FU - FairAndUNbalanced.com

It has finally all come out about Scott McClellan. He is a turncoat, a sellout, and a disgruntled former employee. He tends to shade the truth. His friends are shocked and saddened. Karl Rove tells us that McClellan seems to have morphed into a left wing blogger.

What nobody is saying is that any specific item in his new book, What Happened, is factually wrong. That is to say, zero wrong items.

For most folks, opinions are already well established and firmly settled. And a pattern has been clear. Thinking of examples requires no research at all:

• Before invading Iraq, President Bush did not seem to understand that there is a difference between Sunni and Shiite, a sightlessness still shared by Senator McCain.

• As his administration opposed continuing the longstanding 1964 voting rights act, then wavered, a bewildered President met with legislators and said he was unfamiliar with the issue.

• His rambling attempts to convey his dim understanding of his own plan to privatize Social Security was vaudeville.

• Your selection from a gazillion possibile choices.

Countless observers have long been convinced that the leader of the most powerful country on earth is hopelessly inept, out of his depth, incapable of devoting thought to anything at all: a 22 caliber mind in a nuclear world. If McClellan wanted his criticisms to pierce the comfortable bubble in which such a President lives, a hardcover book would hardly be the venue. Perhaps later when it is reprinted in comic book form.

Republican stalwarts differ as a matter of course. My conservative friends have a worldview shaped by Fox News, and are unburdened by any distinction between what is right and wise, and what folks can get away with.

My own opinion is a dissent from both sides, and I have wondered if I was fair. My President has seemed to me not dumb but inattentive and immature in the discharge of his constitutional duties. In my view, we have witnessed a Mr. MaGoo presidency, characterized by a Commander in Chief with the devotion to attention of a fairly average Missouri driver on a cell phone after several sleepless nights. President Bush has simply turned two consecutive lazy terms over to a junta of venal partisans and incompetent boobs.

McClellan does challenge the view I have long held. He likes President Bush and excerpts have been sadly sympathetic. But the facts he relates offer a compelling vision of a President actively engaged in tricking the public into supporting invasion, and purposefully involved in the cover up of the deliberate outing of a US spy. If even that much is true, my President’s level of performance will have changed from criminally negligent to actively evil.

Your turn.