You've probably heard by now that former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan is spilling some serious beans in his upcoming memoir called "What Happened" due out in April. To whet our appetite, the publisher has released a pretty damning excerpt in which McClellan in no uncertain terms implicates Bush and Cheney in the disinformation campaign that Scotty undertook from his post in the press room to exonerate the administration in the outing of Valerie Wilson.

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

"There was one problem. It was not true.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

Today, Chris Dodd, using language that evokes memories of an investigation that took down another Republican president, has called on Attorney General Mukasey to begin an investigation into McClellan's claims.

"Today's revelations by Mr. McClellan are very disturbing and raise several important questions that need to be answered. If in fact the President of the United of States knowingly instructed his chief spokesman to mislead the American people, there can be no more fundamental betrayal of the public trust.

"During his confirmation process, Attorney General Mukasey said he would act independently. Accordingly, today, I call on the Attorney General to live up to his word and launch an immediate investigation to determine the facts of this case, the extent of any cover up and determine what the President knew and when he knew it."

Good for Senator Dodd. While my knee-jerk assumption is that Mukasey will prove to be no better than Gonzales when it comes to challenging this president's powers, I like that Dodd is issuing a direct challenge to him. And if the outrage with which Chris Matthews covered McClellan's revelation today on Hardball is any indication, Scotty's book could very well serve as a tipping point among the media if not the American people when it comes to demanding some actual accountability of this administration. At the very least, Dodd's call for an investigation makes Mike Nizza's prediction at The NYTime's Lede blog that much more likely:

How exactly was the president involved? Did he take part in a cover-up? Will the next few sentences in the book explain the role of each official? [...]

...something tells The Lede that this won't be the last little taste of the book that the publisher will, um, leak to the press.