Whether or not you agreed with the message, this president's communications team has been amazingly artful at strategy and delivery. In the beginning, everyone was on point - from talk radio to cable news to print editorials - there was hardly a kink in the armor.

But you sort of knew you weren't getting the real story.

Now, former Bush insider and White House press secretary Scott McClellan is telling all in his memoir "What Happened."

Poor, poor Scott. What happened, indeed?

Politico.com was one of the first websites to post excerpts from the book. And what a hot mess it's turning out to be.

McClellan says he didn't know he was being misled by Rove, Libby, and Cheney about the Valerie Plame leak. "I allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood," he writes. And he says that President Bush had unwittingly been deceived, too.

After eight years of this crew, it's a hard one to swallow.

McClellan always seemed a little uneasy in front of the camera, sort of the like the kid in the boy's locker room that everyone towel whips.

His former colleagues are busy putting their own spin on the book. It seems as if everyone in Washington is suddenly dazed and puzzled. In full-court damage control, they're all asserting that McClellan wasn't privy to top secret information. He didn't sit in on policy discussions. And he was never that good at his job.

Don't believe it. Senior level PR people like McClellan are usually very well-informed. They are often trusted confidants, keepers of secrets, and spinners of deflective tales. They plant stories that aren't true to keep you away from the ones that are.

On NBC's Today Show this morning, McClellan said that his book was not a get-even piece after his former pals threw him under the bus. Instead it was an effort to look at the larger picture of dysfunctional Washington, and its role in the lead up to the Iraq War.

This is where McClellan's story turns to tragedy. How do you explain not speaking out earlier while thousands of US soldiers are being killed in Iraq, and thousands more are returning home injured?

Perhaps more than anyone else, their families deserve to know what happened.