It seems to me that two news stories I’m following must be missing half the coverage. So I thought I’d supply what surely must be true, but somehow isn’t getting reported. And I’d put it in italics.

First, a little foreign news:

June 29 (Reuters) – Veteran Zimbabwean ruler Robert Mugabe has won the country’s single-candidate presidential run-off election, electoral authorities declared on Sunday. President George W. Bush on Saturday ordered U.S. sanctions against the “illegitimate” government of Zimbabwe, and called Friday’s run-off a “sham”.

In a related move, Mugabe called the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections “shams” and demanded an investigation into tampering and fraud in Florida and Ohio. He also ordered sanctions against the “illegitimate” U.S. government of “President” Bush.

And now, for something domestic (but with international implications):

Associated Press, July 1, 2008, SAN FRANCISCO — On his book-promotion stopover here, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was squired around by a “literary escort,” a pleasant woman named Naomi who drives visiting authors to their speaking engagements in a blue convertible. There were no motorcades, no street closures, no Secret Service.

McClellan slept at a Marriott Hotel, a couple of notches down from the Beverly Wilshire, where he, President Bush and the rest of the White House entourage stayed when in Southern California.

It is a long way from the Oval Office, where McClellan once basked in the confidence of the president, to the book circuit, where he is delivering a sharp critique of that president.

But nearly a month after the explosive book’s release, McClellan seems comfortable in his new role, polishing his one-liners about Dick Cheney, relishing largely sympathetic audiences and accepting his exile from certain ex-colleagues.

From the lectern, McClellan is looser and funnier than he was in the hot glare of the White House press room.

It probably helps that his book tour has taken him to such “blue” cities as Santa Monica and Austin, Texas. In Seattle, a sold-out crowd of 850 gave him a standing ovation. In San Francisco, a liberal city Bush has never visited as president, McClellan was drowned out by applause as he said, “The war in Iraq was not absolutely necessary.”

McClellan has incorporated some crowd-pleasing titles of books he imagines his former White House comrades writing:

“The Lies I Told, to Whom and Why,” by Karl Rove.

“Well, Paaaaaardon Me!” by Scooter Libby.

The jokes loosen up a crowd of 550 San Franciscans in the middle of a workday — and appear to crack McClellan himself up. Then he moves into the serious part of what has become his “stump speech,” an overview of the book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”

The book accuses Bush of orchestrating a “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” trying to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.”

Reading at times from prepared notes, McClellan acknowledges, as he does in the book, that he was swept away by trust for the president and the intelligence he assumed top national-security aides must have had.

After reflecting for many months after leaving the White House, “I realized how badly misplaced my trust was,” McClellan said.

McClellan then looked at his actual reflection in the mirror and imagined in one hand a check for $4 million, and in the other hand the blood of innocents from around the world. This did not crack himself up, but the money made it easier to ignore.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.