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In an email obtained by Politico, former GOP senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole harshly criticizes former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan for keeping quiet while serving in the Bush Administration only to write a money-making book critical of the administration once he had left.

"There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues," Dole wrote. "No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique."

"No doubt you will 'clean up' as the liberal anti-Bush press will promote your belated concerns with wild enthusiasm," Dole added. "When the money starts rolling in you should donate it to a worthy cause, something like, 'Biting The Hand That Fed Me.' Another thought is to weasel your way back into the White House if a Democrat is elected. That would provide a good set up for a second book deal in a few years"

Dole's spokesman confirmed that the email is authentic.

The 1996 Republican nominee wrote that McClellan should have spoken up at the time if he had concerns about the administration, writing that doing so "would have taken integrity and courage."

Concludes Dole: "You’re a hot ticket now but don’t you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?"

The Democratic National Committee has released a Web-only video, "Propaganda," that uses video of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to make a case against the Bush administration – and, by extension, presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

The minute-long video opens with the words "Scott McClellan: White House Used Propaganda To Lead Us To War." There is then a cut to the former press secretary, who says "caveats were dropped...contradictory intelligence was ignored. Intelligence that had a high level of confidence was combined and packaged with intelligence that had a low level of confidence. And together, that made it sound like the threat was more urgent and more grave and gathering than it really turned out to be."

Later in the video there is a clip of John McCain from March 24, 2003, saying, "there's no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone that we will be welcomed as liberators." He is also shown predicting an "overwhelming victory in a very short period of time."

Watch it:



UPDATE: Responds Republican National Committee Spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson: “With the Democrats are on the verge of nominating somebody who has not been to Iraq for 873 days, it’s no surprise they would rather engage in these sorts of backward-looking attacks. No amount of DNC propaganda can change the fact that Barack Obama lacks the necessary judgment and experience to make the decisions that will either bring peace and security to Iraq or more chaos and conflict.”

YouTube is causing headaches for McCain, reports the Los Angeles Times today, and not just because of videos produced by the DNC. One three-minute video, "John McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare,” has more than 1.5 million views, and "raise[s] some nasty doubts about John McCain's reputation as a straight talker," the Times reports.

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After John McCain effectively wrapped up the Republican nomination, he paid a highly public visit to the White House to receive the blessing of his party’s leader for the last four years. Since then, McCain has done everything he can to erase that image of the two standing together in front of the White House.

McCain took a barrage of criticism from conservative radio hosts for supporting the view that climate change is a challenge that needs to be addressed. He’s taken road trips to places that probably haven’t seen a Republican presidential candidate in decades. McCain has gladly accepted Bush’s help raising money, as he did yesterday in Arizona – but behind closed doors.

But no matter how much McCain tries to distance himself from a president with historically low approval ratings though, there’s one issue on which they will forever be linked – the war in Iraq. Despite his early and frequent criticisms of the conduct of the war, McCain has been a staunch advocate of it. McCain says he would win in Iraq and accuses Barack Obama of wanting to “surrender” there.

Enter former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, whose accusations made in a new book about the selling of the war are sure to make life all the more uncomfortable for McCain.

McClellan charges (among other things) that the war in Iraq was sold to Americans through a “political propaganda campaign” that was “all about manipulating sources of public opinion,” according to a copy of the book previewed by the Washington Post. Most strikingly, McClellan concludes about the war: “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

Should Hillary Clinton somehow still win the nomination, such accusations may have less impact since both she and McCain voted to give President Bush the authorization to go to war. But Obama just received new talking points to bolster his argument that it is judgment, not the experience McCain is selling, which is the more important quality for a president. Obama, whose early opposition to the war has helped him get within inches of the Democratic nomination, will certainly hammer this point home.

For McCain, the allegations made by McClellan are nothing but bad news.

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