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.

Bush Administration and women

Britain's Guardian points out that

"The status of women was never as high under Saddam [Hussein] as opponents of the [Iraq] war sometimes asserted, and it was already declining throughout the 1990s, as Saddam embraced Islam to distract the populace from the effects of the Gulf war, UN sanctions, and his own depredations. But Iraq today is even worse for women: more repressive, more violent, more lawless."

Iraqi women selling their bodies are now a common sight in Syria's capital, Damascus.

"Inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East."

What of First Lady Laura Bush? She who famously said "...no one suffers more than their President and I do." while watching the devastation in Iraq. She later amended this: "...she means the 'peace of mind' that Americans 'sacrifice…when they see the terrible image of violence on TV every night.' " Yep, Iraqi women sure have come a long way from the days of "The Road to Freedom" when Laura Bush and Iraqi women sat around all comfy and cozy and talked about how great everything now was that Saddam Hussein had been deposed and the Americans were now running things in Iraq.

Oh, and "honor killings" are now on the rise. Funny, but it seems Laura Bush is now copying Karen Hughes, who famously went AWOL when the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah broke out. Hughes quickly chucked her "Public Diplomacy" portfolio and adopted a low profile, almost as though her "Public Diplomacy" efforts were a front that she discarded as soon as it became ever-so-slightly inconvenient.