Puffy Parachutes To Left Bank of the Potomac

Rudolf Hess, who worked as Hitler's Assistant Dictator in Nazi Germany, veered off from a German airplane formation over the North Sea in May, 1941, and bailed out over Scotland. He was captured and held by the British as a probable spy, although the Germans disavowed him as any sort of agent. "Ganz verrückt," is how they summed up their feelings about Rudolf. Crazy. Hess's own story is that he wanted to meet with a member of the British royalty whose acquaintance he had made at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to arrange an alliance to fight the Soviet Union. None of this saved Hess from trial as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was convicted and sentenced to a life term at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he spent the rest of his long life as its only prisoner, dying at 93.

In other words, in more serious times decent people knew how to deal with political criminals who decided they might be on the losing side of history and fled to the opposition. What's done is done, the Allies said. Once a Hitler henchman, always a Hitler henchman. But thanks for dropping in on us.

Among the various terms of derision for Scott McClellan, my favorite was Puffy McMoonface, since it seemed to capture his essential ridiculousness. I recall him best as Bush's stonewaller during the Plame matter. Day after day, he stood at his podium and informed a nation curious about treason in high places that he could not talk about anything to do with Plame because "of the the ongoing investigation." Part of the ongoing investigation had been his personal conversations with Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, who assured him that they had had no involvement in leaks concerning Valerie Plame's CIA identity. This he dutifully reported to the press corps, since it seemed favorable to George W. Bush. When facts developed in the Libby case proved that Libby and Rove had lied to him (so Puffy says), he could not comment because of the ongoing...whatever. Investigation, trial, sentencing, exoneration by Bush, and eventually because of Puffy's own resignation and intention to write a tell-all book for big bucks. He couldn't detract from his own punch lines.

While McClellan's book is treated as a "bombshell" by the inbred culture in Washington, D.C., it is obviously nothing of the kind. Fortunately, the narcissistic reporters in the D.C. press corps have already read the book for us, looking for references to themselves, and so have divulged all of the parts worth mentioning. No one needs to read this thing now. Puffy does not say anything we did not know, as far as I can tell from the available hearsay. We all know that Bush lacks curiosity; that he's not "intellectual" in his approach; that he sold the war as a defensive measure against WMD's, but that the messianic purpose Bush "concealed" was to remake the Middle East (as the Neocons said at the time, in fact). We know that Bush is insecure and won't admit mistakes. We know, first and foremost, that he deludes himself, because he actually thinks he has what it takes to be President.

The one place where McMoonface might have helped the course of justice was in describing Bush's true state of knowledge about the Valerie Plame disclosures. He persists in the Official Story that Bush remained in the dark even though Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, all direct assistants to the President, were not only fully informed but were the principal sources of the leak. This is highly doubtful, and I suspect McClellan knows it. The net effect of Puffy's book, therefore, is to give Bush a pass on a critical matter, one where serious legal jeopardy once threatened him. The rest is carping, a lot of adjectives thrown around for the purpose of impressing us that Puffy is an insider. Bush, as usual, will lose no sleep over this book. In fact, I feel reasonably confident that the "firestorm" of criticism aimed Puffy's way by the High Command was choreographed. It's part of the marketing strategy and a quid-pro-quo. Go ahead, Scott, and say bitchy things about Bush's complacency and susceptibility to manipulation. That's your opinion, and anyway, who doesn't know that? Just don't say anything that really matters. We'll attack you to help you sell your book and make you look like a "traitor" to us and a hero to them.

Scott's still playing the same game, in other words. Pretending to redemption, whereas his experience is redeemable only down at the bank.