Wednesday, April 19, 2006

white house hustle

White House Press Secretary (and son of Texas gubernatorial hopeful Carole Keeton Strayhorn) Scott McClellan has announced his resignation from the post. McClellan has served as Press Secretary since the resignation of his predecessor, Ari Fleischer, in July 2003. Bush complimented McClellan's "class, integrity" and gestured that it would be "hard to replace Scott."

In the same vein, a senior administration official has announced that infamous advisor Karl Rove will no longer oversee policy but will move to a senior advisor post where he will be in charge of "long-term strategic planning." The deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joel Kaplan, will take Rove's place in policy development.

These personnel changes could be those warned about by the new White House Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten. After Andrew Card's resignation and Bolten took the position, he promised to "refresh and re-energize" the Bush administration and issued an ultimatum for administration officials: if you want to go, leave now.

A HuffPo commenter from New Hampshire asks that we get the former Iraqi Minister of Information for McClellan's replacement, because "at least [Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf] was entertaining during his obvious lies." More realistically, perhaps the Bush administration will actually find a White House Press Secretary that can lie to the media without squirming.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think Scottie left because he knew how bad it's going to get. Wait until we get a couple more indictments on the Plame leak, six congressional indictments over Abramoff, and the usual continuing good news in Iraq -- and the press secretary is going to be like the FEMA position. Who would want it?