Under the headline "Nations Hope Veil Lifts From Libya's History of Terrorism," John Burns writes in today's New York Times (8/30/11):

Television footage of the only man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Gadhafi's government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader's war with the Western world?

So terrorism was Gadhafi's "signature," and many "nations" hope a full accounting will be forthcoming. What's the record that Burns has put together?

Obviously he talks about Pan Am 103, which is the most visible example. But there are serious questions about the link between Libya and the Lockerbie bombing. Burns mentions the 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing, which killed three people. The judge at the 2001 trial said the  Libyan government bore some responsibility, but a connection to Gadhafi could not be established. The Times account of the trial mentioned in passing that prosecutors alleged that the disco bombing was launched  "to retaliate against the sinking of two Libyan boats by the United States in the Gulf of Sirte." It's unlikely that many people remember these acts, which likely killed a fair number of Libyans.

The other examples Burns cites are support for the Irish Republican Army--similar schemes were undertaken around the world, including here in the United States--a shooting outside a British embassy that killed a police officer and the disappearance of a religious leader in Lebanon during a visit to Libya.

This is not to suggest that Gadhafi was innocent of any of these charges. His rule in Libya was marked by vicious attacks and repression inside the country.

But it's difficult to imagine someone at the Times writing about international hunger for accountability for terrorist acts supported, linked to or committed by George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. It's not as if it would be difficult to point to their "signature" acts--support for deadly, anti-democratic death squads in Latin America, the massive destruction and violence unleashed on Iraq, or the torture and prisoner deaths that occurred on Bush's watch. But something tells that if you were to to try to write about these "signature" acts of American terrorism in connection to either--or even to Henry Kissinger's record--someone at the New York Times might try to have you committed.

In case you were wondering whether Irene sparked any discussions of climate change, here's a moment from the panel discussion on ABC's This Week (8/30/11):

RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion?

DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No.

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don't know if we want to open that door.

Let that serve as a reminder to read Neil deMause's piece from the last issue of Extra!

This was a laugh line, so I guess take it for what it's worth.  On the other hand, Cokie Roberts seemed to be serious when she said this about George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina:

It was surprising to me, his reaction, because his father's example with Hurricane Andrew had been such that you would think that he would, you know, understand that he needed to get out front on Katrina. But in his case, a huge part of his appeal post September 11th, was that he was keeping the country safe. And suddenly, people didn't feel safe. They weren't safe. They were in a very dangerous situation.

Back in reality, Bush's job approval rating was hovering around 50 percent for about 18 months prior to Katrina--which would suggest quite a number of people weren't sure about Bush's "appeal" before that storm hit. More jarring, though, is to hear someone say that people liked Bush after the 9/11 attacks because "he was keeping the country safe." Really?

Fox host Bill O'Reilly laughs off any calls for increasing government spending to help create jobs. Last week he derided Paul Krugman for

demanding more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? Unbelievable.

People like Bill O'Reilly don't pay any mind to the fancy pants Nobel Prize committee that gave Krugman one of their liberal awards. Why should he? He knows how the economy really works, as he explained last night (8/8/11):

Raising income taxes is not the way out of this. In 2001 and again in 2003, President Bush cut individual tax rates. And what happened? Well, from 2004 until 2008, tax revenue increased from about $800 billion to almost $1.2 trillion. That blows away the liberal argument that tax cuts starve the government of revenue. They don't.

This has been, at times, a talking point among conservatives. But you don't really get a sense of tax revenue without comparing it to something-- as FactCheck.org noted in a piece in 2007 (when John McCain was saying much the same about the Bush tax cuts), revenues tend to increase every year as the economy grows.

A more useful measure would be how tax revenue looks relative to the size of the economy. As the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent report (6/1/11) on the 10-year anniversary of the Bush cuts:

• Federal tax revenue fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in FY2000 (the last year of the 1991-2000 expansion and reflective of
Clinton-era tax rates) to 18.5 percent of GDP in FY2007 (the last year of the Bush economic expansion and reflective of
Bush-era tax rates).

• From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, nearly 50 percent of the total debt accrued
during this period.

• The decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous
decade since the 1950s.

That would be (part of) the "liberal argument" against the Bush tax cuts--and it doesn't appear to be "blown away" by O'Reilly's too-good-for-Princeton economic analysis.

Glenn Beck's temporary replacement in the 5 p.m. slot on Fox News, Eric Bolling, has started out with a bang. On the July 13 edition of his new show the Five, the host declared:  "America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008.  I don't remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time."

After Bolling's error, erasing 9/11 and several other deadly terrorism attacks from the Bush record, was pointed out by outlets including Media Matters and Huffington Post, the host returned to the air Thursday to issue a correction that sounded more like a retaliation against those who dared correct him. Bolling denounced the  "radical liberal left" and accused Media Matters of pettiness for pointing out the error, in an emotional tirade in which he exclaimed:

No, I haven't forgotten. I happened to be standing there, watching in true terror as radical Islamists slammed planes into the towers that morning. I remember the towers collapsing, killing 3,000, including 16 of my close friends. And I really remember trying to comfort the kids of my friends at their memorial services.

Bolling's temporary amnesia about the September 11 attacks puts him in company with many conservatives who have distorted the Bush record on terrorism  (Extra!, 3/10). But even the correction part of Bolling's tirade was in error:

Yesterday I misspoke when I said there were no U.S. terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11.

Among the terror attacks Bolling's revised position erases from the Bush record: the  September/October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five, the December 2001 "shoe bombing" attempt, the July 2002 attack on the L.A. airport's El Al ticket counter that left two dead, the "D.C. sniper" attacks in October 2002 that killed 10,  the  March 2006 SUV attack on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus that injured nine and the July 2008 murder of two at a progressive Knoxville, Tennessee church, which were carried out by a gunmen who said he was inspired by Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg.

According to the Huffington Post, none of the panelists on the show challenged Bolling's initial error about 9/11. But should we be surprised? Among those panelists was former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino, who is on the record insisting to an unfazed Sean Hannity, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."

Frank Bruni has been named the new Sunday op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Bruni has been writing restaurant reviews for the past few years, but came to a lot of people's attention as the reporter covering the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush. Bruni went on to write a book about that experience, and one of the lessons in the book was that what Bruni actually thought about Bush's campaign rhetoric and debate performances wasn't really what he was reporting at the time.

I wrote something about this when the book came out, though I can't recall whether or not it was ever used anywhere. Part of this was adapted for an episode of CounterSpin, that much I know for sure.

Covering Bush, or Covering Up for Him?

By Peter Hart

Though conservatives still pound away at the idea that the media won't cut them a break, it's hard to argue that Bush has been given anything but kid glove treatment from the mainstream press, all the way back to the early days of his candidacy.

A new book by New York Times correspondent Frank Bruni fills in some of the details in Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. While it is a peek behind the curtains of one of the most guarded and careful administrations in recent memory, the book also tells another, perhaps more important story about a rather lazy and inconsistent press corps.

Though he doesn't make much of it, Bruni offers some valuable evidence that he pulled his punches while covering Bush. Sometimes the evidence is clear. Bruni explains that at one point he "deliberately soft-pedaled" Bush's difficulties explaining his tax cut and his apparent trouble communicating in his native tongue. In the home stretch of the campaign, Bruni writes that he gave only cursory attention to Bush's late acknowledgment of an arrest for driving under the influence. Bruni's story led not with the arrest details but with Bush's "lashing out" at Al Gore over an unrelated matter. The curious news judgment earned Bruni a hearty endorsement from the Texas governor: "You're a good man."

In other areas, Bruni is not so forthcoming. In the book, Bush is "at best mediocre" in his first debate with Al Gore, and from where Bruni sat it looked like "Bush was in the process of losing the presidency." Sadly, his newspaper reporting was almost a mirror image: Bruni led his October 4 debate report not with how bad Bush was, but how obnoxious Al Gore was. In fact, the first four paragraphs are all Gore, whose "self-satisfied grin" and "oratorical intimidation" just rubbed Bruni the wrong way. It's nice to now Bruni's now getting around to telling us how he really felt--long after it matters.

This revisionism continued once Bush took office. As Bruni explains in the book, on Bush's first day in office he reinstated a ban on federal funding for groups overseas that provide abortion counseling, sometimes called the "gag rule." Bush's explanation was different, though; he said that he was acting to limit federal dollars from being used to promote abortion. A good catch, but one Bruni failed to make at the time, preferring instead to accept Bush's "conviction" without a word to suggest Bush was not telling the whole truth.  Other reporters managed to nail Bush for his deception.

Since Bruni provides little evidence to suggest that he was a cut above his peers on the campaign trail, one can assume that the image of a president that seems aloof, careless or even inattentive has nothing to do with media being too critical of him. In fact, it's more likely that we only know the half of it. And who's to blame for that? Bruni, for one, thinks that "modern politics wasn't just superficial because the politicians made it so. It was superficial because the voters let it be." If that’s the case, then those charged with exposing political chicanery--namely, folks like Bruni himself--have plenty of work to do. It's too bad they seem so unlikely to step up to the plate.

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler also documented the wide gap between what Bruni wrote in his book and what he wrote in the New York Times.

The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush's torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek from Yale professor Stephen Carter (5/5/11):

In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called "enhanced" interrogation....

So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama's presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president's failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden's door. If we are cheering bin Laden's death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.

Three cheers for torture--because the "vital clue" that "led us to bin Laden's door" was that he "communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers"? So without this "crucial" information, the U.S. government wouldn't have been looking for bin Laden's couriers? Or if it had found them, it wouldn't have realized they were important? Maybe it would have wasted time looking for couriers who were only children. "Bin Laden's door" it isn't.

Newsweek's rationale for cheering terrorism is no more convincing than the one advanced by Time (FAIR Blog, 5/6/11), which argued that the fact that detainees didn't give up any information about the courier under torture was key evidence that the courier was important.

One gets the sense that people who participated in torture, or helped to justify it--as Carter did in his book The Violence of Peace--recognize on some level that this was a horrible thing to do, and are desperate to assert that their moral collapse was not in vain.

OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you:

In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years

The piece--actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut--lays out the argument:

As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.

And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.

So not only did torture work, but the illegal, baseless war against Iraq "forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication."  In other words, the Iraq War led to catching bin Laden. This could give Fox News a new theme to pound for the next couple of days.

Will Ferrell did a one-man show at the end of the Bush years, in his W. character, called "You're Welcome, America." It was pretty funny. This is not.

In today's edition of the Washington Post (5/2/11), Dan Balz puts forth what is probably going to be a popular theme in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden:  that catching the Al-Qaeda leader was a top concern of both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Bush put down the marker not long after the September 11 attacks, saying he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." That was taken as a sign of cowboy swagger by a Texan president by some of his critics, but it was a reflection of the absolute importance that he and much of the nation attached to bringing to justice the man responsible for the worst terrorist attack on the homeland in the history of the nation....

Bin Laden eluded Bush and his team, to their regret, but not for lack of trying. Bush's persistence was palpable and set the tone for the intelligence community tasked with bringing bin Laden to justice. Obama picked up on that commitment when he came into office and redoubled efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda and kill bin Laden.

To cite just one memorable moment that this account overlooks, Bush declared in March 2002:

Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not. We haven't heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He's just a person who's been marginalized.... I don't know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly gathers the rest of the evidence of the Bush administration's less than "palpable" pursuit, including:

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Stephen L. Carter has a piece over at Newsweek that points out that Barack Obama hardly differs from George W. Bush when it comes to war; as the subhead explains:  "How does Barack Obama differ as a commander in chief from his swaggering predecessor? A lot less than you might think."

Now that's something you don't hear very often in the corporate media. But Carter means this more as a compliment than a criticism, explaining that

there were people on the left and right alike who thought that America had elected an antiwar president, but that simply turned out not to be true. Rather, the nation elected a president in the tradition of American wartime leaders: a man ultimately willing, whether or not it was his original intention, to sacrifice idealism for pragmatism in pursuit of his primary duty of keeping the nation safe.

So a massive troop surge in Afghanistan equals pragmatism and keeping the country safe.

He also writes:

We have all seen the passion with which he battles for his vision of what the nation's health-care system should look like, or how the financial sector should be regulated. If he would bring the same determination to rallying the public in support of his wars—yes, his wars now, nobody else’s—he would do more than anyone else can to truly support the troops.

I'm not sure I saw Obama passionately explain his ideas about Wall Street reform or healthcare. But apparently convincing people to support the Afghan War by keeping U.S. forces there for an indeterminate period of time is how you "truly support the troops."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses WikiLeaks as a jumping off point to talk about George W. Bush's new book and the run-up to the Iraq War (11/30/10):

As my colleague, the indefatigably indefatigable Walter Pincus, has pointed out, Bush manages to bollix up both the chronology and the importance of the various inspections of Iraq's weapons systems so as to suggest that any other president given the same set of facts would have gone to war. "I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war," he writes. On that score, he is simply not credible.

The accumulating evidence at the time showed that Iraq lacked a nuclear weapons program and did not have biological weapons either. As for its chemical weapons program, while harder to ferret out, it not only no longer existed, but even if it had, it was insufficient reason to go to war. Poison gas has been around since the Second Battle of Ypres. That was 1915. "The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat," Bush writes. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

The late 2010 version of Richard Cohen is certainly up to speed on the pre-war Iraq intelligence. Unfortunately, the 2003 Richard Cohen wasn't, as he most memorably wrote about Colin Powell's UN presentation (2/6/03):

The evidence he presented to the United Nations--some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail--had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman--could conclude otherwise.

In that column, Cohen acknowledged the nuclear evidence was weak, but the chemical/biological weapons case was "so strong--so convincing--it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that."

He also wrote that at the UN presentation, "when the by-now hoary charge was made that a link existed between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad, it was Powell who made it--and it hit with force." So a hoary charge sounded convincing coming from Colin Powell. Is the idea that Powell's just a better liar than Bush?

Time magazine's Joe Klein has read George W. Bush's memoir, and has a few criticisms (11/11/10); for instance, he points out that Bush

never stops to wonder if the UN inspectors, whom Saddam Hussein had allowed back into Iraq, were not finding weapons of mass destruction because, maybe, uh, the WMD didn't exist.

That's a good question, but it's not surprising that Bush didn't raise it, since Bush has repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein did not allow weapons inspectors into Iraq in the first place. As FAIR pointed out in an Action Alert ("Media Still Letting Bush Lie on Iraq Inspectors," 12/2/08), Bush peddled this absurd falsehood to ABC's Charlie Gibson, who failed to challenge him:

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq War?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.

The Washington Post's write-up (12/1/08) of the interview praised Bush's "new candor."

The alert noted that this wasn't Bush's first attempt to rewrite history:

As FAIR pointed out (7/18/03), in July 2003 Bush made a similar comment ("We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in"), which the Post soft-pedaled by saying these words "appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring." And reporter Robert Parry (Consortium News, 12/2/08) noted after the ABC interview that Bush has made similar declarations (1/27/04, 3/21/06, 5/24/07 )--none of which  generated much interest from the corporate media.

If these utterances had received more attention at the time, reporters like Joe Klein would surely be more familiar with them. But Bush's fantasy was kept quiet--perhaps because reporting it widely would have sent a message that Bush had no idea what he was doing.

NBC star Matt Lauer's one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer's mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview:

The Florida recount.  Hanging chads.  A divided Supreme Court.  George Bush had a rough road to the White House.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million. By many reasonable standards, he should have lost the Florida recount too. The Supreme Court made him the president. I'm not sure "rough" is the right way to describe what happened to him.

And then there was this passage on the Iraq War:

LAUER: He says he eventually decided to go to war based on Saddam Hussein's defiance… and what seemed to be rock-solid intelligence.  [To Bush:] On the subject of WMD, George Tenet famously said, "It's a slam dunk."

BUSH: Yes. The intelligence.

LAUER: The intelligence is.  So by the time you gave the order to start military operations in Iraq, did you personally have any doubt, any shred of doubt, about that intelligence?

BUSH: No, I didn't.  I really didn't.

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though.  There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was--I was a dissenting voice.  I didn't wanna use force.

Saddam Hussein's "defiance" of... what, exactly? The U.N. weapons inspections were underway (and were finding little to support U.S. claims about Iraq's WMD programs). The U.S. failed to win Security Council approval for the military strikes and invasion, but went forward nonetheless.

The problem isn't merely that Lauer did so little to push back against Bush's version of history-- in this case, he provided it. If Lauer is going to bring up the fact that there were "dissenters"--Bush's absurd claim that he was one surely deserved some response--he should have pointed out that some of that dissent came early, from people who believed the "slam dunk" intelligence on Iraq's weapons wasn't a slam dunk at all. But then you'd be pointing out that one of the favorite media tropes about the Iraq War--that "everyone got it wrong"--is false. And the kind of journalist who would do that is the kind of journalist who wouldn't win an exclusive interview with George W. Bush.

Over at his Nation Media Fix blog (a must-read), Greg Mitchell watched Matt Lauer's NBC interview with George W. Bush, and wasn't impressed. He writes:

Time after time Bush would offer a whopper and Lauer either said nothing, or expressed sympathy for the poor man who was subjected to such harsh criticism. It went that way, from Bush saying there was "no intelligence" prior to 9/11 about terrorists maybe wanting to fly planes into buildings to stating flatly that lack of regulations had anything to do with  the financial meltdown.

Bush said he had zero doubts about the WMD intelligence on Iraq, not one--and Lauer eagerly pointed out (doing his Judy Miller impersonation) that George Tenet called it a "slam dunk." Bush said posing in front of the window when flying over New Orleans was a mistake but Lauer pointed to local officials who had not done enough.

I was thinking the same thing reading USA Today's Bush piece this morning, where we learn this:

He smiles and laughs readily. He calls a photographer he's just met "darlin'." He's not in a hurry to end the interview and there's no hint of annoyance, even when he's asked how he copes with the ridicule that hasn't abated much since he left office.

Bush doesn't get annoyed when he's asked about how he "copes" with all the "ridicule." Well that's a relief.

"I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do." That's how George W. Bush referred to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in his new book Decision Points. The quote is featured in Time magazine's Verbatim section (11/15/10), and has been discussed pretty widely.

This is an interesting claim. When Bush appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 23, 2004, his sickening feeling was gone--and replaced by his funny bone . Bush's speech included a routine where he joked about the fruitless search for Iraq's deadly weapons, showing slides where administration officials hunted around the White House offices for the weapons. (You can see a partial video of that speech here or here; both include commentary critical of Bush.)

The media reaction at the time, as FAIR noted (Extra!, 5-6/04), was to defend Bush's jokes--the L.A. Times had an editorial called "Commander in Comedy." Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly said, "You know, trying to be funny at these things is so difficult, and he is quite good at it. I mean, he really is very good at self-deprecating humor. The pictures were funny. I laughed at the photos. I mean, he looks goofy, and he's got that great deadpan delivery." You can bet few media outlets will recall this now.