McClellan Dregs: Scotty's On The Soros Payroll

Scott McClellan is making his media rounds today, trying desperately to turn his one-day media spotlight stretch into two. And what a day it was -- over 1 million Google hits for "McClellan what happened" (that's the name of his book, in case you somehow missed it), and no fewer than 640 hits on Nexis. Super.

One of the more interesting hits was this, from NewsBusters:

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in the last few months.” In an “Eat the Press” blog entry Wednesday, Rachel Sklar asked Osnos: “Did you work directly on the book with McClellan? (Who was his editor?)” Osnos replied: “The editor was Lisa Kaufman and yes, I worked very closely with them.”

Osnos' Public Affairs publishing is part of The Perseus Group; Little Green Footballs adds that there are several companies with this curious coincidence: they have both "Soros" and "Perseus" in them, like Perseus-Soros Management LLC. (Perseus was the son of Zeus and was the lucky guy who got the task of killing Medusa, which he accomplished neatly.)

McClellan is either a smart guy who knows exactly who he's working with, which means he completely and knowingly sold out his boss and the war against Islamist terror, aligning with the hard-core lefties; or, he's an incredibly stupid guy who has no idea who he's working with and therefore can't be trusted in anything he deduces.

I'm afraid it's the former. And worse, I'm afraid he'll do OK with it all. The media blitz has no legs, but now he has signaled to academia and the media that he's safe to book. The protracted and lucrative campus tour will be starting shortly, and soon to follow will be his gig as a commentator on NBC.

A good attack on McClellan from White House counselor Dan Bartlett can be found here. I particularly like how it points out that during the run-up to the war McClellan was a schlep, the deputy press secretary for domestic affairs, without access to anything remotely "inside" regarding the planning for the Iraq war he now terms as "rushed."

But good as Bartlett's attack is, it will make no difference. McClellan has the Soros seal of approval now, so even though the media storm will not last through the week, his new career as a Bush-whacker will feather his nest ... but it won't salve his conscience. If he has one.