McClellan must be getting tired

September 20, 2005

Yesterday’s White House press briefing was just sad. One almost gets the impression that Scott McClellan’s heart just isn’t in it anymore. He’s going through the motions, offering weak answers and half-truths not because he necessarily wants to deceive, but because coming up with Fleischer-like lies takes too much effort.

At one point, for example, a reporter noted that the president has no offered no leadership in handling the costs associated with Katrina relief and reconstruction. The reporter said “part of the problem is that it’s kind of a sham to tell the American people that your federal government will do it all, but yet again, we won’t ask for any sacrifice.” The best McClellan could do was:

“I disagree with your characterization, because this President from day one has worked to cut non-security discretionary spending.”

Poor Scott. There were a hundred different ways to respond to this question, but the response he came up with was not only completely bogus claim, but a lie that took about 20 seconds on Google to disprove.

It got worse. When a reporter noted that former President Bill Clinton had some fairly harsh criticism of the Bush administration, McClellan started with a string of talking points that didn’t quite work.

“No one can question the results that we have achieved on behalf of the American people. The policies that this President has pursued are bold ones and they are ones that are achieving real results for all Americans. The President, from day one, has been acting to move forward on bold initiatives to produce real results that are helping all Americans.”

It looks like a bad cut-and-paste job in which the same sentence was just reworded three times, but this is actually what McClellan said.

Then McClellan proceeded to list the “bold policies” that are “achieving real results.”

“We are closing the achievement gap with sweeping education reforms, so that every child can learn and succeed. We are moving forward on pro-growth economic policies that are creating jobs. We have more Americans working now than ever before. We’re reaching out to faith-based groups and community organizations that have proven records of helping people in need. And we’re now helping more people in need.

“And we’re also moving forward to expand home ownership. Minority home ownership has reached record levels under this administration. We’ve worked to expand community health centers.”

After five years in office, this is the list of achievements — an education policy that the president won’t fully fund, the worst job-creation record of any president in 70 years, a faith-based initiative the president couldn’t get through a Republican Congress, and home-ownership rates that have reached half the rate of growth of the Clinton years.

No wonder McClellan seems depressed.

Let’s not forget this President’s two main growth initiatives:

1) Grow the number of terrorists in the world.

2) Grow the percent of Americans living in poverty.

As for education…

Only two-thirds of all those entering HSchool get a degree in 4 years.

Of those two-thirds, only half can read at the college Freshman level.

That means only one-sixth of American 18 year olds have a reading level worth boasting about.

This is the stuff that third world countries are made of.

  • Koreyel,

    I think you missed the most important growth initiative…

    1) Grow the wealth of the “haves” and “have mores”

    your point #2 is really just a by-product of the point above. Ideally this president would like to see poverty wiped out. But the only way he knows how to do that is to send the poor off to fight in battle zones or to ignore them and hope they a) get hi-payin’ jobs or b) starve to death.

  • What’s Karl Rove’s Mantra? Find something that works and stick with it.

    Lil’ Scotty isn’t doing anything differently than he’s been doing in the past, the X factor is the White House Press Corps. But will they, or can they, take the utter garbage they are given, do the hard work (research and writing), and come up with honest journalism? Will their corporate bosses let them? If GE can’t get a piece of the Katrina pie because someone in their news subsidiary was mean to the president, the criticism will just go away.

  • If GE can’t get a piece of the Katrina pie because someone in their news subsidiary was mean to the president, the criticism will just go away.

    You hit the nail on the head there, bcinaz! Rove in charge of doling out money to huge corporations which own media conglomerates AND stand to profit from the Katrina rebuilding scam. GE certainly qualifies in more ways than one: like Shaw and Halliburton, they also have a history of defrauding the government, so surely they’re high on the list. Just don’t get Karl pissed by asking the wrong questions, GE “reporters.” Makes me wonder which of the other media titans stand to benefit, but I’m just too tired now to investigate it. I’ll bet the connections are there, though.

  • Can we focus on that education policy for a minute? There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – in the policy to be proud of, funded or not. The No Child Left Behind Act is a time bomb meant to blow up our public school system.

    If you understand even broadly how the thing works, you’ll see that what I’m saying is true. Each school must show improvement in student test scores, on a schedule that has every school required to eventually show 100% proficiency. Now, clearly, no public school is ever going to achieve 100% proficiency, given that they’re mandated to serve every child including those with all sorts of medical and mental disabilities, so set that pie-in-the-sky aside for a moment and concentrate on the improvement schedule. This year, for example, the proficiency rate required for language skills is around 25%. Each school must post a proficiency rate of 25% for its student body as a whole, AND it must post the same rate for every one of its sub-groups. A sub-group is an identifiable group of 100 or more students, or a group that makes up 15% of the student population; examples are special education students or English-language learners.

    If you can’t post the required rate for your entire population and all of your sub-groups for two years running, you get designated as needing ‘program improvement.’ Later, of course, you get designated other things, until finally you’re labelled a failing school; and every designation carries with it increasingly expensive penalties.

    Thus, my daughter’s school, which exceeded the required proficiency goals for the student body as a whole, and for 20 of its 21 sub-groups, has been designated as needing program improvement. Our problem? Our English-language-learners are unable to perform as well on the language skills tests as the native-English-speakers do. Big duh. It’s the SAME test…

    It’s only a matter of time before every public school in America is labelled a failing school. Voila! No more public schools!

    So. There you have it. If Scott McClellan looks like his heart isn’t in it, maybe that’s because his heart shouldn’t be in it.

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