McClellan jabs with talking points

Turns to old tactic to defend tell-all

WASHINGTON - Bush loyalists watching Scott McClellan kick off his media tour yesterday must have felt a revulsion akin to Dr. Frankenstein's.

McClellan's former White House colleagues had built and trained the former press secretary to parrot their talking points, no matter what argument stood in the way. Saddam Hussein was a grave threat. The war in Iraq was going well. "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove didn't leak Valerie Plame Wilson's identity.

But now McClellan is back - and he's got a new set of talking points that attack the very people he was trained to defend. He's a bit thinner around the middle, and the sideburns are comically longer, but McClellan's famous fealty to his message is as stubborn as ever.

"We set up a massive political operation that was aimed at really continuing that permanent campaign way of governing," he informed the listeners of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition."

"We got caught up in the excesses of the permanent campaign culture in Washington, D.C.," he explained to viewers of NBC's "Today" show. On and on he went, about "this permanent campaign culture" and the "importance of ending the permanent campaign."

Just as they had through the middle years of the Bush presidency, the airwaves again echoed with McClellan's litanies yesterday.

Only this time, he employed the repetition to the detriment of his former Bush masters.

"It looks really at how things went off course," he said of his new book. "I'm disappointed that things went so badly off track." His colleagues should "come to grips with the fact that things went terribly off course."

McClellan's former colleagues responded in the only way they know how - with their own echo chamber of talking points.

Dan Bartlett, former counselor to the president , said the book left him "puzzled and bewildered."

"We are puzzled," said White House press secretary Dana Perino.