A few months back, the pages of American book reviews hummed with distressed chatter about a book by Pierre Bayard called How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Not having read Bayard's book, I can confidently say that when it comes to the publication of Scott McClellan's What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, the damning tell-all about his tour of duty as Bush's public mouth, Bayard's book was perfectly on point. Although What Happened won't be published until Monday, most of us have been talking with great acumen about the contents of McClellan's book for years.

The titles that populate the barely literate genre of the political memoir tend to be stuffed to the binding with the expected faux revelation and scandal. They're like the second-rate stand-up comics in Manhattan comedy clubs, all relying on the same cheap techniques to elicit the approval of the meet-you-halfway, drunk, eager-to-be-pleased audience. By all accounts, What Happened follows this pattern and then goes even further, confirming all the more sordid accusations hurled at the Bush administration over the years - obfuscation about the Valerie Plame CIA affair, fecklessness about the deluge in New Orleans, intentional deception about starting the Iraq war, a kind of brutish stupidity about George Bush's past as a booze-swilling, coked-up son of privilege. We've known for years that high-level Bush operatives were key dissemblers. Bush's critics have been right all along, and now one of his inner circle has confirmed our suspicions. This is neither surprising nor edifying. We should be careful what we ask for.

Taking just one example from the book, McCellan admits to spending a great deal of his time behind the White House podium explaining away the presidentially sanctioned outing of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative. "There was only one problem," he writes. "What I'd said was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: [Karl] Rove, [Scooter] Libby, vice-president Cheney, the president's chief of staff, Andrew Card and the president himself."

McClellan claims that he uttered the disinformation unknowingly, that he was lied to. Pragmatically, it does make sense to keep the press secretary in the dark about the lies he's telling. That said, McClellan stresses that the president was as much a victim of these lies as McClellan himself. I don't think I need to stress how creepy that is.

Now that the ship is really going down, it's somewhat pleasant to see who's a rat and who's a barnacle - all apologies to barnacles, because, after all, they can't betray their own humanity. The attacks against McClellan have already started - the book doesn't' "sound" like the Scott that they knew, as if to imply that he's gone mad and converted into a Manchurian leftist. Master scoundrel Karl Rove has declared that McClellan sounded like a "left-wing blogger", whatever that means. I assume he's not referring to the book's rather unappealing style, which, if the published excerpts are indicative, is cobbled together in a kind of Bush-speak with the aid of a thesaurus.

All of this frenzied spin makes me want to discuss the other books that have yet to be written about this dark-water period in American history. This won't be the last confirmation of the thuggish cynicism of this administration, what with all their foolish consistencies, their hobgoblins, their little minds.