WHIG of the Week Scott McClellan (Part Two, The Video)

I just watched more of Bill O'Reilly than I've seen in my life in watching this video, "O'Reilly Goes Ballistic on McClellan," but you can skip right to the 3'29" marker to hear the section that's most relevant to the purposes of the WHIGgate Update blog.



Here's the transcript of the section about "catapulting the propaganda" using the White House Iraq Group, as transcribed in Crooks and Liars:

Bill O’Reilly: You said they used propaganda and that is a loaded word.
Scott McClellan: The White House Iraq group, the White House Iraq Group was set up, it’s a marketing arm for selling the a war. That was a specific purpose that I talked about in the book
BO: Because they fervently believed that the guy was a danger and could hand his weapons off.
SM: No because the President had a bigger driving motivation which was to transform the middle east.
BO: You telling me that President Bush didn’t believe they had the,
SM: No, he did too. He believed that too.
BO:That’s not propaganda then, that’s not propaganda.
SM: It is when you package it all together—over sell it and over state it to the American people. That is propaganda.

Propaganda may be a loaded word in O'Reilly's mind, but Scott McClellan gets his definition of the word directly from his former boss:

... third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

-- George W. Bush, 24 May 2005 (text and stage cues from the whitehouse.gov transcript)

You can see a video of the Catapult the Propaganda quote here.

If you can stand watching the whole interview video, it's also interesting to see the way that O'Reilly goes on about how "everyone" believed Iraq had WMDs because they read it in The New York Times; I just wish that Scott would have pointed out how Judith Miller of the Times was being used as a tool -- perhaps the key tool -- in the catapulting the propaganda about Saddam's scary aluminum tubes.

crossposted from WHIGgate Update at whiggate.org