George W. Bush is a historic embarrassment that will forever stain the legacy of American democracy. Listen to short clips from his press conference yesterday and see if you can make it through a couple of minutes without averting your eyes:




I always come back to the same point because it is the one that makes the biggest difference. The press failed us. This man was always stupid -- and glaringly so. The press needed to tell the American people that the emperor had no clothes on. Instead they spent so many years covering his ass. That's how this imbecile was elected a second time. It was great failing of the press, while they thought they were being "neutral." Your job isn't to be neutral, it's to be objective.

A neutral sports reporter would be laughed out of the press box. The Cowboys beat the Giants 42-10. The neutral reporter says they both played fine. The objective reporter says the Cowboys kicked ass and the Giants sucked. Report the score!

A neutral reporter says John McCain and Barack Obama are both fine candidates who represent a change from George W. Bush. An objective reporters says that John McCain's policy proposals are nearly identical to George W. Bush's. They agree on at least 95% of the issues.

You don't have to say John McCain sucks, that's an opinion. But you do have to say that he is nearly a carbon copy of Bush. That's a fact. If you don't report that, then you are not doing your job of informing the American people. That's how we get incompetent presidents like George W. Bush -- because the press was too scared to report the obvious truth.

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More accurately, Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) clowned himself. But he did such a poor job, even Wolf Blitzer had to challenge him and show that his argument made no sense. First, watch how Gov. Sanford mumbles, bumbles and stumbles through this interview:





Now, as to the real point -- there is no difference between John McCain and George Bush on economic issues. John McCain agrees with 98% of the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

They fundamentally don't believe in government regulation. That is a radical position (a sensible position is that we need some regulation, enough to check the excesses of an unfettered market without over-regulating industry). When it comes to financial institutions taking great risks for short-term pay-offs and then dumping their mess on the American taxpayer if it goes wrong, we need more regulation to make sure they can't do this.

If they want to take all this risk and then when they get burned, we don't bail them out, then fine. But if it's going to be my money that bails them out, I'm not going to sign-off on excessive risk for excessive short-term profits when we have to deal with the long-term pain. This is highway robbery. It's also socialism for the rich.

If you're a middle-class working family, Republicans throw bootstraps at you and say you need to pick yourself up off the ground. They offer no government assistance under the guise of the free market. But if the top banks get in trouble, the free market is out the window and here comes government welfare to save the day for rich folks.

Funny how that works. Unless you're insanely wealthy or directly benefit from these anti-free market practices of the Bush administration (no-bid contracts to favored military suppliers is another example), you'd be crazy to vote for another Republican.

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Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama claimed over and over during the primaries that they were strong leaders who could take America in a new direction. They also claimed that George W. Bush was the worst president in US history. Then, how come they have never been able to beat him in almost any legislative battles?

This week they surrendered again. This time it was about giving immunity to telecommunication companies who broke the law to placate the Bush administration. Nearly everyone involved admits they broke the law -- otherwise they wouldn't need immunity.

I didn't rob a bank, so I don't need immunity for robbery. Everyone should have their rights, and that definitely applies to the telecom companies and the Bush administration as well, so it should be very simple for them to go into a courthouse and show there was nothing wrong with what they did. Except they can't, and that's why desperately need immunity for the crimes they have committed.

This isn't about spying on terrorists. The FISA court gives out warrants like they're growing on trees. If they spied on terrorists, it's the easiest thing in the world to show. No, this is for breaking the law and spying on Americans without a court order. Do we know who they spied on? No, and now we never will. Why? The Democrats are going to give these companies -- and by extension the Bush administration -- immunity for breaking the law.

In essence, the Democrats are giving a preemptive pardon to George Bush and everyone else that authorized and participated in this illegal surveillance program.

Now, if we only had a couple of strong leaders on the Democratic side who could stop this. Oh wait a minute, I remember two people that kept telling me how strong and capable they were. One of them even claimed that change was coming. You know when it might be a good time for change? Right about now.

Instead, Hillary Clinton is on vacation somewhere doing absolutely nothing about this immunity bill. When it's not about her career, all of a sudden she's not that moved to fight for us, our laws and our constitution. Since she's not going to be president, she's taken her ball and gone home.

And what about Obama? Nothing. Worse than nothing, because he's actually thinking about voting with the Republicans on a so-called compromise, which in the words of Sen. Feingold is nothing short of a "capitulation." Leadership you can believe in!

You think I sound angry here, you should have seen me all week on the show. If you want to see what I think of pathetic Democratic weakness, watch this (not safe for work or with kids around). The Democrats make it nearly impossible to respect them. And if you want to see what I think of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama's awful record of leadership on this issue, watch this:




If you can't beat the most unpopular president of all time in a simple legislative fight like this, how can you claim to be a strong and effective leader?

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Scott McClellan dropped another bombshell today. It turns out the man who ultimately authorized the leak of secret intelligence information was -- George W. Bush. As Bush was claiming he would not tolerate any intelligence leaks, he was leaking the intelligence himself.

Watch McClellan explain what happened exactly:




Remember what George H.W. Bush said about people expose the identities of our secret agents:




The most insidious of traitors, indeed.

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President Bush was trying to explain what success in Iraq means to him, when as usual, he embarrassed himself (and the rest of us for electing him):





By the way, I should also note that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded and Iran's influence in Iraq has been greatly expanded since our invasion as well. So, we are now fighting a circular war in which we are battling the forces we helped to create by attacking Iraq in the first place. George W. Bush is the worst president ever.

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This year the leading Democratic candidate has been charged with being an "elitist." What surprise! That's what they're charged with every four years. George W. Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, his dad was president and he had everything in his life handed to him on a silver platter and the media said his opponents were elitists and he was an average Joe. Why do they keep falling for this same crap every time? Are they this stupid or are they complicit?





We also discussed who is more elitists between the different campaigns here (warning: some strong language). I know it was Hillary Clinton who originally brought up this elitist charge this time, but then again it's hard to separate her from a Republican these days, as I explain in this video (also some strong language).

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In the video below I summarize what General Petraeus told Congress yesterday -- and show why according to his logic we can never, ever leave Iraq:





Despite what George Bush believes, we do not live in a black and white world. So, Gen. Petraeus is neither pure evil nor pure good. As an officer serving in Iraq, he risks his life on a daily basis (maybe not as much as the people below him in the chain of command, but certainly plenty enough -- and hell of a lot more than the rest of us). He was smart to make deals with the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia. This -- and not the extra troops -- brought the level of violence in Iraq down for awhile.

On the other hand, he was originally in charge of training the Iraqi troops and he was a miserable failure in that regard. To this day, many years later, they still remain woefully untrained. Since they are not ready to accept responsibility in for security in Iraq, we have to remain there. But to be fair, this is not really Gen. Petraeus's fault. They didn't want to be trained. They don't want to be part of the Iraqi Army. But that is what leads to Gen. Petraeus's greatest failure.

He refuses to recognize or acknowledge that the central government of Iraq is a fraud. It is neither central nor a government. It does not effectively govern any part of Iraq outside of the Green Zone. The Kurds run the north, the former Sunni insurgents now run the Anbar province and the Shiite militias run the south, including Basra. The so-called central government has been reduced to simply another large Shiite militia.

So, why are we backing one Shiite militia over another? Especially one that is more linked to Iran then even the Mahdi Army? There is no good answer for that. That is why Gen. Petraeus has been dutifully avoiding that topic for the last several days. And this is the core of my problem with Petraeus. He is following orders set by this administration and not being honest with Congress or the American people. He knows the central government of Iraq is a joke, has no real power and is tied to Iran. Yet, he helps to perpetrate this fraud upon the American people so that we can stay in Iraq longer.

The whole point of this exercise is to hand off this mess to the next president so that Bush can pretend he didn't lose Iraq. And for Petraeus to be complicit in that kind of political manipulation is unacceptable and unforgivable.

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You gotta love Jesse Ventura. Look at what he says about George Bush, Dick Cheney and all the rest of the chickenhawks:





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What conservatives don't understand is that America was not made in God's image. It was not born perfect. It is not and should not be immune to change. Challenging the government of America isn't un-American, it's the very definition of being American.

Through these challenges and these changes we continue to make America better and better. We are not the greatest country by birthright or accident of geography; we are the greatest because we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

So, when we do something as hideous as what I explain below, it is our duty as Americans to challenge our government and demand that they do better. We cannot allow them to do this in our name:




Here is the original 60 Minutes story on what we did to Murat Kurnaz. But his story is, unfortunately, not unique. We have done this to countless people at Bagram Air Base, Qaim, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. We are better than this. Don't let George Bush tell the rest of the world that this is what we are and what we stand for. We must defend the honor and good name of America, otherwise this is what we become.

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Finally, we have agreement in Washington. Democrats, Republicans and the press all agree -- Bush's new budget proposal is completely unrealistic and a total disaster. It exemplifies all that is wrong with his administration -- overspending on war, enormous deficits, unrealistic tax cuts, draconian cuts in services and dishonest numbers.

We explain all that is wrong with the budget here:




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As I explain in the video below, I think this is not a very good idea, but I am amused. Here's the story of the town in Vermont considering the arrest of President Bush and Vice President Cheney:




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Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we've heard that one before. Well, the two groups--the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism--managed to secure major media attention by making the claim that the Bush administration released 935 false statements. Clearly no one was in the mood to read all 935, so the leftist groups boiled them down to 532. We hear that on 532 occasions the Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the claim is not that Bush told 532 lies, but that he told the same lie 532 times.

But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn't Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out? When I raise this point with liberals on campus, they typically say, "Well, we're not saying that Bush knew for sure that there were no such weapons. We are saying that his administration stacked the data." But this is another way of saying that Bush actually believed that there were those weapons, and he mobilized whatever evidence he could muster to make his case. This may reflect prejudice against Saddam Hussein's motives or even imprudent decision making but it is hardly proof of lying.

Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of refugee German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb. The project was headed by that country's greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler getting such a weapon, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. America built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan.

Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan Project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, "Einstein lied" or "FDR lied." They didn't lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.

The same is true of Bush. As a statesman, he had to act in the moving current of events. He didn't have the luxury of hindsight. To those leftist pundits who say, "Knowing what we know now, Mr Bush, why did you do what you did then?" Bush's answer is, "Obviously I didn't know what we know now." Acting against the somber backdrop of 9/11, Bush made a hard call based on an assessment of the intelligence provided to him. He may have acted in haste, and he may have acted in error, but he did not act in bad faith. Therefore the claim that Bush lied is itself a lie.

If a Democrat ever lies (most of the time it doesn't even have to be a lie, as long as the press claims it's a lie), the media goes ballistic. They never, ever let it go.

The most obvious example is Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. They built such a firestorm over that lie about his personal life that the man was impeached. But at least that actually was a lie. The press grilled Al Gore for saying he invented the internet and personally discovered the Love Canal and that Love Story was based on his marriage. Here's the problem -- Al Gore never said any of those things.

You should read this great Vanity Fair article about how the media concocted these fabrications and hammered Gore's reputation with them in 2000. The writer meticulously researches exactly what Gore said and exactly which members of the press misquoted him and exaggerated his claims. And how the press mercilessly piled on, when ironically they were the ones misleading the public.

Now, the question is: Will Mitt Romney get anywhere near that level of scrutiny for his blatant lie?

George W. Bush never wanted to be president. He just wanted to be elected president.

He said recently he is going to miss campaigning because that's fun. Whereas, clearly he isn't having any fun in actually doing the job. The work of actually being president is like homework to him. So, he winds up ignoring his work in a criminally negligent manner that winds up getting people killed.

The perfect example is in the video below. A student asks him about the fact that no law seems to apply to US contractors in Iraq. This is a vitally important question because, as we have found out recently, Blackwater employees wound up killing dozens of innocent Iraqis and KBR/Halliburton employees wound up gang raping at least one American woman -- and they cannot be punished because the Bush administration never bothered to bring these people within the law.

Now that you know that background, watch this pathetic performance by Bush when he is asked this question a year and half ago:




People sometimes accuse me of being a Bush-hater. To which I reply, hell yeah!

But I didn't start that way. I thought his father was a good president, who was the best foreign policy president we have had in my lifetime. I was a Republican when George W. Bush came into office. It's because of him I ran screaming from the party. My distaste for Bush has grown through experience. He has earned it!

When your president is this incompetent and this indifferent, I have to wonder about your sanity if you don't dislike him. He isn't a dentist or a plumber. His decisions, his actions, and in this case, his lack of action or interest, gets people killed. And when he seems to show absolutely no concern over it, I grow from disagreeing with him to disliking him. I just don't understand how anyone can stomach a man this clueless and this callous.

So, if you want to see why I hate him, look at the clip of him answering that question in the video above. That's how. He earned it!

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Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
--Theodore Roosevelt

Listening to the fatuous Al Gore claim his undeserved Nobel Prize and maunder on about how America is ruining the planet makes me realize how fortunate America is to have as its president George W. Bush. Yes, Bush has his ample share of failings. He occasionally speaks at the fifth-grade level. He is too willing to surround himself with cronies and sycophants. An unsupple man, Bush sometimes reminds me of the toy soldier who walks into the wall and keeps going.

Bush's weaknesses, however, are more than compensated for by his one great strength. This is a man with unbelievable tenacity. No American president in my lifetime, not even Reagan, had Bush's guts. Perhaps one would have to go all the way back to Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt to find comparable determination. On the international stage, Bush's stamina recalls that of Churchill. Consider: when Bush was elected in 2000 with the tiniest conceivable margin--a margin so slender it required Supreme Court intervention to place him in the Oval Office--I was sure that Bush's proposed tax cuts were dead. But no: Bush pushed ahead and got most of what he proposed. And the subsequent health of the economy--low interest rates, low unemployment, steady growth--has undoubtedly been nourished by Bush's tax cuts.

Then in 2006, after the midterm debacle, I thought that Bush's Iraq policy was finished. And you could hear the pundits and the newly-elected Democratic congressmen and the pathological Bush-haters gleefully declaring, "Now he's going to have to start pulling out of Iraq." Instead Bush pressed for an increase of 20,000-25,000 troops. Incredibly, he got it. Congress shrieked and howled but went along. The American people were very doubtful, but Bush serenely told them to "wait and see." Bush has seemingly singe-handedly pursued his vision for Iraq even when his allies both at home and abroad have dwindled or lost their nerve. And once again Bush's policy seems to be working. Iraq is becoming more peaceful, and apparently there are Shia and Sunni leaders cooperating with the Americans. The Bush-haters are still with us, but the wind has gone out of the antiwar movement.

Bush has had a tough second term in office. But I think history will be kinder to him than the opinion polls, at least in the past couple of years, have been. When the country looks back at Iraq and sees a standing, even if fragile, democracy, Americans will see that when they became impatient, Bush forged ahead. When they were ready to give up, he was undeterred. And as a consequence the Middle East has its first Muslim democracy, and a pro-American democracy to boot. The lesson of Iraq may well be: Thank God we didn't listen to those advocates of defeat on the left; if we had, it would have been Vietnam all over again.

The diplomat Clare Luce once wrote that history, which has no room for clutter, will remember every president by just one line. I'm not quite sure how Bill Clinton will be remembered: perhaps his only distinguishing mark will be the one that Paula Jones identified. As for Bush, he will go down in history as the president who refused to back down, and if staying the course in Iraq proves to be the right move, then Bush could be remembered as one of America's great presidents.