Now and then I hear George W. Bush praised for the eloquence of his remarks in a prepared speech. I do not usually want to embarrass or disillusion the listener by explaining the facts of life about White House speechmaking. However, anyone who reads Matthew Scully’s tell-all takeout in the September Atlantic on his days manufacturing phrases for the president, will have disillusionment to spare. It’s a scathing tale that oozes resentment with every word. Among the mildest: “extravagant falsehood.”

That’s Scully’s description of chief White House speech writer Michael Gerson’s way of hogging the limelight and giving his colleagues scant or no credit. As Scully vehemently tells it, he, Gerson and John McConnell were close collaborators but Gerson was a shameless self-promoter who, in interviews and profiles, hid their contributions. And oh, did I mention plagiarism? Scully does not use the dread word but he unmistakably accuses Gerson of recycling work Scully did for the Wall Street Journal.

Scully cites as an example of Gerson’s style the oft-quoted “axis of evil” reference to Iran, Iraq and North Korea in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech. Although Scully says Gerson implied to the New Yorker that the words were his, they were, Scully writes, a team effort built around the germ of an idea volunteered by a former speech writer.

Set aside for a moment the spectacle of four grown men to compose three words, and consider the content: it’s mystifying why anyone would want credit for it. The phrase seemed dumb at the time and is even dumber in retrospect. Axis in the context of international affairs means alliance, partnership or coalition. The only thing Iraq and Iran had in common was that they detested each other. Germany, Italy and Japan were the Axis powers in World War II because they fought on the same side; Iraq and Iran fought AGAINST each other. Their murderous eight-year war ended in 1988 and cost a million casualties. North Korea seems to have been dragged into the speech to form a non-existent parallel with the true axis. Those who wrote the speech basically lumped together three disparate regimes to create a zippy passage that made no intrinsic sense.

Worse than its playing with words was the speech’s playing with facts. Referring to Iraq in the address, Bush declared, “This is a regime that agreed to international inspectors – then kicked out the inspectors.” Hans Blix, chief U.N. arms inspector, wrote that it was Richard Butler, head of the United Nations Special Commission, who had ordered the inspectors out before the expected 1998 bombing of Iraq by the U.S. and Britain. The Washington Post reported the same thing.

The 2002 State of the Union speech was part of the blustery build-up for war against Iraq and included since-discredited claims of a “grave and growing danger” to the U.S. If I were one of the speech writers I would worry about liability, however remote, if there ever is a war crimes tribunal in connection with the attack on Iraq.

Speech writers are not journalists; essentially they are hired guns and propagandists though some move in and out of journalism. Gerson is a former senior editor at U.S. News and now again is in journalism as a twice-a-week syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. If I were still in the column-buying business, I might be interested in adding someone of Gerson’s talent to my roster of editorial-page contributors, but I would want assurance that he’s rid himself of bad habits picked up in the White House.