To defend some bad guys

For 95 months, the New York Daily News considered G.W. Bush to be their Dear Leader, their glamorous Churchillian hero who dared to do things that annoyed "the liberals," but now, in his 96th month, as he's going out the door, Bush is now all of the sudden being compared unfavorably with Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin. And yes, I and Digby both made a lot of serious criticisms of Palin during the campaign, but as Digby points out:

(And frankly, the demonization of Palin after their deification of Bush struck me from the beginning as nothing more than class and gender snobbery. There really is no substantial difference between them except that Palin actually had more government experience than Bush did. She was his natural successor.) [emphasis in original]

It's crass and crude for the Daily News to all of the sudden discover Bush is an idiot. Where were these guys during the years when such an epiphany would actually have been of some use to the rest of us? Heck, just a few months ago, a few weeks before the 2008 election took place, would have been nice.

Alberto Gonzales blames John Yoo for the torture memos.

John Yoo, the then-Justice official who had been assigned to draft the memos, had strong feelings and no one could have pressured him to write the memos a certain way, Mr. Gonzales said.

and

Gonzo appeared genuinely unable to grapple with why he might be unpopular. "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he asked.

Well, let me put it this way. Gonzales was Yoo's boss. To accept Yoo's torture memos was to make the deliberate and conscious decision to toss the Geneva Conventions over the side and to embrace what "Darth" Cheney calls "The Dark Side." Sorry, but Yoo was a functionary. He was a guy who was doing what he was instructed to do. Gonzales could have said "No" and could have informed the public what their government was up to.

But yes, I have to mention The Guardian's list of the 19 Worst Americans of 2008 (They're British, so they can single out Americans like that). The Washington Monthly lists lots of awful people The Guardian forgot.