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Now we know. The Bush Administration is watching Turner Classic Movies, and not just the Ronald Reagan anthology. Notice the coordinated response to Scott McClellan’s tattletale. “Why, this isn’t the Scott we know…These aren’t his words.” That was just the first act.

The second act: “Scott always seemed to hear noises. He thought that he saw strange lights in the attic. You know that he would steal things but never realized what he had done. And did you know that he sometimes would speak with a Swedish accent?”

The third act: “I’m afraid that Scott should be committed or euthanized. You know that he was never actually the Press Secretary. Oh, yes, the simple-minded soul claimed to be, but he really was only our pet idiot in the mailroom. If he put on airs, we never thought that he would do any harm—or that anyone would believe the drooling dolt.”

Of course, if you remember the movie “Gaslight“, you know that Ingrid Bergman is not really insane, although her Swedish accent is inexplicable in an English family. However, her vicious husband Charles Boyer wants to steal her fortune (of which she is not even aware; he knows her net worth better than she does). The scheming Boyer creates public incidents and scenes that call into question her sanity; of course, everyone believes him rather than her. Well, almost everyone—Joseph Cotton will save her.

Scott McClellan will not be that lucky, however. Joseph Cotton, along with most of the cast of the 1944 movie, is no longer making personal appearances. Angela Lansbury is still around, but it might be too much to ask her to break into the White House, free Scott McClellan and fight to the death with Karl Rove. Worse, McClellan’s situation is just the opposite of Ingrid Bergman’s. Most people actually believe him–but no one wants to rescue him. We all remember what a snippy little putz he was.

So, we’ll let him be committed. Then Scott McClellan can feel like he is living another Turner Classic Movie: Olivia DeHavilland in “The Snake Pit.”

In his just published memoirs, ‘Not as Dumb as I Seem’, former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admits that he was parroting the administration’s lies. “Yes, Iraq really didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor or cause the cancellation of ‘Hee Haw.’ But I thought everyone knew that. How gullible could the media be? Was I supposed to say, ‘Today, the President wants you to believe these whoppers?’ I had to say whatever they told me. Lynn Cheney threatened to hurt me.”

But the White House and Faux News were ready with their denials. “Who?” Dana Perino responded with convincing vacuity. Impartial political analyst Karl Rove said, “The book is an obvious forgery and the real Scott McClellan has been murdered and replaced by a terrorist clone who was grown in a secret Al Qaida lab at some Ivy League school–except Dartmouth, of course.”

Impartial political analyst Anne Coulter said, “If McClellan knew someone was lying, he owed it to the American people to personally kill the liar, and show the severed head to the media. It’s what I would have done. And it’s what I intend to do to McClellan.”

Added impartial political analyst Rove, “Why didn’t he alert the public when he was the Press Secretary? By not exposing me, the Vice President and the President as gleeful liars, McClellan is directly responsible for the war in Iraq, and the waste of a trillion dollars and the needless deaths of 4000 Americans. How can a man that guilty live with himself?”