And thus the flurry of face-saving tell-all memoirs begins in earnest. All that time with Ari Fleischer’s family must have hardened little Scottie McClellan. Maybe some adorable little tow-headed Fleischer child, not more than five, slapped him twice across the face and said “what the fuck were you thinking, you glib twit?” Or maybe more likely, the specter of actually getting called to account for the vast misery he grinningly participated in began to feel real to him; its weight, along with that of his mandatory enormous head, giving his already weak spine a distinctly put-upon cant. So he decided to Reveal Disturbing Truths! in a Shocking! Tell-All! Memoir! Lay it on us, Scottie, we can take it:

McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

No. Fucking. Way. Next thing you know he’s going to tell us Bush didn’t really, technically look into Putin’s soul. Look forward to lots more of this, folks. The “CYA-Oriented Perfunctory Recounting of Shit You Already Know” aisle at Barnes & Noble will squeeze out the 8 million remaindered copies of Left Behind For Dummies and moldy stacks of John Mayer CDs in no time. And every time another ex-Bush apparatchik clasps their bloodied hands in front of them to mewl and whimper for sympathy because it just wasn’t their fault, expect the press to be Shocked! by the Stunning! Revelations! in their Surprisingly Harsh! note from Mom (signed, shakily, in crayon) that requests, in sum, that little Scottie (or little Paul or little Condi or others to be named later) be excused from prison today because that mean little Rove boy beat him up in the briefing room again. Pathetic.