With all the gloating about Scotty "Sucka MC" McClellan's loss of employment, I think Jay Rosen (who teaches journalism at NYU) has the best analysis: Sucka MC's ineptitude was deliberate. Part of a strategic attempt to starve the public of reality-based information and a philosophical contempt for freedom of the press.

From Jay Rosen's unpublished, aborted Q and A piece with John Harris, the national politics editor of the Washington Post:

The old understanding, which lasted from Kennedy to Gore, was that the White House has a right to get its message out, and the press has a right to probe and question, and so there will always be tensions in the relationship...

[The Bushies] sensed that the old press system was weakened and they changed the game on you. They knew you wouldn't react because to do so would look "too political."

Other White Houses had a "line of the day" they wanted to push. None had a spokesman like Scott McClellan who, no matter what the question, will mindlessly repeat the line of the day as a way of showing journalists that they have no rights to an answer. That isn't "spin," although it may superficially look like spin. That's shutting down the podium and emptying out the briefing room without saying you're doing it.

A nice example of Creeping Fascism. Just because they don't wear funny hats, doesn't mean it isn't Fascism. It's Fascism that is aware of Marketing priorities: don't freak out your audience! You have to get past their defense mechanisms in order to deliver the message.

A platoon of jack-booted "security forces" clearing Dear Leader's briefing room and arresting journalists looks bad.

Holding daily briefings conducted by a plump clown who discloses zero information gives the appearance of transparency but has the same end result as the jackboot scenario.

The definition of Rollback:

Back ‘em up, starve ‘em down, and drive up their negatives: this policy toward the press has many strengths as a working piece of politics, and supporters of it abound within the Bush coalition. I believe the ultimate goal is to enhance executive power and maximize the president’s freedom of maneuver— not only in policy-making, and warfare, but on the terrain of fact itself.

Control of Reality is a powerful thing.

Rox already picked up the money grafs from Rosen's obituary for Sucka MC, but for your convenience:

McClellan’s specialty was non-communication; what’s remarkable about him as a choice for press secretary is that he had no special talent for explaining Bush’s policies to the world. In fact, he usually made things less clear by talking about them. We have to assume that this is the way the President wanted it; and if we do assume that it forces us to ask: why use a bad explainer and a rotten communicator as your spokesman before the entire world? Isn’t that just dumb— and bad politics? Wouldn’t it be suicidal in a media-driven age with its 24-hour news cycle?

You would think so, but if the goal is to skate through unquestioned—because the gaps in your explanations are so large to start with—then to refuse to explain is a demonstration of raw presidential power. (As in “never apologize, never explain.”) So this is another reason McClellan was there. Not to be persuasive, but to refute the assumption that there was anyone the White House needed or wanted to persuade— least of all the press! Politics demands assent, on one hand, and attack on the other. (And those are your choices with Bush and Rove: assent or be attacked.) The very notion of persuasion conceded more to democratic politics than the Bush forces wanted to concede.

If it's slaying snark of fine vintage you crave, here's the Michael Wolff article:

It's this verbal haplessness that has made Scott McClellan—a pleasant, low-wattage, old-before-his-time young fellow, with, at 38, a wife, no children, and "two dogs and four cats"—the living symbol of this White House's profound and, perhaps, mortal problem with language and meaning. McClellan himself, as though having some terrible social disability, has, standing miserably in the press briefing room every day, become a kick-me archetype.

From Vanity Fair, where the effete meet to beat mental midgets into the hard concrete.