being overthrown, going into hiding, being discovered by US forces, tried and convicted by an Iraqi court and hung by Iraqis while Bush will serve out the remainder of his 2nd term as elected President and then hand over the Office of President next January to the next elected President...is just a detail. It's entirely reasonable to call them both dictators.

posted May 29, 2008 01:19 PM            

quote:

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Of course, it later turned out Joe Wilson was lying through his teeth and that Saddam did indeed seek to purchase uranium from Niger.

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Just to clarify the statement above with a bit more detail (nice try Jwhop but the Bush administration still jumped the gun on the senerio: )

Iraq's connection to Niger and the Yellowcake deal comes from the alleged document that had Iraqi representitive Zahawie's signature on a yellowcake trade deal which later on turned out to be a fraugulent document. Offcourse, any responsible agency cannot overlook such an important assertment given Iraq's previous track record of trying to get Urainum.

HOWEVER it does comes to mind that the document could have been a "product of disinformation" to accredit Niger's solidarity over its mines (a common practice amoung many forigen secreat agencies.)

In fact:

quote:

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A NATO investigation has identified two named employees of the Niger Embassy in Rome who, having sold a genuine document about Zahawie to Italian and French intelligence agents, then added a forged paper in the hope of turning a further profit. The real stuff went by one route to Washington, and the fakery, via an Italian journalist and the U.S. Embassy in Rome, by another. The upshot was—follow me closely here—that a phony paper alleging a deal was used to shoot down a genuine document suggesting a connection.

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posted May 29, 2008 02:51 PM            

The so called forged document didn't surface until about 6 months AFTER Wilson wrote his poison pen piece for the Treason Times. So.......Joe Wilson most certainly did not have that document or even knowledge of that document at that time. That's a fact Wilson had to admit before the 9/11 Commission and one of his lies among others he's had to admit.

Further Xodian, When Bush said...The British have learned Saddam recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa....that Xodian was an absolutely true statement by Bush. A true statement proved by the Butler Report...that's Lord Butler to you Xodian who concluded the Bush statement "was well founded". Meaning true.

In addition to that Xodian, a bipartisan Senate committee found exactly the same thing. Bush did not manipulate intelligence information nor did Bush lie.

The uranium/yellow cake statement which came from the British did not depend on the so called forged uranium document and neither did the Bush statement.

Neither did Bush "jump the gun" Xodian. Bush made an accurate report to the American people based on facts in his possession. That's a fact which has been proved by 3 separate committees set up to investigate that statement and others which lead up to the war; one in Britain and 2 in the United States.

posted May 29, 2008 04:33 PM            

quote:

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Further Xodian, When Bush said...The British have learned Saddam recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa....that Xodian was an absolutely true statement by Bush. A true statement proved by the Butler Report...that's Lord Butler to you Xodian who concluded the Bush statement "was well founded". Meaning true.

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Yes and No. Where the Butler report does acclaim that there was enough evidence at 2002 for the invasion to go through, it does not affirms that intelligence to be accurate. The Butler report concluded that the intelligence used for the justification of the invasion was found to be "unreliable" and overstreatched.

QUOTE:

quote:

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"more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear", and that judgements had stretched available intelligence "to the outer limits".

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I can see why the Bush government made a hastey decision upon its plans to invade Iraq Jwhop but it still doesn't lets the administration off the hook. The intelligence was still gathered through third party sources and the emphisis placed upon it was far too great. The deputy director of the CIA should have known that.

posted May 29, 2008 06:08 PM            

It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

The Butler Report affirmed what the British government had said about the Niger uranium story back in 2003, and specifically endorsed what Bush said as well.

Butler Report: By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” was well-founded.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Report

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported July 7, 2004 that the CIA had received reports from a foreign government (not named, but probably Britain) that Iraq had actually concluded a deal with Niger to supply 500 tons a year of partially processed uranium ore, or "yellowcake." That is potentially enough to produce 50 nuclear warheads.

The Senate report said the CIA then asked a "former ambassador" to go to Niger and report. That is a reference to Joseph Wilson -- who later became a vocal critic of the President's 16 words. The Senate report said Wilson brought back denials of any Niger-Iraq uranium sale, and argued that such a sale wasn't likely to happen. ]b]But the Intelligence Committee report also reveals that Wilson brought back something else as well -- evidence that Iraq may well have wanted to buy uranium.
Wilson reported that he had met with Niger's former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki, who said that in June 1999 he was asked to meet with a delegation from Iraq to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries.
Based on what Wilson told them, CIA analysts wrote an intelligence report saying former Prime Minister Mayki "interpreted 'expanding commercial relations' to mean that the (Iraqi) delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales." In fact, the Intelligence Committee report said that "for most analysts" Wilson's trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."

One wonders why the subject of uranium ore sales never came up since Joe Wilson was sent to Niger specifically to ask questions about Saddam seeking uranium ore from Niger but according to Wilson, the subject never came up. One wonders what Wilson thought he was supposed to be doing there in the first place.

The subject of uranium sales never actually came up in the meeting, according to what Wilson later told the Senate Intelligence Committee staff. He quoted Mayaki as saying that when he met with the Iraqis he was wary of discussing any trade issues at all because Iraq remained under United Nations sanctions. According to Wilson, Mayaki steered the conversation away from any discussion of trade.

For that reason, Wilson himself has publicly dismissed the significance of the 1999 meeting. He said on NBC’s Meet the Press May 2, 2004:

Wilson: …At that meeting, uranium was not discussed. It would be a tragedy to think that we went to war over a conversation in which uranium was not discussed because the Niger official was sufficiently sophisticated to think that perhaps he might have wanted to discuss uranium at some later date.

But that's not the way the CIA saw it at the time. In the CIA's view, Wilson's report bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa. The Senate report cited an intelligence officer who reviewed Wilson’s report upon his return from Niger:

Committee Report: He (the intelligence officer) said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that the Nigerian officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerian Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting.

"Reasonable to Assess"

At this point the CIA also had received "several intelligence reports" alleging that Iraq wanted to buy uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and from Somalia, as well as from Niger. The Intelligence Committee concluded that "it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency reporting and other available intelligence."

Reasonable, that is, until documents from an Italian magazine journalist showed up that seemed to prove an Iraq-Niger deal had actually been signed. The Intelligence Committee said the CIA should have been quicker to investigate the authenticity of those documents, which had "obvious problems" and were soon exposed as fakes by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"We No Longer Believe"

Both the Butler report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report make clear that Bush's 16 words weren't based on the fake documents. The British didn't even see them until after issuing the reports -- based on other sources -- that Bush quoted in his 16 words. But discovery of the Italian fraud did trigger a belated reassessment of the Iraq/Niger story by the CIA.

Now Xodian, I see you're attempting to veer away from the obvious truth that Bush did not lie, did not fudge intelligence estimates and analysis and did not manipulate intelligence data to produce a desired result.

Whatever Bush may have done, he didn't lie to the American people and neither Bush nor anyone in the Bush administration retaliate against Joe Wilson by outing his wife as a CIA agent.

When people deliberately make up lies to support their positions, I know it's desperation time. Indeed, it was desperation time for the uncouth nuts at move on dot org, daily kos, democrat underground, the Traitor Kerry campaign and the entire range of US leftist morons who attempted to lie their favorite traitor, John Kerry into the White House.

Two of the biggest lies ever told about a presidential candidate and President were these 2 lies and they were repeated endlessly and still are being repeated by morons.

Bush lied to lead America to war.

posted May 30, 2008 09:32 AM            

By John Hinderaker

Scott McClellan's appearance on the Today Show this morning had elements of comedy, as McClellan wanted to talk about bipartisanship while Meredith Vieira desperately prodded him to say something controversial, or, failing that, something specific. The most concrete anti-Bush statements were quoted by Vieira, from McClellan's book, under the headline "Weapons of Mass Destruction:"

'Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East. Rather than open this Pandora's Box...the administration chose a different path...not employing out and out deception, but shading the truth...in an effort to convince the world Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction....The administration used innuendo and implication and intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.'

Ironically, McClellan addressed this very subject in his last briefing as press secretary. At that time, before he was trying to sell books and ingratiate himself with liberals, he rightly condemned the revisionist history that is peddled by the left:

Q Some people seemed to take out their frustrations yesterday on Secretary Rumsfeld. What did the President think about that exchange? And does it change his opinion at all about the Secretary?

MR. McCLELLAN: "People have a right to express their views, but I think you ought to step back and review history a little bit, not try to rewrite history. Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat. It was a threat to the region, it was a threat to the world. And in the aftermath of September 11th, this President made a determination that we were going to confront threats before they fully materialized, before it was too late.

And this President has led the way. We all saw the same intelligence. Now, the intelligence was wrong, but it was the collective judgment of the intelligence community that decisions were made upon. And this President took steps to appoint a bipartisan independent commission, and that commission took a look at the intelligence because it's vital in this dangerous time we live in when there are terrorists who still want to strike America, that we make sure we have the best possible intelligence.

*** And regardless of where you stood before, this is a time when we all need to be coming together to support our troops in Iraq and to support our plan for victory in Iraq, because success in Iraq is critical to winning the war on terrorism. It is the central front in the war on terrorism. The terrorists recognize that. They recognize how high the stakes are, and you see the Zarqawi video. We must continue to move forward and help the Iraqi people who have shown that they want to build a brighter future, that they want to live in freedom, when 12 million people show up at the polls, and when a group of leaders that they elected comes together and forms a national unity government. ***

Let's look at the collective judgment of the intelligence community. It was outlined in the National Intelligence Estimate, and it was provided to members of Congress, too, so that they could look at. Intelligence around the world, in different countries around the world, was the same kind of intelligence that we saw. And the world recognized that Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat."

posted May 30, 2008 11:54 AM            

I stand by my post and will requote what I said in it:

quote:

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I have never claimed that Bush lied. Did the administration make an iffy decision based upon third party sources? That they did.

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posted May 30, 2008 12:45 PM            

2 independent commissions have confirmed Saddam's government made contact with government officials in Nigeria. Further, on that trade delegation from Iraq just happened to be the head of Saddam's nuclear program, Wissam al-Zahawie.

Vision on these points is not in the least cloudy Xodian. Saddam did indeed send a delegation to Niger to discuss purchasing uranium.

The British stand by the information they furnished the United States to this very day and the Butler Report concluded there was sufficient evidence in the hands of British intelligence to sustain the intelligence report Britain furnished the United States.

Bush did not lie, nor did Bush mislead the American people.

Nigeria's sole major income producing commodity...aside from oil IS uranium. I seriously doubt the country with the 2nd largest known reserves of oil in the world wanted to talk to Niger about importing Nigerian oil.

posted May 30, 2008 01:01 PM            

a) ONCE AGAIN, I affirm that the decision in question was based upon the given intelligence AT THE TIME, but the intelligence in question is still faulty. The Butler report highlights the intelligence to be ovemphisized upon in the end. The Bush administration may have not lied but it still is accountable for its actions on faulty intelligence.

b) Zahawie may have visited Niger but he did not engage in any tenitive dealings. The official documents that supposably linked any dealings around Uranium purchising in question were found to be forgeries even if it was 6 months after Mr. McClellan's little press blostering. BTW: My argument is completely independent of McClellan's little book. That much should be obvious by now.

c)

quote:

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October 15, 2001: US intelligence agencies receive reports from the Italian intelligence service SISMI of a supposed agreement between Iraq and Niger for the sale of yellowcake uranium. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research considers the report "highly suspect" because the French control Niger's uranium industry.

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The security of transport maybe Niger's responsibility but the mining operations within the area are directly under the control of the French consortium who would be tipped off of any large Uranium bulk transportation.

posted May 30, 2008 02:51 PM            

Bush never said...and the British never said..in fact no one ever said Saddam bought uranium from Niger. Further, those documents had nothing to do with what Bush said and what Joe Wilson later said or what the CIA believed..or what the British said about Saddam trying to buy Uranium from Niger.

Saddam had dummy corporations set up all over the world to bypass export controls of nations...so he could continue to buy items from the restricted list imposed by sanctions. The French were no problem whatsoever since they were part of the problem and supplying Saddam all through the embargo. Ditto China and ditto Russia and ditto Germany.

Further, Saddam bought not only high officials of the UN..those corrupt bast@rds but also business men and women he bribed to get sanctions lifted as well as bribing them in a skimming operation from which he managed to build numerous palaces with the money he skimmed from the UN Oil for Food Program.

Bush didn't jump the gun. The United Nations..the utterly corrupt, bungling, moronic boobs whom you admire were derelict in their duties for about 12 years in making Saddam Hussein live up to his ceasefire obligations. Those ceasefire obligations were many and included a long list of things Saddam was supposed to do and a list of things Saddam was not supposed to do.

If the bungling, intellectual pygmies and corrupt boobs at the UN had their way, Saddam would still be murdering, raping and torturing his citizens.

Instead, because Bush acted where the UN utterly failed to act, Iraqi citizens, about 25 million of them are free of Saddam's murderous regime and have elected a secular, representative government.

I know that just burns the as$es of all leftists, the corrupt UN and all apologists for the corrupt UN but that's the case and it's TS baby.

Bush did the right thing for the right reasons while the bunglers at the UN sat around warming their chairs with their thumbs up their as$es.

posted May 30, 2008 03:08 PM            

Now the Bush administration has a lot of explaining to do to the taxpayers as to when and if the endevor in Iraq will go over smoothly or not. How long will the stabilization senerio last, we can't tell, nor can we say at the apparent cost of it all. The Iraqi troops themselves are no where near ready to take upon the task of sustaining the stability within the region and the insurgency within the region will not die out anytime soon. Not to mention the budget concerning the current conflict is overinflated as it is. Here is hoping it all goes over smoothly because if it doesn't, the region is a key geographical ground that will usher an instability in the region that will surely harm many of the key neighbouring countries.

posted May 30, 2008 03:59 PM            

The United States doesn't need UN permission or UN backing or UN approval to do or not do any damned thing at all.

The UN is not in the US chain of command and while the bunglers, boobs, thumbsuckers and morons may express opinions and wet themselves over US actions, that's the extent of UN power over the United States.

We intend to keep it that way for very good and sufficient reasons...including the UN Oil for Food scandal, the genocide in Rwanda overseen by the UN and the ongoing genocide in Sudan while UN morons sit on their sorry as$es, among others.

That's not a matter of perspective.

The cost of the war in US dollars is no business of the UN and it's no business of yours either Xodian. Bush doesn't owe you or the UN any explanation for the costs of removing Saddam and rebuilding Iraq...and Afghanistan.

posted May 31, 2008 09:01 AM            

An examination of published reports reveals that Scott McClellan's kiss-and-smell betrayal of George W. Bush is a far cry from the book McClellan started out to write and was shaped into an offensive tome by a publisher with close ties to George Soros.

To understand how McClellan's literary knife-in-the-back evolved, one has to know something about the book industry.

Unlike fiction, a non-fiction book usually hasn't been written before it's sold to a publisher. The author normally puts together an outline and/or synopsis detailing what the book will be about and how it will be structured, and writes 1-3 sample chapters to show the author's writing ability. The author's agent then shops the proposal around to prospective publishing houses.

The agent actually lands the deal, so the choice of agents is crucial. Any author normally starts at the top of the A list and works his or her way down until--or if--they find an agent with whom they can work. According to an Associated Press article,

"McClellan's book does not fit the pattern of Washington megadeals. He was not represented by Washington, D.C., attorney Bob Barnett, whose clients include Tenet and countless political leaders, but by the much less known Craig Wiley, whose most famous client is actor Ron Silver."

Not to slight Mr. Silver, a gifted talent, but that's hardly the reaction one would expect to a proposal promising the kind of sensational accusations which have created a media furor and catapulted McClellan's book to the top of Amazon's charts. Oh, and put quite a bit of coin in Messrs. McClellan and Wiley's pockets. Agents are paid on a percentage of sales basis. The more controversial and sellable they think the book will be, the more likely they are to take it on.

Nor did publishers see enough in the proposal to jump at the chance to publish it.

"It was shopped around but, like others who publish in the category, we didn't even take a meeting...." said Steve Ross, who was head of the Crown Publishing Group at Random House Inc. at the time McClellan was offering his manuscript. This in an industry that, just like newspapers, appears to be dying a slow death at the hands of new media, print-on-demand, and other modern technologies, and is desperate for books that can add substantial numbers to the bottom line.

Again, agents start at the tope of the food chain and work their way down. McClellan finally reached a deal with PublicAffairs, which according to the AP "specializes in policy books by billionaire George Soros" and others.

Further, the unwritten book wasn't published based upon McClellan's proposal. "(Public Affairs founder Peter) Osnos said he didn't even read the proposal" the article reports. Instead, Osnos "sought out people who knew McClellan and said they regarded him as an honest man unhappy in his job."

In other words, Osnos didn't look at the proposal of the book McClellan wanted to write; he was more interested in confirming that McClellan was disgruntled with the White House.

PublicAffairs editor Lisa Kaufman confirmed to the AP that the proposal McClellan shopped around was nothing like the book that plunges the knife into his benefactor's back. "The original proposal was somewhat general," Kaufman admits, "so before making an offer on the book we talked to Scott at some length."

It takes little imagination to gather how the conversation between George Soros's publisher and a disgruntled former Bush administration official hawking his unwritten memoirs, still unsold after having gone through the tope tier of publishers, went.

But imagination isn't needed.

A book's editor and its author work extremely closely--with the author sweating over every word, every detail, and the editor helping shape the pacing and overall tone of the manuscript. Kaufman told the AP that as McClellan wrote the book the "tone began to be directed toward issues and events that some people would rather he not be straightforward and candid about." (Emphasis added.)

PublicAffairs reportedly paid McClellan a $75,000 advance. An advance is the only part of an author's financial deal with a publisher that's guaranteed. It is literally an advance on the author's royalties. If the book sells enough copies that the author's royalties exceed the advance, the author will make more money.

Some have argued that McClellan's small advance negates the financial incentive as a reason for McClellan to bring forward these charges, when the opposite is true. When George Tenet or Bill Clinton are offered millions in advances, they've already made their money. The books will probably not "earn out" (pay the author more than the advance) no matter how many copies are sold. With a small advance, the author is under pressure to sell as many copies as possible.

With only a $75,000 advance, and working with a publisher and editor who were more interested in producing a book written by a disgruntled former Bush staffer than they were in the book McClellan had proposed, McClellan had every financial incentive to give them exactly the book they wanted.

And he apparently did.

According to the AP article, "Rival publishers say they had no sense that McClellan would make such explosive observations."

posted June 01, 2008 10:21 AM            

During the Civil War, when the issues of right and wrong were clear, one of President Lincoln’s appointees, General George McClellan, betrayed him. The anti-war Democrats to whom McClellan pandered were called “Copperheads.” They rallied around McClellan to defeat the president politically, when they could not defeat the armies of America militarily. McClellan had a pretty high opinion of himself. He knew what Lincoln did not: That the war come not be won, that giving up and bringing the troops home was the only sensible answer, and that the president was not much of a leader.

Democrats overwhelmingly supported this type of defeatism and these Copperheads would shrink from almost nothing to insure that the war ended, whatever the sacrifice already made to preserve the Union and whatever the costs of allowing the Union to dissolve. These Copperheads did not really care about moral issues, like Lincoln and his Republicans did. Slavery was an abomination in the South and democracy scarcely existed, but McClellan and the Copperheads did not care.

The public approval ratings for Lincoln – if there had been such ratings in 1864 – would have shown him as the least popular president in history. The mainstream media of the time pilloried him mercilessly. Although Lincoln was intelligent, lesser men, like McClelland, considered him a buffoon. Although Lincoln had an almost transcendent nobility, lesser men, like McClellan, considered him no more than a crass pol. Although Lincoln would be judged by history to be great, lesser men, like McClellan, judged him to be ordinary.
McClelland was putty in the hands of the treacherous Copperheads. His own sense of self-importance made McClellan feel that he was much more important to the war effort than the Republican Party or the Republican president. He fancied himself at the center of things, when actually he was an incompetent whose time spent in the administration prolonged the war.

McClellan was a Scot, coming out of the long history of brave Scots. The man history has called Braveheart is the icon of this heroic tradition. But McClelland was anything but a William Wallace. While Braveheart martyred himself for his nation, for his king, Robert the Bruce, and for human freedom, the Scottish-American McClelland placed himself about his leader and his nation: He, McClellan, not his nation or its leader was the focus of all that mattered to him.

History has not been kind to McClellan or the Democrats he served. McClellan did not serve his nation or the principles of liberty upon which his nation was founded. He had a chance for greatness, but his self-importance got in the way. There is no “McClellan Memorial,” nor should there be. Tenacious and loyal lieutenants of Lincoln like Grant and Sherman would earn a place in history. Sherman, unlike McClellan, was so lacking in personal ambition that the political phrase “Shermanesque” has become associated with complete rejection of crowns of office (“If nominated I will not run. If elected I will not serve.”) Grant spent the end of his life writing magnificent memoirs, as he was painfully dying, so that his family would not live in poverty. Those lieutenants of Lincoln, although not perfect, were real men, great men, noble men, men of history. McClelland is only remembered as a disloyal, self-centered whiner.

McClellan and his Copperheads of Lincoln’s times are, of course, the McClellan and his modern Copperheads of Bush’s times. Historians can argue about the merits of the Civil War, although overwhelmingly the consensus of historians is that it was an awful, but essential, war – a grim duty for any good American. No one, however, can dispute that if McClellan deigned to serve as the commander of the Army of the Potomac, that he had a duty to prosecute the war with diligence and duty, not to undermine the war and Lincoln to feed his own appetite.

No one should dispute, either, that Scott McClellan, the moral descendent of the earlier McClellan, could have rejected the premise for Operation Iraqi Freedom, eschewed the benefits of serving in the Bush Administration, and honorably opposed the administration and its war. Or he could have been like Grant or Sherman, loyal despite the hardships and second-guessing that inevitably follow in the wake of long wars. Or McClellan could have followed the path of least moral resistance, of lowest personal risk, of greatest ease and comfort – he could have served as Press Secretary when that brought him gain and then become friends of the Copperheads when that brought him greater gain.