Don't worry, I got what it takes to cure him.

Help me understand something if you could.

Are we supposed to assume Obama is stupid because he uses a teleprompter? And why are we supposed to take accusations of stupidity seriously when they are made by people who are part of a political party that celebrates stupid (Bush, McCain, Palin, Quayle) as a matter of principle?

I'm seriously at a loss here.

You're going to make a great psychiatrist someday, kid.

If I was somebody that had a violent reaction to the sight of blood then I wouldn't become a butcher. Likewise; if I had a problem with actual practice of medicine I wouldn't become a doctor.

It's not that difficult of a concept. Honestly.

That really hurt! I'm gonna have a lump there, you idiot! Who throws a shoe? Honestly!

Wow. President Bush mentioned me in his press conference just after the shoe incident-

"It's like driving down the street and have people not gesturing with all five fingers. "

One of my proudest moments was having his limo diverted just a few feet from me and giving that ass just gesture he mentions.

Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Coyote. Wile E. Coyote, genius.

There's an almost surreal quality to the outgoing Bush administration publicly warning president-elect Obama that terrorists see transitions between governments as a good time to attack.

This is after all the administration that ignored multiple warnings about the 9/11 attacks from Clinton administration officials like Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke or George Tenet in order to focus on the important issues like renewing Star Wars missile defense program. Berger warned Condoleeza Rice months before the attacks that terrorism would "consume far more of her time than she would have imagined."

“For the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running,” Mr. Bush said in an emotional speech to hundreds of employees of the executive branch on the South Lawn of the White House.

Dude, the next president isn't going to just hit the ground running. He's going to leave your worthless team in the dust. You're about to see what he feels like to be the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.

I did find this a bit annoying:

Mr. Bush has said he is determined to conduct an orderly transition. The White House wants to avoid a repeat of the kind of news reports that plagued President Bill Clinton when he left office amid questions about whether members of his staff, irked at having to turn their offices over to Republicans, removed the letter W from some computer keyboards.

How nice of the author of this article to underplay what exploded into a major vandalism scandal only a few days after Bush took office. It included accusations that the outgoing Clinton administration cut telephone wires, wrecked computers, left graffiti on the walls, stole presidential seals and even towels off of Air Force One. A General Accounting Office investigation found most of the accusations to be bunk.

"Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story," says an angry John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff. "At least they got what they wanted out of it."

A close look at the way the scandal mushroomed bolsters Podesta's view: The Bush administration helped the vandal scandal along, publicly appearing to try to douse the flames, while privately fanning them with detailed, off-the-record allegations of damage. On Tuesday, after the GAO's review was made public, Fleischer was left trying to spin himself out of a very deep hole, insisting he had tried to "knock down" the vandal story when it first emerged.

But a transcript of Fleischer's Jan. 25 briefing on the issue contradicts him. It shows the Bush spokesman coyly encouraging reporters' suspicions about the vandal scandal, while refusing to confirm or deny the reports of damage. According to one leading White House reporter, the story was also nudged along by two unnamed Bush aides.

Yesterday, Bush was referring to this "scandal" when he told his staff without any sense of irony to “conduct yourselves with the decency and professionalism that you have shown throughout my time in office.”

After 8 years of this administration we've seen decency and professionalism as something that are in short supply at this White House. Lying about their opponents and bare-knuckled politics are the way they conduct business. They have been from the start.

I will not be threatened by a walking meat loaf!

President Bush said yesterday that economic recovery is "going to take a while."

True. It won't even start until January 21, 2009.

Will you look at the man? He's a Freudian delight; he crawls with clues!

It's with a sense of bitter irony that I note Fareed Zakaria's ridiculous piece "What Bush Got Right" about foreign policy came out in the same week yet another foreign policy disaster arose given in large part to the continued incompetence of Bush's entire administration in this arena. They've been in over their heads since he first took the oath of office and, contrary to Zakaria's assertion to the contrary, nothing has happened to change that situation.

I don't like to write or even think about these sorts of global crisis these days. Truth be told I've been irrationally trying to focus on other stuff in the hope that it would blow over, resolve itself or the adults in the Western European community would step in and bring and bring a peaceful resolution to the fighting.

I'd be the first to admit that's a naive and unrealistic approach. It's just that I have a hard time with accepting the alternative; that our leadership are nothing but a bunch stupid children. I find myself very nervous watching Bush and Cheney poke at Russia over the conflict in Georgia. I've used the example many times but it's akin to being trapped in a room with a monkey that's playing with a grenade. Eventually he's going to figure out how to pull out the pin...

I'm second to nobody in my opinion that the "tough guys" that make up this administration are really a bunch of blustering pansies. One thing I've learned is that the guys that talk the most smack are usually the guys that spent most of high school stuffed in a locker. They're the guys who are cheerleaders or look for excuses to get out of going to Vietnam. They're cowards who can't back up the crap that comes out of their mouths. As a man I don't have much of an opinion of the manliness of men like Bush and Cheney.

Having said that I also recognize it's for exactly this reason that they feel they have something to prove, especially if they're own hide isn't on the line. That's why I'm not sure the tack that Matt Yglesias (via Digby) takes in calling them out is the best one to use here.

"This highlights, I think, some of the limits of the kind of bluff-and-bluster approach to foreign policy that seems popular among conservatives these days. Or, rather, it highlights the fact that popular as bluster-based policy making is on the American right it can have some extremely high costs and that, tragically, a large proportion of those costs can wind up being borne by the people who were nominally supposed to be the beneficiaries. "

Bush has been throwing some extremely bellicose language at Russia yesterday. The kind of language I can't remember being used by an American president since at least the Berlin Wall came down. Pointing out that he's all hat and no cattle might not be the best thing to do here. On a personal level he's a coward. But he's also an incurious, stupid coward who has demonstrated zero predilection towards considering the consequences of his decisions whether to our security as a nation or the well-being of the troops under his charge.

I believe the phrase is "don't poke the bear." In the case of George W. Bush I would change that to "don't poke the teddy bear, it's not stuffed properly."

Out, damned spot!

Sorry, Scott. That blood is as much your hands as it is Bush and Cheney's. I know a lot of my fellow anti-war bloggers are praising McCellan's recent revelations but the excerpts I read are disgustingly self-serving. To whit:

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it. Most of it is not willful or conscious. Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

You were the Chief Poobah of Washington Bullshit, asshole. You have no moral standing - NONE - to criticize.

Oh, and a good portion of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are aren't good, decent people. Those kinds of people - people that oppose the Washington hive mentality you helped sell - are few and far between.

Ironically, much of Bush's campaign rhetoric (in 1999-2000) had been aimed at distancing himself from the excesses of Clinton's permanent campaign style of governing. The implicit meaning of Bush's words was that he would bring an end to the perpetual politicking and deep partisan divisions it created. Although Washington could not get enough of the permanent campaign, voters were seemingly eager to move beyond it.

Bush wasn't "elected" so "voters" weren't buying his crap. The way he took office, as the recent HBO film "Recount" reminds us, shows he didn't give a rat's ass about getting beyond "partisan divisions." The man lived for them.

Bush did not emulate Clinton on the policy front. Just the opposite – the mantra of the new administration was "anything but Clinton" when it came to policies. The Bush administration prided itself in focusing on big ideas, not playing small ball with worthy but essentially trivial policy ideas for a White House, like introducing school uniforms or going after deadbeat dads.

Pure, unadulterated crap Mr. McCellan. "Anything but Clinton" wasn't just a formulation against focusing the power of the federal government on trivial issues. It was a formulation against EVERYTHING the Clinton administration did, regardless of merit.

This meant a foreign policy that focused on bluster instead of diplomacy. An environmental policy that assumed science was partisan. A domestic policy that believed the rich were the ones that actually drive the economy and a security policy that believed the chief international threat to the United States wasn't loose pockets of islamic radicals but instead nation-states. A belief that led directly to the attacks on 9/11 I might add.

And it wasn't just Clinton administration policies that got the heave-ho. Treaties that had been negotiated by Republican and Democratic administrations alike were tossed out. Comity and decorum in the senate under control of both parties were thrown on the trash heap. The federal government became the plaything of people who were so full of hubris they believed they and they alone understood how the world worked.

"Anything but Clinton" was really "anything but reason." That's their fucking legacy, asshole.

When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war – more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead – he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly.

Really? Because I don't think he cares. He's done nothing since then to correct his mistake. In fact he's compounded it with the surge and other efforts to make our presence there permanent.

But the point is HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. He's the President of the United States not the garbage man who missed your can. It's his job to know. If he didn't then he simply isn't qualified to be the president.

Which is what most of us have known for years.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently the only adviser who even tried to raise doubts about the wisdom of war. The rest of the foreign policy team seemed to be preoccupied with regime change or, in the case of Condi Rice, seemingly more interested in accommodating the president's instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him.

This assumes Rice, Cheney, etc. were smart enought to know better or cared. I'm not willing to extend the President's advisors slack in either case. Or the president for that matter. And Powell can go jump of a bridge. He should've resigned the moment it was clear to him they were going to war. The man has no honor. None.

Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.

Of course not because at it's core it's a moral question and he's a sociopath.

But as history moves to render its judgment in the coming years and decades, we can't gloss over the hard truths this book has sought to address and the lessons we can learn from understanding them better. Allowing the permanent campaign culture to remain in control may not take us into another unnecessary war, but it will continue to limit the opportunity for careful deliberation, bipartisan compromise, and meaningful solutions to the major problems all Americans want to see solved.

Bite me, Scott. You need to be dragged off to the Hague and tried for war crimes along with the rest of this administration. I'm sure your entire book is full of this self-serving tripe. YOU are just as responsible as Bush and the rest of his administration for the idiotic war in Iraq. YOU have blood on your hands.

I look forward to Baghdad Bob's book. I'm sure it will be just as factual.

What's happened?

Bush will never be a real little boy if he keeps telling lies. Just look at his nose in this picture from the Washington Post...

Original Page Here.

And don't anyone say 'April Fools' again or I'll rip them apart!

This certainly comes as no surprise.

Although I assumed that Laura would at least wait until she was out of office to leave president Cuckoo Bananas. It's only a few more months.

I guess the big louse really is impossible to live with. Couldn't happen to a nicer couple.

Is he always this funny, or only on days when he's wanted for murder?

One could read President Bush's remarks defending the Iraq war yesterday or one could watch the following video to get the same effect.

(I'd take the video if I were you.)

This isn't Geneva, Colonel.

Jess Wundrun catches the President speaking out of both sides of his mouth on torture. Since there's usually also chaw in there the whole thing is pretty gross.

Where do you think big words come from?

Headlines that make more sense without a colon--

"Bush: Inaction on FISA endangers U.S."

I was serenely independent and content before we met! Surely I could always be that way again...

In celebrating black history month yesterday President Bush said we "purge the country of symbols of intolerance."

Silly President. That's what we're doing this November when we vote your party into oblivion.

How bout I answer your question with another question; how many abo-digitals do you see modelling?

What's funny about this FOX News interview with President Bush is that you really do get the sense the guy sees himself as some sort of sagacious elder statesman dispensing wisdom to the ignorant masses rather than the guy who struggles with the cap on his toothpaste and almost chokes to death on pretzels. Not all of us spent the first forty years of our lives on a coke binge, Mr. President. Some of us have actually been interested in how the world works since we were children.

"If John (McCain) is the nominee, he has got some convincing to do to convince people that he is a solid conservative, and I'll be glad to help him if he is the nominee," Bush said on "Fox News Sunday.

If McCain's the nominee won't he at that point need to focus on convincing people that he's NOT conservative or crazy? Won't he have to put on his "uniter" costume?

"In his first expansive public discussion of the 2008 election, the president also depicted Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as a political mystery whose muddled foreign policy would have the United States attack an ally and coddle an enemy."

"Muddled?" As in the rational discharge of U.S. influence through diplomatic and military means? Realpolitik? You know; the thing you threw out the window the minute you were sworn in.

Bush brushed off their high-profile disagreements over the years on issues such as taxes and interrogation policies, depicting them as natural for any senator. "The question I asked myself, and I hope voters ask, [is] what are the principles by which this person will be making decisions?"

Actually this is a good point. If the next President will be making decisions using the same bedrock principles President Bush utilized then voters would be cautioned to run screaming in the other direction.

As for conservatives who doubt McCain, he said: "If you're seeking, looking for perfection, you'll never find that person. I certainly wasn't a perfect candidate for a lot of folks."

As bad a candidate as you were you were an even worse President.

Of course President Zoolander finishes his interview with this wonderful Bushian question:

"The American people have got to know that what we did in the past gained information that prevented an attack," he said. "And for those who criticize what we did in the past, I ask them, which attack would they rather have not . . . stopped?"

The one involving the abo-digitals, Mr. President.

Fickle Finger of Fate!

President Cuckoo Bananas proposes 3.1 trillion dollar budget.

In his honor I dedicate this song...



(The WTF quotient is high with this song. Dame Edna singing "Hey, Big Spender" to the Dr. Who Daleks.)

I'm king of the world!

In last night's State of the Union the President laid out an ambitious agenda as to what he plans to do in his last year in office...

Clear brush from the last 83 acres on his ranch. This will only require 200 days of vacation.

Give more backrubs to tense foreign leaders. Gordon Brown you are first on the list.

Enlist more celebrities in the GWOT, including his favorite actor.

Finally beat Cheney's grandkid at Candyland.

Visit the Alamo and recover his stolen bike from the basement.

Take on and defeat that bag of al qaeda pretzels.

Finish "Cliffs of Dover" on easy level of Guitar Hero 3.

Hahaha. How ironic. Okay, ask me something. Ask me something which you think I lied about.

Occasionally some knuckle-dragging Bush fan will write the local rag accusing Bush's critics of distorting his record (as if that was necessary) and taunting them to prove Bush lied. About anything.

Most of read this stuff and reflect on the sheer volume of mendacity produced by this administration, even on their first days of office (Clinton White House vandalism) and sit in stunned admiration at the sheer self-delusion necessary to convince oneself that Bush is a straight-shooter.

This weekend Bush repeated one of his favorite little lies in an interview with Israeli reporters. When asked again about his decision to invade Iraq he pulled out the old "Sadaam wouldn't allow the inspectors in" chestnut.

Bush just loves to trot out this little revisionist pony. Here it is from March of 2006.

"I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass [Resolution] 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences -- and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."

Complete bullshit, of course. Bush ordered the inspectors out of Iraq so he could start bombing. How can anyone come to any other conclusion than the man is a mendacious liar of the worst sort?

When I watch you eat. When I see you asleep. When I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in.

I wish I didn't find this headline funny.

"Bush Predicts Mideast Peace Agreement"

Peace agreement? Does he mean some sort of treaty? I thought we lived in a brave new world where such things, along with the constitution, were nothing but goddamned pieces of paper.

Huh.

Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left!

"Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon" - President George W. Bush - yesterday.

Wonder what they'd have done to Columbus if he'd discovered America, and then mislaid it.

Unintentionally funny quote of the day from Victor Davis Hanson in today's opinion page in the Big O:

"Too often Congress and it's wayward members decide they're smarter at foreign affairs than President Bush. "

The problem in which members of congress decide they're smarter than Bush on foreign affairs isn't limited to wayward members of congress. It's extends to small children, other primates and certain inanimate objects including pencils.

In fact; had we simply flipped a coin at every important foreign policy juncture over the last six years we would've been better off as a country than having the drooling moron in the oval office and his track record of utter, complete failure make foreing policy decisions.