McClellan Book Publisher Has Anti-Limbaugh, Talk Radio Agenda

THE GET-RUSH BOOK?

Real Agenda May Be To Undermine Limbaugh, Movement







Since yesterday, conservatives have been puzzled as to why supposed Bush loyalist Scott McClellan would write a book that reads as though it was taken straight from the pages of the Daily Kos, a fringe- leftist blog.

Beyond his obvious profit motive, the big question is why he chose to go after Bush now, at a point where it's unlikely to affect the final year of a lame-duck presidency.

That's where the real deception emerges: Peter Osnos, the book's publisher and apparent co-editor, has a long history of far-left sympathies. Did he embellish portions of the book to suit his own political views?

And was his real agenda to undermine Bush- supporting conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh? The use of McClellan as a front for this agenda is clever indeed.

At NewsBusters, Brent Baker has been researching Osnos's political background, with these fascinating results:

A reporter and editor at the Washington Post during the 1970s and 1980s before going into book publishing, Osnos pens a weekly column for the left of center The Century Foundation. In a March column he denounced Rush Limbaugh as “bombastic, aggressive, and mean,” bemoaning how the late William F. Buckley Jr. left behind “a right-wing culture that tends to be as coarse and leaden as his demeanor could be buoyant,” charging Buckley provided “unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit that was distinctly and consistently malevolent.”


[...]


From his March 4 column:


....But the dominant voices of the Buckley succession are bombastic, aggressive, and mean -- O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, among many others. They are despisers, whose vituperative name-calling regards alternative viewpoints as stupid, venal, or treasonous. The #1 bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list for March 9 is a quintessential example of the genre: Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It has sold about 50,000 copies in its first two months. Among his chapter headings are "Adolph Hitler: Man of the Left"; and "Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism." His argument, as summarized in the Washington Post's review is that "fascists and liberals seek to use the state to solve the problems of modern society." Goldberg is an editor at the National Review Online. His mother, Lucianne Goldberg, made her name (and gave his a career boost) as the literary agent who urged Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky. As vice-president of his mother's agency, Goldberg once wrote, he did his time "in the trenches of Clinton's trousers."

Meanwhile, McClellan's media tour to support the book's release includes some downright bizarre stops. Right off the bat, the former White House press secretary will be visiting with MSNBC oddball Keith Olbermann, who is sure to fawn all over McClellan and his book.

But look what Olby had to say about McClellan after he left the White House:

• May 16, 2005 | 9:45 p.m. ET

The resignation of Scott McClellan (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS — I smell something — and it ain’t a copy of the Qu’ran sopping wet from being stuck in a toilet in Guantanamo Bay. It’s the ink drying on Scott McClellan’s resignation, and in an only partly imperfect world, it would be drifting out over Washington, and imminently.

Last Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book.

But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for a series of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House lawn, Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story, McClellan said, “has done damage to our image abroad and it has done damage to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have lost lives. This report has had serious consequences.”

Whenever I hear Scott McClellan talking about ‘media credibility,’ I strain to remember who it was who admitted Jeff Gannon to the White House press room and called on him all those times.

Whenever I hear this White House talking about ‘doing to damage to our image abroad’ and how ‘people have lost lives,’ I strain to remember who it was who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn up just after the Holy Grail will — and at what human cost.

So now that Scott's name is on a bogus tell-all book, he becomes Olbermann's hero? What a joke.


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