Leo (July 23 — Aug. 22)
Try not to feel frustrated if current circumstances do not seem to be offering you as much support as you would wish. Mercury is working on bringing a real chance to alter your direction. Mars, meanwhile, is increasing your personal power.
Scorpio (Oct. 24 — Nov. 22)
Market forces exert pressure on us all to earn and spend more money, but the answer to your current question does not concern material issues. Your deepening understanding of life is now promising to bring enlightenment and emotional freedom.
Gemini (May 21 — June 21)
Stay aware of what's really pertinent to your situation. The sky cannot force you to do what is in your own best interests, but it is attempting to divert your attention from an irrelevant problem that is nudging you to pursue an unwise goal.
Pisces (Feb. 20 — March 20)
If you want success today, just keep things simple – assuming, of course, that you can manage this. It requires you not to ask for too many opinions, not to read too much on a certain subject and not to worry quite as much as you have been.
Read Phil Booth at boothstars.com or at thestar.com/horoscope.
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON–In the most stinging repudiation of George W. Bush's policies ever penned by an insider, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says the U.S. president shaded the truth and used "propaganda'' and innuendo to sell the war in Iraq.
McClellan, once one of the most trusted members of the president's Texas "family,'' spent three years as the public defender of the rationale and conduct of the Bush war, but in a new book he calls the decision to invade a "strategic blunder'' and terms the war unnecessary.
Remaining Bush loyalists fired back quickly, painting McClellan as a disgruntled former employee who was acting like a "liberal blogger,'' portraying him as a man badly out of the loop who never raised any of these objections while in the White House.
McClellan's What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception had two other immediate impacts. It hurt presumed Republican presidential nominee John McCain's ongoing defence of the war, and it should give pause to those remaining believers who consider the answers from the White House briefing room to be anything more than manufactured spin.
"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided – that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder,'' McClellan writes.
In selling the war, he said, the Bush administration stopped short of out-and-out deception, instead "shading the truth; downplaying the major reason for going to war and emphasizing a lesser motivation that could arguably be dealt with in other ways (such as intensified diplomatic pressure); trying to make the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable, than they were."
McClellan said the administration ignored some of the crucial caveats provided by its intelligence agencies, using innuendo to encourage Americans to believe falsehoods such as the idea that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program or operational links to Al Qaeda.
Yet, in July 2003, at one of his earliest briefings, McClellan was asked whether the White House had a "credibility problem'' over its rationale to war.
"Absolutely not,'' he replied.
"The president has been very straightforward about this from the beginning. He laid out a very compelling case, a very clear case. It was based on solid evidence and it was based on a number of factors.''
McClellan also says the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the biggest blunder of Bush's second term, writing that he and his advisers spent the first week after the deadly storm "in a state of denial.''
Yet, at the briefing-room podium in the wake of the storm, when McClellan was asked to respond to then House minority leader Nancy Pelosi's charge that the president was "obviously in denial,'' he said: "You all are well aware of how engaged this president is in the response efforts and making sure that we're meeting the immediate needs.''
McClellan was White House press secretary from 2003 to 2006.
"Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House,'' said Bush press secretary Dana Perino.
"For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.''
On Fox News, former Bush adviser Karl Rove said McClellan sounded like "a liberal blogger'' and said he was out of the loop.
Part Two
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