George W. Bush's Legacy of Shame

   

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This look back at the long national nightmare we endured during George W. Bush's presidency comes courtesy of Omid Malekan at Visual Stories.

#georgewbush #dubya #bush #bushadministration #GOP #stolenelection #iraqwar #taxcutsforthe1% #karlrove #donaldrumsfeld #dickcheney #condirice #9/11 #weaponsofmassdistraction #notmyhero #katrina #socialsecurityprivatization #missionnotaccomplished #nomorebushes

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Signs of Growing Friction Between McCain and Palin

The Huffington Post, 10-6-08

The call to "Free Sarah Palin!" has been answered, and Palin off the chain is proving to be a loose cannon. The day after her debate with Joe Biden, Palin told FOX News she learned about the McCain campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan when she read about it in the newspaper that morning. Maybe this was just to reassure us she stays well informed by reading newspapers like The New York Times, part of her post-debate strategy to try a damage control re-do of her Katie Couric interviews that continued to drip out one Palin gaffe after another earlier in the week.



But then she claimed to have "fired off a quick e-mail" in which she said, "Oh come on, do we have to?" Over the weekend, she again questioned the decision to reporters outside a diner in Englewood, Colorado, saying she "would sure love to get to run to Michigan and make sure that Michigan knows that we haven't given up there."



And yesterday, in a phone interview with William Kristol, Palin leapt at the chance to resurrect Obama's former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a way to drag Obama through the mud. "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more," she said. "Because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country...I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up."

When the far right wing clowns running the North Carolina Republican Party ran a racially-tinged attack ad during the primaries tying Obama to Wright, McCain graciously denounced it. "I've said again and again, I do not believe that Sen. Obama shares Rev. Wright's extremist views which he has stated," said McCain, and promised to "disassociate myself from that kind of campaigning."

Either Palin never got the memo, or McCain has flip-flopped and flushed his honor down the toilet yet again in his quest for the presidency. The latter is certainly possible. With McCain-Palin's chances cratering like the economy, McCain has clearly signaled it's time to get McDesperate.

Responding to rising GOP fears that the election is slipping away, the McCain campaign has decided their only hope is "turning a page on this financial crisis," in the words of one senior McCain adviser, and relentlessly tearing down Obama.

"It's a dangerous road, but we have no choice," echoed another top McCain strategist to the NY Daily News. "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose."

But there's more going on with Palin's off the reservation moves than simply carrying out the McNasty plan of attack against Obama. Sarah Palin has her own agenda. She wants to be president, and knows this election is her best shot at elbowing her way into the Oval Office.

Laura Chase, Palin's campaign manager during her first run for mayor of Wasilla in 1996, remembers a night they chatted about her ambitions:

"I said, 'You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,' " Ms. Chase recalled. "She replied, 'I want to be president.' "

And she's not going to let John McCain stop her. At a rally yesterday in Omaha, Nebraska, playing defense far within the red state zone, Palin also claimed to be making her own calls about which states she barracudas into:

"The pundits were saying, 'Check out where she's going. She's going to Nebraska.' The pundits were saying, 'The only reason she would be going there is because they're scared. They have to shore up votes,' " Palin said. "I so wanted to reach into that TV and say 'no.' I'm going to Nebraska because I want to go to Nebraska," Palin said.

These incidents are not the first time Palin has bared her naked ambition. In September, she made a revealing slip when she flipped the ticket at a rally in Iowa, referring to a "Palin and McCain administration." This happened back when the campaign was still babysitting Palin by restricting her to joint appearances with McCain. Now all bets are off as to what she'll say next out on the trail on her own.



Unless McCain reins her in again fast, we can look forward to another month of jarring moments like on Saturday when she misread a saying from Madeline Albright. Quoting off a Starbucks cup, she warned female voters at a rally in California, "there's a place in Hell reserved for women who don't support other women."

In Palin's Mary Poppins bubble, why shouldn't she strut her stuff? At the moment she's pumped up from surviving her debate with Biden, although failing to realize she didn't do nearly enough to prove herself competent enough to be Vice President and reverse her drag on the ticket. But by stepping over the bar painted on the floor, her performance quieted the voice of reason that was beginning to percolate among conservative talking heads calling for her replacement.



Since she now knows McCain won't dump her, Palin is in the driver's seat and plans to stay there. And her take-no-prisoners nasty streak and extreme right wing views have found kindred spirits now that she's fully staffed up with veterans of George W. Bush's slash-and-burn, hyper-partisan campaigns. Like Tucker Eskew, Palin's new chief of staff, who was instrumental in trashing McCain when he helped run Bush's 2000 primary campaign in South Carolina.

Far from a fresh crop of reformers, the Republican operatives who are currently stage managing Sarah Palin are virtually all transplants from the Bush White House. As one Republican strategist told the Washington Post:

"It's insane to me that at the same time that it's running saying it's not going to be the Bush administration, this campaign looks like the Bush campaign on steroids."

Reminiscent of how John Edwards helped keep the Democratic ticket disorganized in 2004 by sticking to his own playbook, Palin is showing the nation McCain is already an afterthought for her. She even said so at the debate, reminding us she "joined this team that is a team of mavericks with John McCain, also." Mr. DeMille, she's ready for her 2012 closeup.

(UPDATE 10/25 - Politico published a jaw-dropping story today confirming that the McCain-Palin rift first spotted here three weeks ago has only gotten worse. Heavy on not-for-attribution interviews with four senior Palin advisors, it revealed that Palin "blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image." These are the same former Bush campaign veterans and dirty-politics practicing Karl Rove proteges who were hand picked by McCain’s team to guide her. Meanwhile, McCain stalwarts on the inside describe Palin as "simply unready — 'green,' sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain." Other stories that have trickled out in recent weeks tracing the McCain-Palin divide can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.)

Mad Over Sarah Palin? Time To Get Busy for Obama.

The Huffington Post, 9-9-08

Until last week, recent events in the presidential race might have seemed too strange for fiction. A movie about a candidate battling age-related concerns, who would be the oldest president in history if elected, choosing the least experienced VP ever, and announcing the choice on his 72nd birthday? It would have been laughed off the screen. Thanks to John McCain's warped judgment, no one's laughing now.



Add in the fact that the McCain campaign rolled out Sarah Palin by focusing on her family and biography, managing to whitewash most of her extreme right-wing views, and you'd have more cause for disbelief. Yet the mass media was celebrity-struck. McCain played the Paris Hilton card against Barack Obama, accusing him of being too famous. Still, McCain wanted his own infotainment soap opera star to juice up his lackluster campaign, and in Palin he got one.

Palin has rallied the far right Republican base, drooling at the 1 in 3 actuarial chance that McCain will die in office if McCain/Palin win. Since she wants to ban abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, what would a President Palin's Supreme Court picks look like?

But she's also got Democrats and independent voters mad as hell that McCain would gamble with the future of our country so recklessly.



So what to do? How can progressives channel our outrage over the prospect of an unqualified, dangerously far-right wing ideologue, rabidly partisan pitbull with lipstick like Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Here's a simple solution. If there's an Obama campaign office near you, get down there and volunteer. Don't fool yourself into thinking one more volunteer won't make a difference. It will, and they need us. If your state is true blue or red and not in play this cycle at the presidential level, you can volunteer for a Democratic candidate for Congress. And it's not too late to donate or raise some money from friends for Obama. Log onto MyBarackObama.com to get started.

Four years ago, I worked for John Kerry in North Carolina. Based in Durham and Orange counties, the most liberal part of the state, I oversaw a voter registration effort that added more than a quarter of all the voters registered that year by the N.C. Democrats.

The most important factor was that we mobilized a huge number of local volunteers into a grassroots voter registration army. In 2004, Democrats were fired up to get rid of George W. Bush. Even folks normally detached from politics were energized by the unfolding disaster of Bush's first term in the White House, and the mess he'd gotten us into by invading Iraq.

By the voter registration deadline, more than 400 volunteers were working with us to register voters in both counties, with teams on the ground three shifts a day. From the Durham Democratic party office, we deployed volunteer voter registrars to high-traffic sites - grocery stores, bus stations, college campuses, libraries, concerts, festivals, and anywhere else we could think to register likely Democratic voters. As our volunteer ranks exploded, the number of voters we added to the rolls reached into the thousands.



The weekend before election day, U.S. Rep. David Price was on hand to watch the crowd of get-out-the-vote volunteers streaming into our headquarters, so big they filled the parking lot. "They trained 1,000 people in Durham," he was overheard saying later, in wonderment. It was the largest outpouring of support ever seen for a North Carolina election.

Yet even with all the volunteers we had, and all we accomplished in our office, we could have done a lot more. We did everything we could to get volunteers in the door, but there were still many nights in the campaign's final two months with work to be done, and not enough hands on deck to do it.

A big part of the reason Bush was able to add three million votes in 2004 to his popular vote totals from 2000 was because Karl Rove masterminded a sweeping Republican voter registration drive during those years. GOP activists all over the country signed up voters at conservative churches and events like state fairs, NASCAR races, and country music concerts.

During 2008, the Obama campaign has flipped the script. Our efforts in 2004 were funded by the N.C. Democratic Party. By contrast, Obama has directly invested in voter registration as part of his national strategy. Obama field organizers started registering voters during the primary season, and have picked up where they left off in every state being contested for the general election.

And it's working. News accounts have trickled out all year long about Democrats adding voters to the rolls since 2004, while Republican registrations have declined.



September is possibly the month in an election cycle when volunteer help is the most productive. Voter registration deadlines in most states (the ones without same-day registration) don't occur until early October. If you show up to volunteer now, you can bank votes for Obama. You can roll up your sleeves and transform your distaste for Sarah Palin and John McCain into on-the-ground activity that will help win this election.

Plus, you'll have a good time. I met my wife on the campaign trail in 2004. Campaign offices are social places. You'll meet dedicated, good-hearted people who share your views and have fun fighting for a common goal. Make time to do it. Turn the local Obama office into your hang-out spot for the next couple months.

Four years ago, after John Kerry failed to respond forcefully to a month of swiftboating attacks, we saw a marked decrease in volunteer enthusiasm in our office. The energy picked back up, but it was valuable time lost. At a moment when McCain is coming off his convention bounce in the polls, Republicans would love it if we lost hope again, sat back on our hands and did nothing.



The stakes are high. Go volunteer today.

Digg It.

Thank You, John Edwards

The Huffington Post, 8-13-08

Silver linings for Democrats in the John Edwards affair scandal

Cheating on his cancer-stricken wife, lying to the public about it while running for president, and lying some more while supposedly coming clean on national TV. There are good reasons for the rush to denounce the suddenly toxic John Edwards. But lest we forget, he accomplished a few positive things during his decade on the political stage. On several counts, the nation owes him a debt of gratitude.

During Edwards' meteoric rise in politics, many people thought he could be another Bill Clinton, minus the sex scandals. Turns out he had that part covered, too.

They looked at Edwards and saw an optimistic, folksy, Southern Democrat talking about bread and butter economic issues. Edwards had rhetorical gifts honed by years of appealing to juries as a highly successful trial lawyer. He seemed disciplined enough to stay on message, whether meeting donors, giving stump speeches, or appearing before the TV cameras.



Yet in 2004, Edwards' unrelenting ambition and self-promotion ensured he would be off message as John Kerry's vice presidential nominee. Perhaps fueled by the "increasingly egocentric" narcissism he copped to last week while admitting his affair, Edwards kept the focus on himself. He refused to go on the attack against George W. Bush, reasoning that playing the traditional VP role of hatchet man would blow his image as a sunny, fresh face in politics. And maybe damage his prospects for another presidential run.

He couldn't even agree with Kerry on a slogan, refusing to adopt Kerry's "Help is on the way." Edwards preferred "Hope is on the way," which was more tuned to the themes of his own primary campaign. But Edwards was unable to entirely charm his way out of reality. He was woefully unprepared for his biggest turn in the spotlight, his sole debate with Dick Cheney, who wiped the floor with him. Edwards didn't carry his home state of North Carolina, even losing his home county and hometown of Robbins, N.C. The Democratic ticket lost every Southern state.



Ironically, by helping to bungle the 2004 elections for the Democrats, Edwards may have done us all a favor. As much continued damage as the Bush Administration has caused in the past four years, Bush's second term set the stage for Republican overreach. If the Kerry/Edwards team had been elected, the burden would have been on them to find a graceful exit from the Iraq war disaster. Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans would have happened on their watch, instead of providing the country with the wakeup call we needed to finally see Bush, Cheney & Co. had no clothes.

In 2006, Congress would almost certainly have remained in Republican hands, with Tom DeLay possibly emerging as Speaker. We'd be getting ready to coronate John McCain in '08, or worse. Maybe Jeb Bush would be heading the ticket, about to lead yet another restoration of the Bush family dynasty.

Edwards' tone-deaf political instincts again helped America out when he foolishly decided to push ahead with another presidential bid. Despite carrying on an affair with an unstable, new age nutcase with a shady past like Rielle Hunter in the 24/7 infotainment fishbowl of presidential politics, Edwards honestly thought the public would never find out. He even took her with him on his official announcement tour in the closing days of 2006, allowing her to be photographed sitting next to him on his campaign plane.



Hillary Clinton's former communications director Howard Wolfson was essentially right when he observed that by covering up his affair and staying in the 2008 race, Edwards cleared the field for Barack Obama. That's not a knock on Obama's historic candidacy, it's just the way things happened.

Wolfson's detractors cite a caucus night survey showing Obama was the second choice of 51% of Edwards caucusgoers, versus 32% for Clinton. But if Edwards had decided to quit before Iowa, where he had been practically living for the past few years, Clinton would never have considered writing the state off. It would have been harder for Obama to win the caucuses. As things turned out, Edwards finished second, edging out Clinton by a few tenths of a percentage point in a serious psychological blow to her campaign.

And by staying in the hunt until he limped to third place in South Carolina, the only primary state he won during 2004, Edwards split enough of the white vote with Clinton to give Obama a lopsided 55% victory. Only 2% of African-American voters in South Carolina backed John Edwards, according to exit polls, but he won the white vote, 40% to Clinton's 36%, with 24% for Obama.

Thanks to Edwards, the story that came out of South Carolina was that Obama had scored a bi-racial landslide, which gave him much needed momentum going into the Super Tuesday contests. It was a watershed event in Obama's path to the nomination.

Win or lose in November, Barack Obama's turn at bat is giving the Democratic party a huge boost for the future. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, younger voters' party affiliations basically tracked those of their parents and grandparents. But because of Obama's ascendancy (and the country souring on the GOP brand after eight rotten years of Bush), the generation gap is back.

In late June polls, voters under thirty-five backed Obama over McCain by an astonishing 27-point margin. And 58% now self-identify with the Democratic party versus 33% with the Republicans, as shown by a recent Pew Research Center report.

Finally, by falling short in his bids for the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency, Edwards ensured Democrats would not be seriously tarnished again by a national sex scandal. He would have truly been the second coming of Bill Clinton if Edwards had advanced further and then gotten caught with his pants down.



He even chose as good a time as any to go public with his ludicrously half-truthful televised mea culpa. If he had waited another two weeks, coverage of the Democratic National Convention would have been drowned out by the media fury. It would have been a replay of when Dick Morris was busted at the '96 convention for consorting and toe-sucking with call girls, only a lot noisier.

The Edwards affair story has been a big distraction from real news, like Wal-Mart coercing its employees to vote Republican in November, oil companies funding a massive propaganda campaign designed to open up our coasts to off-shore drilling, and a GAO report just released that reveals two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no annual taxes from 1998-2005.

But because Edwards is out of office, not on the ballot, and now out of the running for a convention speech, VP slot or cabinet post, it will have little effect on Democrats' chances this fall.

So thank you, John Edwards. You can go now.

The Shilling of Sept. 11

The Carrboro Citizen, Carrboro NC, 9-13-07

   

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CHAPEL HILL - With every year that passes, September 11, 2001 recedes further into history. But this year marks the fifth anniversary of another dark time for our country. The first time we memorialized the victims of 9/11, our (fraudulently) elected leaders were hard at work exploiting this national tragedy by conning us into an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq.



The day after the first 9/11 anniversary, on September 12, 2002, George W. Bush addressed the United Nations and served up one fiction after another about why Iraq, not al Qaeda, was America's most important enemy. "al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq," said Bush. He assured the world that Iraq has "failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons," and "retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon."



Also on September 11, 2002, citizens in communities across the nation, including Chapel Hill, were speaking out against the rush to war. Sensible voices cautioned not to let the urge to avenge 9/11 blind us to the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.



We were warned that an unprovoked war would enrich defense contractors like Halliburton, could help multinational oil companies get their hooks into the world's second largest proven oil reserves, and might boost Bush's re-election chances in 2004. But it wouldn't help America in the long run.



Unfortunately, the Bush administration's crusade to take the country into war in Iraq was on a fast track. Secretary of State Colin Powell would go on TV a few days later, September 15, to help make Bush's case against Iraq.



Appearing on NBC's Meet The Press, he asserted that "Iraq does present a danger," referred to Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction activities," and said the threat the U.S. faced was that Saddam Hussein would continue "enhancing his ability to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction."



The 2002 mid-term congressional campaigns were heating up, and the timing of Bush's push to war was seen by many observers as an especially transparent attempt to boost support for Republican candidates. In Georgia, Democratic U.S. Senator and triple amputee Vietnam war hero Max Cleland would be defeated for re-election that fall by a Republican campaign that questioned his national security record, including ads featuring pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.



Five years later, the war drags on with no end in sight. We've seen more than 3,700 U.S. soldiers needlessly killed and nearly 28,000 wounded, according to the Pentagon's official figures. America has poured almost half a trillion dollars down the drain, only to end up less safe today than we were before the war started.



North Carolina's communities have borne their share of Iraq's casualties. Last Thursday, Chapel Hill native Army sergeant Lee C. Wilson became the latest N.C. servicemember to die in Iraq, killed when a bomb exploded near his vehicle during combat in Mosul. The 30 year-old had enlisted in 2001, was on a mind-boggling fourth deployment, and due to return home in December. When contacted by reporters, his father said, "We always talked about what we were going to do when he got out. He didn't want to be there."



Bush has destroyed Iraq while supposedly trying to liberate it, and thrown the Middle East into turmoil in the process. The bungled U.S. occupation has turned out to be the greatest recruiting tool al Qaeda could have hoped for. Iraq has become a shooting gallery where a new generation of terrorists are honing their skills using our troops as sitting duck targets.



And the Sept. 11 mastermind, Osama Bin Laden? Last week he released another propaganda video, implicitly taunting the United States for having failed to capture him, referring to events so recent it erased any doubt he was still alive.





Another 9/11 anniversary wouldn't be complete without another well-timed push to rally the nation around the flag in support of the Iraq fiasco. This time, it's Gen. David Petraeus who's shilling for Bush, having delivered his Sept. 10 report to Congress on how this year's "surge" in troops is coming along.



Despite his history of exaggerating progress in Iraq, most notably in a Washington Post op-ed published six weeks before the 2004 elections, Petraeus is Bush's last hope as a salesman for staying the course. There's nobody else left in his administration with any credibility. Meanwhile, more and more nervous Republicans are peeling away over Iraq, realizing voters are fed up with the war and want the troops to come home.

Unless the Republican Party wants to suffer more congressional losses in '08, and probably elect a Democratic President, it's far past time for Bush to declare victory in Iraq and leave. There's always a chance this message has finally gotten through Bush's thick skull, and true, he has been recently hinting at troop reductions. Yet considering his stated desire to hand Iraq over to his successor, any cutbacks in U.S. forces are likely to turn out to be a shell game, taking troop numbers down only to pre-surge levels.



As long as he's in the White House, the Decider will determine whether and how fast we extricate ourselves from Iraq. Forget about what the citizens want, forget about what military officials more candid than Petraeus advise, and forget about what's in the best interest of the United States. Bush will continue playing with our soldiers' lives until his term runs out. But he's wrong to think one more Sept. 11 snow job will salvage his tattered political legacy.

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Sept. 11, 2002 Remembered: Only Bush Wanted War in Iraq

Thanks to Kelly, Barbara, and Ernest for their help making this community memorial happen.

The above photo gallery was shot on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC on September 11, 2002, as a memorial for the first anniversary of 9/11, and protest against George W. Bush's unconscionable use of Sept. 11 to gin up support for an unprovoked war in Iraq.

In light of what Bush, Cheney & Co. have done in their memory by dragging America into the Iraq War's nightmare, the victims of 9/11 must be turning in their graves.

Waking Up On November 8th To Find Another Bush in the White House

E-mail to family & friends, 10-28-00

(If you know anybody who's seriously considering not voting for Al Gore over George W. Bush, e-mail this to them. Also forward it to any of your friends who are also concerned about waking up on November 8th to find another Bush in the White House, and tell them to pass it along to their friends, and so on. Don't let anyone tell you this isn't an important presidential election!)

>>Are you thinking about voting for George W. Bush over Al Gore? Well, here's good reasons to be skeptical about the charge, repeated endlessly by the Bush campaign, that you can't trust anything Al Gore says. Check out this recent column by Tom Teepen of the Cox News Service, showing how Al Gore's gotten a bum rap for being a serial exaggerator:

Gore the Untruthful - Is That So?
By Tom Teepen

Atlanta, October 19 - There's a concerted effort under way to discredit Al Gore with lurid claims that he's a serial liar, compulsive and even "pathological," according to that eminent clinical psychiatrist Rush Limbaugh.
This thing has been building for months, the ground prepared for a leap into the mainstream by busy Internet haw-hawing at Gore's supposed whoppers and by ridicule and retailed indignation on the political right's informal network of talk radio spielers.
The campaign itself is a lie.
Lord knows, Gore is a political exaggerator. In that, he is different only from the politicians who are not. Try to find one. Gore puts the best light on his accomplishments. He personalizes issues where the connection is strained. He can make a mountain out of a molehill on his own behalf. In a word, spin.
But ditto George W. Bush, who has a habit - disturbing, if you like - of claiming credit for successes in Texas he didn't initiate and for popular policies and legislation he had outright opposed.
The slander of Gore is rooted in a widely circulated list of supposed exaggerations so extreme they became routine fodder for comedians and armchair shrinks.
Gore claimed he invented the Internet; said he was the model for the young hero in the novel "Love Story"; pretended he discovered the toxic Love Canal; and said he labored on a farm, when everybody knows he's just a pampered prep school twit.
In point of fact, he never said he invented the Internet. He said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And he did just that. He was a crucial player - THE crucial player, many in the field say - in securing enabling legislation and funding for development of the Internet, one of the first in Washington to see the potential.
He never said he discovered Love Canal. Encouraging school kids to be interested in the environment, he recalled how he had learned about a toxic waste problem in his home state and then researched other, similar sites, including Love Canal, and held Congressional hearings on the issues. All true.
"Love Story" author Erich Segal has confirmed that the novel's Oliver Barrett was a mix of Gore and Gore's college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
The Gore family had a working farm in Tennessee and it is common knowledge thereabouts that young Al worked the farm chores - and worked them hard - during summers, holidays and weekends.
All of this has been on the record for months but continues to be ignored by commentators who find the truth less useful than the tale of Gore the serial fibber.
And with Gore the Liar by then a set character, it was no trick to claim he lied when he said in the first debate that a Florida girl had to stand in school because of overcrowded classes. But the girl's father confirms the story and so does coverage, easily accessible, in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Now that he's been typecast, expect every Gore fumble to be cited in confirmation. The smear - and it's just that, built up in increments - has worked.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.

A longer, more detailed article by Princton historian Sean Wilentz published last month in the American Prospect making the same argument can be found HERE. This article also presents detailed evidence that most of the supposed fundraising and other ethical "scandals" the Bush campaign has tried to pin on Al (including his attendance at the infamous Buddhist temple "fundraiser") are without merit.

Finally, here's two eye-opening columns by Molly Ivins, nationally syndicated columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who has observed George W. Bush up close and personal during his six years in office:

Bush Files An Odd Claim by Molly Ivins, October 19

The Unexamined Candidate by Molly Ivins, October 24

As Molly says, "Damned if I know why he's running. He is a nice fellow. I've always liked him. I like lots of people who I don't think should be President."