Truth-tellers or snitches

BY ELLIS HENICAN

May 23, 2008

Actually, everybody likes a snitch!

Everybody, that is, except for the people who are being snitched on. They're always trying to intimidate the truth-tellers calling them "snitches" and making them feel ashamed for speaking up about the way things really are.

Why else do you think drug gangstas at the Red Hook Houses wear those "Stop Snitching" t-shirts? Why else do you think the Drudge Report had a big headline yesterday?

"Scott the Snitch."

The reference, of course, is to Scott McClellan, former press secretary for George W. Bush. An earnest insider from the president's Texas days, McClellan spent three painful years trying to put a happy face on Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and assorted other national disasters from that time. Now, McClellan has a book coming out -- "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

It's all here: the constant "self-deception," the "serious strategic blunders," the president's "decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed." McClellan doesn't spare the "complicit enablers in the media in the boosterish run-up to the war in Iraq. Nor does he spare himself: "I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be."

Well, ready, aim -- intimidate the snitch!

Not since Sammy-the-Bull broke the Mafia code of omerta has a public informant been greeted by such a wounded chorus of disdain. And the president's last remaining loyalists are rushing toward the microphones.

Dana Perino is saddened. Ari Fleisher is confused. Condoleeza Rice isn't giving an inch on anything. Bush himself is "disappointed" in his former mouthpiece, says Perino, his current mouthpiece. Karl Rove is comparing McClellan to a "left wing blogger," a Bush-world insult that falls somewhere between "mass murderer" and "supporter of national health care."

For his part, McClellan spent the day in book-hype interviews, where the word "loyalty" kept coming up. Give the White House snitch some credit. He got the sentiment exactly right.

"No one questioned my loyalty to the president when I was there," he told ABC News with clarity both refreshing and new to him. "But there's a higher loyalty. There's a higher loyalty to the truth."