Vomiting, puking, throwing up, retching, and barfing are all terms for the "forceful discharge of stomach contents through the mouth." Personally, I prefer "barfing" because its such a gutteral word that really gets at the discomfort of expelling things back through the mouth that have gone into the stomach. "Barfing" also captures the involuntary quality of the action as well as the feelings of disgust that accompany those discharges.
"Retching" is another good word, but I still think "barfing" hits the mark a little better.
Whatever its called, barfing is a sign that the stuff in your stomach is so intolerable or harmful that it can't be digested any further and has to be rejected back up through the mouth. Stomach bugs, carsickness, and chemotherapy make people barf because the stomach is in no condition to handle food. Too much alcohol makes people barf because it's too poisonous for stomachs to handle. Because a person's stomach just can't handle the awful stuff anymore, it makes a powerful effort to send it back to the world from whence it came.
That's what happened with President Bush and the Bush administration. At the beginning of Bush's first term, America more or less willingly swallowed George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. President Bush's approval ratings shot up after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and most people bought into Bush administration rationales for invading Iraq. But since Bush's re-election in 2004, almost the whole country has been engaged in one long exercise in barfing up the Bush administration as being too arrogant, incompetent, dishonest, or absurd to hold down any longer.
The Bush administration is just so (fill in the blank) that everyone wants to throw up.
That appears to be what former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is doing in his memoir as well--barfing up the Bush administration. Having defended and rationalized the Bush administration on a daily basis from 2003-2006, McClellan is now condemning everyone and everything he once defended. It's almost like he wants to get the Bush administration out of his system and out of his system for good.
President Bush?
"[Bush] and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."Hurricane Katrina?
“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”Rove, Libby, and Cheney?
“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”The Bush-enabling corporate media?
Barf, vomit, retch--McClellan is spewing out the Bush administration in all its messy, ugly, glory.“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq . . . The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Asked to comment for Fox, Karl Rove thought that McClellan sounded like a "left-wing blogger." But that's actually not a good analogy. What sets left-wing bloggers apart is that they never bought into the Bush administration and therefore never had to barf them back up like Scott McClellan is doing. To the contrary, Scott McClellan is just a normal American who bit hard on the Bush administration and now feels an overpowering need to purge himself.
Who can blame him?
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5 comments:
You're giving him way too much credit.
He was not some naive patsy who now realizes too late that he was had.
McClellan knew he was lying when he was lying. Now he would have us believe that he was manipulated and lied to as well?
So he's admitting to being stupid or a liar, or maybe a stupid liar?
The question is: how dumb does he think we are?
I'm not sure McClellan himself is that important. I'm reserve judgment but he doesn't strike me as being as much of an obvious creep as Matthew Dowd or Ari Fleischer.
What's significant here is that McClellan seems to have undergone the same process of becoming increasingly repulsed by the Bush administration. That's a process that a lot of people have gone through.
No, if he had any conscience or integrity at all, he would have resigned at the time.
Instead, he chose at the time to regurgitate BushCo bullshit, just like Colin Powell did.
On top of it all, he writes a book to cash in on "seeing the light."
I don't buy his act, and I'm not buying his shitty book, which will undoubtedly be full of "revelations" that most of us already knew or strongly suspected.
I agree that McClellan is going to be saying things that most people already knew. But it's still important for people like McClellan, David Iglesias, and others to keep reminding people about how bad the Bush administration is.
I think you're spot on here! I just so happen to be watching an Interview with McClellan on the Today Show and reading your Blog about it now. I do think this book is important. Not only that, I think it's incredibly ballsy of him to put it out there knowing that the Bush admin has probably tried to strong-arm him into not doing it.
I recommend getting a copy of this show and watching it. It's very interesting!
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