I, Scott McClellan
I, Robot
for release 07-14-05
Washington D.C.
It's usually not the big mistakes that can take down a presidency, but the dumb small blunders that smart people make when their confidence becomes distended, when the only learning curve they know about is the curve that their assprint makes in the seat of their new Esplanade.
The last person in the world that I would want to be right now is Scott McClellan. The man is in a tough position. His job depends on his ability to stonewall when the red, glaring facts are being hurled at him?
It's funny how our experiences run in a random but parallel synchronicity. Yesterday our NetFlicks package arrived and we watched I, Robot. Then today I read the transcript of Scott McClellan facing the White House press corps on the subject of Karl Rove and the Plame case. These two experiences were eerily similar.
The Poet's Eye has long seen Scott McClellan as a robot, endlessly and flawlessly repeating the recorded messages. He also reminds me of those old Clutch Cargo cartoons with the cheap animation where only the lips of the characters moved.
For years now Scott McClellan has faced a largely compliant and complacent White House press corps. They have accepted and broadcast his slogans and talking points (many of which I'm sure were written by Karl Rove.) But an odd thing has happened recently. Goaded by their competition in the blogosphere, the White House press corps has started to remember what a journalist is supposed to do. A real journalist doesn't just dumbly repeat the party line, a real journalist has a hard-on for the truth, and the truth has been mightily abused by this administration.
On Monday McClellan reached into a rhetoritician's bag of tricks and decided to hide behind the old "we are not going to comment on an ongoing investigation" ruse. This translates into simple English as: "We are not going to answer any embarrassing questions because if we did we might be exposed for the hypocrites and liars that we are."
The reporters grilled poor Scott and he kept dutifully repeating the party line--"we are not going to comment on an ongoing investigation." He must have said it twenty times. And on Tuesday the rotisserie was still turning and Scott kept repeating the stock answer. You could tell that the reporters were becoming impatient with this preposterous stance. He might as well have just said, "Fuck you, we're not talking about it."
And to add injury to insult, Judy Miller, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, has been locked up for not divulging her source in the Plame case and she never even wrote an article about it. The Press is feeling uneasy, as we should be. Bob Woodward has stepped fourth and offered to serve some of Miller's jail time. Good on him. I'll serve some too. How about you? If every journalist worth his salt stepped up, we would only have to serve Warhol's fifteen minutes apiece.
I suppose a robot doesn't know when he's lying. He just responds with the stock answer. It's programmed in. So I suppose that Scott is the perfect man for the job he does. I couldn't do it.
I met Bill Moyers once. I was a young journalism student and he had just resigned as Johnson's press secretary. I'll bet he couldn't do it either. Journalists have a nasty habit of getting stuck on the truth. McClellan doesn't appear to have this fault.
The Poet's Eye will watch the press briefing today, because I want to see a robot sweat.
First Law:
A robot may not injure his administration, or, through inaction, allow his administration to come to harm.
Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given by the administration, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
--paraphrased from Isaac Azimov-- I, Robot
and funny joke, jack.