The tattletale book by President Bush's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, looks likely to be a one-day wonder. And no wonder. For all the gee-whiz reactions to them, none of the supposed revelations is in fact a revelation.

The only surprise in the whole business is that McClellan, a doting Bush loyalist for all anyone knew, wrote the book at all.

Were Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, um, less than candid about their roles in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame? Well, of course.

Did the administration resort to propaganda, exaggerated fear-mongering and carefully coiffed "truths" to sell the Iraq war to a public that would have balked at the real reason for starting it: Bush's fantasy vision of a Muslim Middle East awed into peaceableness by the sudden example of an Arab democracy in its midst?

That had been the proclaimed dream scenario since the mid-1990s of the neoconservatives with whom Bush surrounded himself.

Rove had a reputation "as a ruthless, perhaps unscrupulous operator"? The cries from whole wards of the politically maimed have testified to that for years. Bush makes decisions more from his "gut" than from study and reflection? Bush boasted of himself as a "decider," not a thinker.

And, yes, it was obvious early on that, as McClellan charges, the administration was getting gingerly treatment from the media.

First, there was the usual inaugural honeymoon and benefit of the doubt. Then 9/11 froze skepticism and at the first sign of even a little thawing, administration mouthpieces intimidatingly suggested that any venturesome reporting that inconvenienced the White House verged on the unpatriotic.

Factor in as well the sorry fact that even before 9/11, publishers and producers, in bulk, had let themselves be cowed by the long right-wing campaign to cast ordinary journalistic enterprise as "liberal" and had even managed, in a coup of linguistic legerdemain, to turn "mainstream" into a feared accusation.

No, McClellan tells us little we didn't already know. And there's more and sometimes even worse. The nation has let slide this administration's subversion of statutory and constitutional law, its deep-dug secrecy, its abandonment of the high ground in favor of kidnappings, secret detentions, torture and drumhead trials.

McClellan pleads for an end to the constant political campaign that has muscled out governance, a campaign fueled by a politics in which every issue is ransacked for partisan opportunity, in which no differences can be settled short of unconditional surrender, in which the public interest is a mere shuttlecock to be batted back and forth endlessly.

It is the right plea, but you have to wonder. Can it be other than lost on an electorate whose sprawling indifference has even, without complaint, let more than 4,000 coffins from Iraq be slipped past it all but unseen?