McLovin

When I was back there in seminary school, I used to nearly obsess over Scotty McLellan and his pathetic whirligigs in the briefing room. There were times when I almost felt sorry for the guy. He'd come out there with his hangdog, "Why's everybody always pickin' on me?" expression and not comment on ongoing investigations, even when the questions had nothing to do with ongoing investigations, and you knew that he knew that you knew he was lying most of the time, and it was, to borrow a Perot-ism, "just sad".

Now, though, as you all know, Scotty has released his sensational Haaaah-lywood tell-all including such bombshells as:

"[George Bush]signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest" .

Hrumph. Well, Scotty, I think your editor should have caught this, but you use "less than" when talking about degree, not in describing two different beasts. An apple is not "less than" an orange, an aardvark is not "less than" a motor scooter. So, you're still lying, and this renders your mea culpa less than consequential. Shove it up your ass.

Anytime a former administrationchik blabs about the miscreancy of GWB and Co., the White House expresses its morose assessment, which boils down to "those grapes are sour! We don't understand why! One day he's out in the yard catching frisbees, the next he's digging up our flowerbed!". Or, in the grandiloquent phraseology of Dana Perino:

"We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."

Has anybody here seen my old friend Scott?

This blogger pictures Perino, immediately following that line, adding "we are puzzled and sad but twirling, always twirling toward freedom" and then peeling her face off to reveal that she's a drooling space alien.

I'm going to try to use "We are puzzled. It is sad" regularly in my speech, like when I drop a plate of scrambled tofu on the floor.

So Scott, now that you're a writer you're probably looking for models in the field that you can emulate. I've always liked Hemingway and Hunter Thompson, myself.