HECKUVA JOB, SCOTTIE. One thing you can say in George Bush's favor is that he's exactly the sort of boss you'd like to use as a reference when you look for your next job. Scott McClellan's tenure as White House press secretary has been objectively disastrous -- a giant step down from the psychopathically smooth lying of Ari Fleischer who's turned the briefing room into a perennial train wreck. Liberals and conservatives really ought to be able to agree on this -- there's no policy implications whatsoever. So McClellan steps down today and Bush remarks, "I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity. It's going to be hard to replace Scott, but nevertheless he made the decision and I accepted it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days."
Not bad at all. And I have to say that McClellan arguably did handle his assignment with class, once you control for the fact that the assignment was, basically, to stand up and dissemble on a daily basis. Integrity, though, not so much. We also learn today that Karl Rove will step down from pretending to care about policy in order to focus full time on caring about politics, and that he'll be replaced in the pretend-about-policy job by some dude from OMB who nobody's ever heard of. I suppose this means we can expect to see weird gimmicks -- phase-ins, fake phase-outs, etc. -- start popping up in even more areas of domestic policy.
--Matthew Yglesias
