That meme is coming soon, brought to you by Bushco, Inc.

All the political world is gushing about Scott McClelland’s new tell all book about the Bush Administration. (Glenn Greenwald’s piece at Salon is great.) Heck, the title is “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” and I hope you’ll go buy it through the ASZ link to Amazon. I’m of two minds here. I’m damned pleased whenever a Bushie quits the Administration and then does a Tell All Book, but Scott McClellan needs to do a whole lot more mea culpa here. He was, after all, the spokesperson for the disastrous Bushco policies until he resigned. He is surely culpable for some of those lies, even though Karl Rove is now saying Scotty was out of the loop. (Rove is disingenuous here, but he’s been caught on that.) What kind of Administration keeps the Press Secretary out of the loop, and what kind of Press Secretary puts up with such an ethical bind. Scotty did so for too long. More about Scott McClellan’s ethical problems later. It behooves me for a moment to note what’s in the book, as reported by Politico:

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• 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.

OK, that’s all inside the beltway stuff, though it is a good indication that McClellan’s book will be a devastating view of the ugly mendacious and deceitful way the Bush Administration sold its policies on Iraq and other issues. But McClellan needs to come clean. As Pensito Review notes, McClellan admitted that he knew about George Bush’s ability to deceive even himself early on, even before Bush came to office. At Pensito they note that McClellan says he had qualms about Bush lying when the issue of his past cocaine use came up. From Pensito:

McClellan tracks Bush’s penchant for self-deception back to an overheard incident on the campaign trail in 1999 when the then-governor was dogged by reports of possible cocaine use in his younger days.

The book recounts an evening in a hotel suite “somewhere in the Midwest.” Bush was on the phone with a supporter and motioned for McClellan to have a seat.

“‘The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,’ I heard Bush say. ‘You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.’”

“I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?” McClellan wrote. “How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Bush, according to McClellan, “isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie.”

“So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It’s the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true,” McClellan wrote. “And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious — political convenience.”

In the years that followed, McClellan “would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment.” McClellan likened it to a witness who resorts to “I do not recall.”

“Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment,” McClellan wrote, adding, “In other words, being evasive is not the same as lying in Bush’s mind.”

And McClellan linked the tactic to the decision to invade Iraq, a decision based on flawed intelligence.

“It would not be the last time Bush mishandled potential controversy,” he said of the cocaine rumors. “But the cases to come would involve the public trust, and the failure to deal with them early, directly and head-on would lead to far greater suspicion and far more destructive partisan warfare,” he wrote.

Man, couldn’t that have given McClellan a clue that he was working for a pathological liar? Where’s the guy’s ethics? Come on, here! McClellan’s job was to represent the Bush Administration, who he already knew would lie on damned near any issue. And he decided early on to keep on working for them even with that knowledge?

Let’s not think McClellan is a hero here, but you may decide to appreciate his book, and I don’t mind that. He gives us a good picture of the corruption and incompetence that will stand as the marks of Bushco politics. That’s a service, and it helps, a tiny little bit, to rehabilitate Scott McClellan. Only a tiny little bit.

Richard’s Update: Based on past BushCo responses after other “tell-alls” from former administration officials have been published, it was only a matter of time before the Bushistas moved to discredit McClellan. Joe Gandelman is following the effort against McClellan.