Scott McClellan is a good man, is all I have to say. He's a whistleblower of a sort, he's put country ahead of party and chain-of-command. He even describes how Bush was converted to the neocon delusion, that peace in Jerusalem is on a road running thru Baghdad.
My big question is, Why haven't we seen a neocon defection of this scale? Why not a Clintonite defection?
We Clinton-critics always waited for someone to bust out of that toxic White House and blow the whole story from bimbo suppression to the Travel Office. Didn’t happen. I think the answer is, Bush is dead meat; while even as Bill left office, the Clintons were a going concern and plotting their own restoration; they offered a real future to a lot of people, and their adherents didn’t want to blow it. They felt like they’d get congressional seats or appointments from the once and future king, and they were right. Bush has nothing to offer McClellan. Of course now that Clinton Inc. seems to be drying up, maybe we’ll get the tell-alls. (Though I’d throw in the intimidation factor. What happened when Linda Tripp was about to go public? Monica left a list of the “body count” on her desk at the Pentagon, all the people who’d died being too close to the Clinton machine. Makes you think twice…)
As for the neocon defections, Fukuyama was halfhearted, and Scott McConnell was eloquent but he was never really a capo. The reason the neocons don’t defect is they really are religious: true believers, with a Jewish-outsider overlay. I think Jacob Heilbrunn’s failure to go for the jugular reflects Jewish prohibitions. But I’m hopeful. Some day we’re going to get the full-on Whittaker Chambers…
