Our Country: A Million Little Pieces

.....Rebel Girl takes a pause in her grading marathon to draw this parallel for y'all:

.....Two new books are out and the authors are already taking their victory laps and depositing their big bucks in the bank: disgraced fraudulent memoirist James Frey has his "novel," Bright Shiny Morning" and former White House Press secretary Scott McClellan has his own book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception." You remember Scott McClellan - he was up there at the podium during the war, during Katrina, during Gitmo.

.....From the Washington Post:

.....Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war."…McClellan, who resigned in April 2006, stops short of saying Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not "employing out-and-out deception."
.....But in a chapter titled "Selling the War," he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush "managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."
.....McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war, comes to a stark conclusion: "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

.....Rebel Girl would like to write more about this but she has work to do.
.....So all she wants to do is point out how these two men remind her of a recent student who, when caught plagiarizing, didn't hesitate to ask if he could re-write the plagiarized paper for credit and stood there smiling at her.
.....Rebel Girl, of course, answered no.
.....It seems that few said no to these two men who profit and continue to profit from lying to the public – and in McClellen's case, lying which led to the deaths and suffering of thousands.
.....Maybe, gasp, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong: clearly there are second acts in American lives.
.....Look at them grin.

SEE: New York Times: White House reacts negatively