Reporter Barton Gellman reports in his book, The Cheney Vice Presidency, that Vice President Dick Cheney declined an invitation from the president to lead the federal response in the disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Washington Post, accused of milking its publicity, has been releasing excerpts. Intrepid LA Times writers snagged some embargoed copy, to wit:

Anyone who had face time with Bush said he was smarter than the public believed, and meaner. He spared Cheney the thunderbolts — Rove got the worst of them, when Bush was in a mood to yell — but now and then aides saw the president give Cheney the back of his hand.

“Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?” Bush asked.

“That’ll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise,” Cheney replied. He was the Cheshire Cat inverted, only the smile dissolving, the rest of him still in the chair.

For more, CLICK HERE.

Washington Post writer Barton Gellman delves into a White House crisis in Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, published Tuesday. Gellman’s reporting reveals that Cheney was by far the most powerful vice president in history. In fact, the warrantless spying policy was actually written and housed in the vice president’s office.
During a legal insurrection among White House lawyers over the legality of such a program, President Bush was oblivious to any dissent over the program.
Gellman writes that Cheney nearly drove the presidency over a cliff during this fight.

A brief excerpt:

“Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department command center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself.

“If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.

“It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had ‘no idea,’ he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.”

To read more, CLICK HERE.

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s critical look at the Bush administration, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, isn’t so much an expose as it is his version of events that we largely already knew about.

Anyone who reads the newspapers, newsmags or watches CNN already knows somebody at the White House outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA supervisor (Libby, Rove, Cheney, probably with Bush’s at least tacit approval); that the reasons given for going to war in Iraq were dubious at best (I believe outright phony); and that the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that compounded the natural disaster and exposed the administration’s inability to govern.

If the hurricanes of 1989 (Hugo – I was in South Carolina at the time) and 1992 (Andrew) taught us anything, it’s that FEMA needs effective planning and execution and is no place to be stowing away inept cronies. Except the people in charge forgot that lesson. It took images of misery in New Orleans to get most of America to take notice. If the 2004 election had been held in 2005, Bush would have lost badly. Even to Kerry! Although Bush may have Myanmar to thank for setting new lows in responsiveness to disaster.

Even as bad as things have gone – a five-year-occupancy with no end in sight, inept response to disaster and a struggling economy – almost one-third of Americans apparently think Bush is a pretty good president. That’s amazing.

What sets McClellan apart is he was a Texas Bushie, one of W’s loyalists. Considered by the Washington press corps to be a rather weak spokesman, McClellan is largely viewed as a little in over his head. One pundit describes his book as Revenge of the Nerd, payback for being pushed around by the likes of Rummy and Cheney and Rove.

And the White House’s response to his book was curious. Rather than deny the essentially undeniable, they said stuff like “That’s not the Scott we knew,” and “He’s in it for the money” (who isn’t?). I imagine they’re just hoping the issue will quietly die down. Hey, it’s hurricane season. Maybe we’ll get lucky!

Things are getting even nastier in Washington these days. Now ex-Bushies are turning on the Bush administration – this time it’s former White House spokesman Scott McClellen. His coming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, is setting off tremors in the capital.
He’s been letting some excerpts slip out since last fall, but today he uncorked some doozies.

Five years ago, anyone who spoke in dissent of the war in Iraq was broadly painted as unpatriotic or worse, a dadgummed Liberal with a capital L. Now that 70 percent of America thinks the war was a mistake (30 percent refuse to acknowledge reality), it’s easy to disparage the Bush administration.

I take little comfort in knowing that in 2002 I said going in and toppling Saddam Hussein was a bad idea. But it was even worse than I thought. I thought they’d at least have enough sense to guard the borders!

I’m sure a lot of conservatives are disappointed, but they have to realize Bush 43 is not a true conservative. A true conservative doesn’t spend more than he earns. Cut-tax-and-spend is a recipe for disaster. The next two or three generations are going to pay for this administration’s screw-ups.

Richard Clark, another former Bush staffer who has been critical of the administration, but didn’t wait two years to pipe up, said the story sounds familiar.

“I think the difference with McClellan’s book is he’s now telling us something we all know — that the war with Iraq was a disastrous war [and] was sold with deception. It’s a little different when you say something as I did and a few other people did four or five years ago, when the war was popular and when we were unpopular for saying what we said.”

I can’t wait to see what the Bush apologists say next.

For more on the subject, CLICK HERE or HERE.

Dave Wilson is the Grand Pooh-Bah of Editorial Content at DelMio.com, a site developed by SunLit Communications LLC. He also is at times janitor, chauffeur, chief cook and bottle washer. Once upon a time he was a metro editor and copy editor at the Akron Beacon Journal. Send love letters and trash talk to dave.wilson@delmio.com. Or post a comment. Whatever.

Let the piling on begin.
The deeply unpopular Bush administration took another hit today as former White House spokesman Scott McClellan released more excerpts of his soon-to-be-published book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.
In essence, he called President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their closest advisers liars.
At the very least, Bush was ill-served by his advisers in matters from the war in Iraq; the Valerie Plame (CIA) leak case in which a working CIA operative was outed; and the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.
The White House responded today, saying it was “puzzled” by McClellan’s scathing memoir. “This is not the Scott we knew,” said current White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. Expect more forceful responses to discredit the longtime Bush loyalist.

For more on the subject, CLICK HERE.

To order the book, CLICK HERE.

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage has won the 2008 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award, given annually since 1987, rewards journalists who bring clarity and public attention to issue.

The Award includes a $15,000 cash prize.

From the New York Public Library’s press release quotes Savage:

“The Bush-Cheney administration’s systematic effort to expand presidential power — a push that originated not with 9/11 but rather with Cheney’s experiences in the Ford administration after Watergate and Vietnam — is the most successfully implemented policy of the current White House. It is also one of the least understood. I wrote this book to explain how the system of checks and balances devised by the founders is changing as ever more power is being concentrated in the hands of the president and his top advisers — be they Republicans or Democrats — and to tell the dramatic stories behind this movement,” said Savage. “My thanks to the NYPL Bernstein Award committee for helping to direct wider attention to this fundamental constitutional issue, which transcends partisan politics.”

Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe.

To view the press release, CLICK HERE