Now NeoCons Hate Capitalism

Or rather, they hate it when one of their (supposed) own writes a tell-all book about a corrupted Administration that they backed 100%. From Think Progress, these are some of the things being said about Scott McClellan's motives for writing his new book:

Brad Blakeman, former White House staffer: “A publisher got to him and he waved a lot of money, I’m sure, in front of him and he took the bait and that is just unfortunate.”

Trent Duffy, former White House deputy press secretary: “It’s like he just turned over the pen to a publisher and signed his name at the bottom and got a big fat book contract.”

Bill O’Reilly: “McClellan is in it for the bucks, keeping in mind his publisher also distributes books by George Soros and other far left people.”

Newt Gingrich, former House speaker: “Here is this guy who want to sell books. He’s cut his ties to the administration and his publisher says, ‘Now look, you can spice it up a little bit.’”

Sure the message deviates to "Scott has been brainwashed by the left" or "Scott's just disgruntled" or whatever, but all of these excuses are anchored with the same theory: the primary motive was money.

Now two things on this:

1. How can a group who has made untold amounts of money because of the Bush Administration's questionable policies fault someone of trying to make money legally? When there were whispers that Bush's oil contacts were making a killing of of the Iraqi occupation, those people were met with scorn; they were even accused of being unpatriotic. But strangely enough, neither the facts nor the arguments were really ever disputed.
2. Even if McClellan's motive was financial in nature, how does that detract from what he's written? Anyone who writes something with pertinent information, and has it published, is most likely doing so for monetary compensation. If we were to assume that the sole motivation behind any book was to get money, and as a consequence of that books can't be considered "reliable," then should we trust any publication?

I'm just saying that "s/he did it for the money" is a lame reason for dismissing any writer, author or book. If we take that out of the question, we are left with two other tried-and-true neoconservative smear tactics: (a) call the person a liberal hater (which is ridiculous considering his former job), or (b) claim that the person doesn't have Clue One what s/he is talking about (well, then, why the hell make this person a Press Secretary?).

One last thing: McClellan wasn't the first to write such things, and he probably won't be the last.