• LESSON FROM SCOTT McCLELLAN

In a continuing flow of insider revelations coming out on the Bush Presidency, Scott McClellan’s “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception” suggests a man who, after many years of buttressing Bush from Texas to Washington, had an epiphany. What is to be learned from his sudden change of heart that falls far short of a mea culpa?

McClellan claims that none of the deception was “intentional or deliberate,” though suggests that Washington plays that way too often. McClellan’s most telling indulgence is his suggestion that being present within the White House bubble “obscures the larger truths of things.” This rationalization is as weak as the consciousness hiding behind it. It is also material evidence of weakness in the individuals that surround an insecure leader.

McClellan’s detractors accuse him of being a disgruntled ex-employee, now denigrating his former boss in an endeavor to sell books. Reponses such as Karl Rove’s suggestion that McClellan should have spoken up at the time, are disingenuous. Talking to, or at someone, who is not listening, achieves little shifting in consciousness. Other attempts at deflecting the accusations, such as Condoleezza Rice perpetuating the refrain about Saddam’s WMD’s, are as pathetic as McClellan’s excuses for not having said anything.

For the rest of us, the learning isn’t that the world was misled, or that misguided thinking, or worse, set the administration’s objectives. That has always been manifestly apparent. The insight here might be more to the course of action that one should take when confronted by pivotal decisions in life where right and wrong are self-evident. Such moments present themselves endlessly, politically, corporately, socially and personally.

Critical events are fulcra on which careers can swivel, and too often our human frailty errs to the side of self-preservation. Only later in life does such juncture come back with a newly invigorated energy and magnitude of its own. We are reminded of the turn that diverted our moral compass down too long a trench of act and thought we couldn’t spill from. In the recall is a fresh unfamiliar wisdom.

McClellan’s epiphany comes a few years too many after truth literally slapped him in the face. His legs should have long ago carried him out the nearest exit.