“There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues,” Dole said to McClellan in a Thursday email disclosed today. “No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits and, spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique. When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, ‘Biting The Hand That Fed Me.’ Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years….if all these awful things were happening, and perhaps some may have been, you should have spoken up publicly like a man, or quit your cushy, high-profile job.”

Dole winds up for a big finish. “That would have taken integrity and courage but then you would have had credibility and your complaints could have been aired objectively. You’re a hot ticket now, but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?”

If Bob Dole had this kind of righteous piss and vinegar coursing through his antediluvian bloodstream in 1996, he might have become President. Oh wait, he had it in 1976 and 1988 during his prior two shots at the Executive Branch, and that’s why he’s our most beloved seething ex-Senator. For those of us who crave longevity and venerability, we can only wish he lets slip the direction to his fountain of rage. What most of us know about mortality and the dangers of unbridled enmity, Bob Dole’s scold was the kind of venomous missive that has left younger men prone on the floor clutching their chest, their eyes staying open for their dying breath and foamy saliva bubbling from their unrepentant rictus.

Scott McClellan is going to have to spend some time between now and December drastically overhauling his Christmas list, and with his declaration today that he’d be willing to testify before Congress about the Valerie Plame outing, he might do well to advertise on Craigslist for a food taster.

There are a lot of people in the GOP’s Big Tent very angry at Scott McClellan this week. I’d like to say that I have better things to talk about on VeepsBlog, but the last three days, it doesn’t get much better than this, and every day there’s another half-dozen logs on the fire.

Set your Google News Alerts to “Scott McClellan book reaction” at the peril of your bandwidth. I would strain my index finger out of commission hitting F5 if I tried to keep up with every new dispatch on Huffington Post.

The White House and their surrogates have dug in and their primary talking point is lamenting their once-favorite Indian who has strayed so far from the reservation.

The further you get from legitimate GOP circles and the more sordid and scathing the declamations get. FOX News’ Fox & Friends Caustic Chatty Cathy, Gretchen Carlson, cautioned Thursday morning, “Scott McClellan better not have any skeletons in his closet. I hope he didn’t do anything that he doesn’t want the world to know about because we all have, and all of his secrets are going to be coming out.”

A more ominous and potentially-salacious caveat came from outed White House Press Corps infilitrator and retired male prostitute Jeff Gannon yesterday. “I can say without fear of contradiction, that I knew Scott better than any other White House correspondent or Washington reporter.” I’m not even sure I want to conceive the implications of that loaded statement. I imagine that this is just Jeff Gannon throwing a grenade into the mix to put another quarter in his fifteen minutes of fame, and in my wildest imagination I can’t conjure up the picture of the two of them spooning, but this is the 21st Century and a brave new world, where any Republican is susceptible to the love that dare not speak its name, so anything’s possible. If Gannon and McClellan have found sympatico, I wouldn’t begrudge either of them, but it seems a bit unlikely to me.

No, Thom Hartman on Portland’s Air America affiliate KPOJ said this morning before his national show what I thought but I hadn’t yet apprehended: Scott McClellan yesterday on his first round of news shows since the early excerpts of his book came out–that, unlike his days on the podium in service to the Bush Administration, he looked like a man entirely at peace.

That’s a good spot to be in, especially as his world is in the process of changing in a way he cannot have possibly imagined. Or maybe he had imagined it, working for as long as he did within the Bush Lair and the duplicity that was as prevalent as oxygen. For as much as they professed surprised as Scott’s “betrayal” this week, McClellan delivered an advanced copy of his book to the White House on April 23, and met with White House counsel to vet potential security and executive privilege issues, and no one said boo to the content of the book. But it’s five weeks hence and they’re all there with their talking points.

Because all guns are aimed at Scott’s kneecaps, and given the bunker mentality of the Bush Administration, there’s no way they are going to give any quarter. He’s agreed to testify before Congress on the lies that he claims he witnessed while he was working in the service of BushCo–lies that so many people believed for so long, without the inner-circle corroboration that Scott McClellan has brought to the table.

No matter how many much you read today or how many hours you spent flipping past MSNBC, CNN, FOXNews, CNBC, Bloomberg, the Military Channel, the Golf Channel, C-SPAN for Kids or MTV’s Pimp My Retirement, it was all Scott McClellan all the time.

Back in 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush was on the stump in New Hampshire talking to an audience in Exeter. “Message: I care.”

McClellan’s disclosures couldn’t have been more clear of the boy President’s MO. “Message: I don’t care.”

To paraphrase another seminal 1990s moment, you didn’t see a sign in George W. Bush’s driveway reading “I care,” and you know why? Because caring isn’t his fuckin’ business.

McClellan released his book to a number of media outlets this week with the request that they not release excerpts until just before its next-Monday release date, but politico.com queered that patch and the rest of the press followed with a dumbfounding vomitose tell-all that excoriated McClellan’s erstwhile boss and his boss’ minions with the kind of bombshells that are usually reserved for a CSD interview with a 14-year-old confessing a history of abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Only in this case the stepfather was George W. Bush and the 14-year-old was the United States.

McClellan tells of an overheard phone call during the 2000 campaign where he alleges Bush said he couldn’t remember if he’d ever tried cocaine before. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘How can that be?’ ” McClellan writes. Indeed. You remember–either because it burned your nostrils, because you hated the bitter aspirin drip in the back of your throat, or because you paid for it and were disappointed within ten minutes. You may regret cocaine, but you’ll never have trouble remembering whether or not you ever tried it.

McClellan had some scathing words for Bush’s lack of propsensity for reflection and accountability. “A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people’s ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change,” McClellan writes. Indeed, Thom Hartman and Carl Wolfson on Portland’s Air America affiliate, KPOJ 620 AM, today told of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon breaking down and weeping when the war wasn’t going well. George Bush turns to mountain biking, and jokes about his golf drive.

The White House and its surrogates were apoplectic. Carl Rove lamented, “(T)his doesn’t sound like Scott. It really doesn’t. Not the Scott McClellan I have known for a long time…sounds like somebody else, it sounds like a left-wing blogger. Second of all, if he had these moral qualms he should have spoken up about them. And frankly I don’t remember him speaking up about these things, I don’t remember a single word.”

And the woman who now mans McClellan’s former podium, Dana Perino: “Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,” Perino said in a statement. “For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad – this is not the Scott we knew.”

George Bush was horribly disappointed in his boy leaving the fold. He’s had a long relationship with the McClellan family and carried young Scott under his wing, and can’t help but feel like Jose Menendez right now, but with only a figurative hole in the back of his head.

Scott was supposed to be the loyal son, the automaton; the programmable one. He wasn’t supposed to have a spine or an opinion. George took him in at a young age, and He may still be doing it for the money, but without parsing his intentions, he has clearly torched a number of bridges with his book.

“As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime President is likely to achieve greatness, inpart because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.” As we all know, that begat “Mission Accomplished” which begat today’s commencement address to the graduates of Colorado’s Air Force Academy “we’re learning as we go along” in Iraq and Afghanistan (you remember–the other war; the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the 6’4″ diabetic who keeps taunting us with eye-poking audiotapes while he’s living the unobstructed rural life in the mountains of Tora Bora where we let him get away six and a half years ago).

His most scathing and telling indictment of the President came with his charge that Bush demonstrates a “lack of inquisitiveness [and] a detrimental resistance to reflection.” Disgruntled or not, that’s a family defection bitch-slap that you can’t ignore. Everyone has always accused Bush of being stupid, but many others have accused him of something worse, something that is also the product of a crude brain: Arrogant indifference. This President doesn’t care about you and he never has. The sooner he’s out of his seat the better. Scott’s motives may not be pure–for a seven-figure book advance, which Scott may or may not have gotten–I’d be at least tempted to say terrible things about almost anyone. But he’s got no where to go after this. He could have kept his mouth shut into a consultant position with one of the loyal former Bush associates and fallen ass-first into a comfortable salary and non-taxing career.

I don’t want to accuse him of a having a conscience, but it does beg further scrutiny.

One of the Bushes’ favorite surrogate sons is bringing great shame and disappointment to the family with his new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception (Public Affairs, $27.95). Of all the erstwhile Bush loyalists who’ve taken book deals after they’ve either found or been shown the door, you never thought Scott would pen such a betrayal. McClellan pre-released his book to reporters this past week on the condition that they’d hold off on their review until just before the book was released next Monday. Fortunately, politico.com couldn’t wait that long.

For nearly three years, the announcement of a Scott McClellan press conference inspired little more than an eye-roll and a pre-emptive masturbatory gesture, because everyone knew what to expect: a hapless, doughy, poorly-programmed automaton trotting out the Administration’s latest line with the emotionless rote of a Ken Doll just human enough to be afraid of having his own thoughts: “The President is very confident about our direction in Iraq. The message is clear. Our soldiers on the ground understand that message.” And the (insert numbers of thousands) dead? “The President is very grateful for the service of our soldiers in Iraq. This is a brave fight, and the President shares the nation’s gratitude for its courageous soldiers.”

He wasn’t good so much as he was predictable, even though his performance would always be far from perfect. He was like a Roomba. He came out on command, poked about the room doing what was expected of him, bereft of any forceful independence of movement, and did essentially what was expected of him, except that he left a lot of dust and crumbs in his wake, leaving you wondering why they sent him out there in the first place, except for perpetuating the illusion of doing what should be his job.

Well, with his independence–and a fat book contract–the Roomba’s grown up to be a Dyson. He didn’t pull many punches on the men whose government used to sign his paycheck. Of our enduring mess in Iraq, he noted, “The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

If he was going to emerge with a book contract and call someone out, I never expected it would be the liberal media for not being tough enough on the President. This is Joseph Goebbels saying that it would have been better for the war if the French would have fought harder.

He had more choice words. He assailed Bush and Carl Rove for the politically-retarded photo of Bush in Air Force One flying over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and looking out the window at the devastation that they officially acknowledged when they got around to it. Rove thought it was the right picture to show, and he clearly won the day over the alleged objections of McClellan and then Chief of Staff Dan Bartlett. “One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

And the defenders of the the war in Iraq are now practically down to single fingers. Here’s what McClellan thinks of the quagmire that he spent some 33 months officially defending. “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

As the politico.com story notes, “Even some of the chapter titles are brutal: ‘The Permanent Campaign,’ ‘Deniability,’ ‘Triumph and Illusion,’ ‘Revelation and Humiliation’ and ‘Out of Touch.’”

This is probably all Monday-morning jockeying for position for the inevitable question, “Daddy, what did you do during the war?” Everyone who served the Bush/Cheney staff for as long as they did has a lot to answer for, and everyone has their own reasons for paddling away from this Titanic as fast as they possibly can, but it’s always entertaining everytime another former stalwart takes a seat in the liferaft.