Matt Yglesias

Attacks on Rosa Brooks

Former LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks is going to work for Michele Flournoy in the defense department and now is being subject to attacks via some kind of right-wing email campaign being hyped up by The Weekly Standard. Taken out of the oppo writeup form, the basic case against Brooks seems to be that:

ONE: She thinks the Vietnam War was a mistake with tragic consequences for civilians across Southeast Asia.

TWO: She thinks the Bush administration’s pre-war statements about Iraq intelligence were misleading.

THREE: She thought the “surge” would not produce an enduring solution to Iraq’s political problems.

FOUR: She favors prosecuting terrorists in normal courts rather than kangaroo courts.

FIVE: She thinks George W. Bush was a generally crappy president.

With the exception of point four, I honestly don’t understand how anyone could even begin to disagree with any of this. On point four, the complaint amounts to something like “she supports the policy of the Obama administration, rather than the policy of the Republican Party.” But of course she does! To be honest, given that she was a pretty regular newspaper columnist and occasional blogger, I find it a bit shocking that they don’t have anything better on her. It’s hard to write on current affairs without occasionally saying something that’s totally wrong or incredibly dumb. But the right’s oppo team has come up with . . . nothing . . . other than that she’s not a conservative. Which is what happens when the conservative candidate loses an election and the new team comes in.

Beyond pettiness and sour grapes, one thing that comes through here is the extent to which the conservative movement just can’t quit George W. Bush. Nominally, the right’s new view is that Bush really was a bad president, but he was bad because he wasn’t conservative enough or something. But show a conservative a liberal who’s subjected Bush to the strongly-worded criticism he so richly deserves, and it’s like waving a cape in the face of a bull. Out comes the whole message operation, the smear machine, the whole deal to defend the sterling record of Bush, Bush’s policies, and the view that anyone who criticized them is borderline treasonous.

Axelrod vs. Cheney

Neat video courtesy of ThinkProgress of David Axelrod hitting back against Dick Cheney’s criticisms of the Obama administration:

This leads Kevin Drum to remark:

I’ve been mulling this ever since Cheney started spouting off a few weeks ago, and I still haven’t really made up my mind about it. Does an outgoing administration owe an incoming one silence? I don’t think that’s always been the case (historians please correct me here if I’m wrong), and I wonder if it really should be. Sure, it would be unseemly for ex-presidents and their staffs to engage in partisan feeding frenzies after they leave office, but is there really any reason why they should all take vows of silence? If Cheney thinks torture and warrantless wiretapping are vital to the nation’s security, then maybe he should go ahead and say so. Why not?

I think the “don’t criticize your successor” rule only makes sense as prudential advice. Not only is Dick Cheney not a credible messenger, but him speaking out looks like sour grapes and it’s all vaguely absurd. The prudent ex-president or ex-veep tries to shift into high-minded elder statesman terrain rather than slumming it à la Cheney.

But as a substantive rule, a “keep quiet” doctrine wouldn’t make sense. It was a good thing that Al Gore brought the credibility and perspective he had as a former Vice President to bear and criticized the invasion of Iraq. And even though I tend not to agree with Cheney on the merits of issues, there’s no denying that he’s been able to look at these things up close so if he thinks it’s important for him to speak out I have no procedural objection to that. It’s just that you’d have to be pretty dumb to actually think it makes sense to take advice from a guy with Cheney’s record.

Republicans Push Back Against Cheney Legacy Tour

Recently we’ve heard an awful lot from Dick Cheney, considering that widely loathed former Vice Presidents tend to lay low. Turns out some Republicans aren’t thrilled with the trend:

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input. [...] Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”

I’m not sure that voting no on everything and calling for a spending freeze really qualifies as “rebuilding” but I suppose recognizing that people don’t like Dick Cheney shows that we’re all living in a common universe.

The Cheney Factor

If I were Dick Cheney, I’d be laying low thanking my lucky stars that I’m not on trial for war crimes not going on television to talk smack about the new administration. But talking smack it is. It’s really remarkable when you think about it that anyone would listen to Cheney on the subject of national security. His administration was by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering Americans. Also by far the least successful in American history in terms of preventing international terrorists from murdering NATO allies. And the military action his administration pursued in response to the terrorist attack we suffered under their watch has come to be mired in problems, teetering on the brink of failure, almost entirely thanks to a second—but completely unnecessary—war his administration chose to undertake in favor of successfully completing the first one.

Meanwhile, during this time hostile nations such as North Korea and Iran have become bigger proliferation threats than ever!

Leave George W. Bush Aloooooone

The country is in a terrible situation in economic, strategic, and budgetary terms and it’s overwhelmingly the fault of the team that was running the show before January 20th. Naturally, the team that’s been running the show since January 20th wants people to understand the baseline conditions against which they should be judged. The Washington Post is mightily displeased. Apparently we’re just supposed to pretend that this all happened by coincidence.

United States No Longer Conditioning Foreign Aid on ICC Non-Participation

Mark Goldberg brings us some very welcome news from the recently signed omnibus appropriations bill, the odious Nethercutt Amendment policy has been reversed. What’s the Nethercut Amendment? Well of course as is well known the Bush administration didn’t much care for the International Criminal Court. It wasn’t initially obvious, however, exactly how opposed to it they were. But not only did they refuse to participate in the ICC, they backed an amendment by Rep George Nethercutt that made it so that a country could only get foreign aid if it agreed to sign an agreement immunizing Americans against ICC prosecution. This was back in 2004, before it was clear that the key policymakers were so committed to this because they were actually in the midst of committing war crimes.

At any rate, this put a lot of countries in a tough spot. As Mark says:

A number of America’s allies declined to enter into these side agreements because they believed their obligations to the ICC prevented them from doing so. They were punished accordingly. Meanwhile, the administration, too, had chose between its opposition to the court and other — arguably more important — diplomatic and foreign policy priorities.

And now the policy is dead. And I, for one, won’t be missing it.

What Obama Could Learn from Watchmen

Ana Marie Cox does a webchat for The Washington Post:

Singapore: Obama likes comics; can he learn anything from Watchmen?

Ana Marie Cox: We can all learn something from the Watchmen. Personally, I hope he repeals the law against costumed vigilantes soon.

More seriously (tho not totally so), I think Cheney and Bush modeled their presidency on Ozymandias.

I like the idea of the Ozymandias reference, but I’m not sure that I actually get it. By contrast, though you shouldn’t click the links unless you want an implicit Watchmen spoler, Ronald Reagan actually did attempt to base his second-term approach to US-Soviet relations in part on a hypothetical version of the Ozymandias strategy. And though the argument was kind of odd, it actually went hand-in-hand with a brave and correct policy stance that helped contribute to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

On Afghanistan

A distressing number of people in the comments to this post were not just disagreeing with the things I’ve said about Afghanistan (which is fair enough) but instead asserting that I’ve been failing to address the topic out of some kind of cowardly desire to follow someone else’s lead. If you’re curious, though, you can always check out this list of posts tagged “Afghanistan.”

But to sum up my thoughts, I don’t think we should be heading for the exits in Afghanistan just yet. We have an interest in doing more to fight al-Qaeda and in weaken pro-Qaeda Taliban factions. Meanwhile, public opinion in Afghanistan is still reasonably friendly to the foreign military presence. I do, however, think it’s important that we set ourselves up to end the war sooner rather than later—that means lowering expectations and setting realistic goals.

I don’t know how to evaluate the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. I’ve heard plausible strategic visions for Afghanistan that involve sending more troops their. But the administration decided to announce the increase in force-levels before announcing the results of their strategic review. That decision about the sequence of events doesn’t seem very smart to me. But the decision about the sequence is going to be much less consequential than the actual results of the review and the most important thing there is going to be goals. I think if we could do history over again, the smart thing to have done would have been to have stayed out of Iraq. Then in 2002 and 2003, when the United States was very popular in Afghanistan we would have had more resources available to provide more comprehensive security and do more comprehensive development. Having made a bad decision to invade Iraq, if we’d started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2005 I think that still would have been soon enough to “go big” in Afghanistan—to send in more resources, more development, and to adopt a deeper, more ambitious, more comprehensive strategy. Even if we’d done what congressional Democrats wanted to and started withdrawing from Iraq in early 2007 this might have worked.

But none of those things happened. Consequently, we reached a point where the Afghan public is losing patience with us. There are things we can do to try to turn that around in the short-run—killing fewer civilians should help—but either way I think it means that we need to start looking for plausible offramps: A relatively narrow set of political and military goals combined with a willingness to cut deals with just about anyone willing to cut deals with us.

Marijuana Legalization More Popular than Key Conservative Leaders

Inspired by this Chris Bowers post, here’s a chart I made comparing public support for legalizing marijuana to the approval ratings for Rush Limbaugh and various Republican Party leaders that I found on PollingReport:

Needless to say, support for marijuana legalization is pretty much a “fringe” view in national politics. And it certainly doesn’t have majority support. And yet put it in perspective and this is what you get.

Stupid Budget Tricks

Not only is the Obama administration’s decision to end Bush-era dumb budget gimmicks that made the deficit seem smaller than it really was a good idea, I also think it’s a political no-brainer. For one thing, you’ll get some points from someone for being honest. For another thing, I never really understood what the Bush Gang thought it was accomplishing with this stuff. It served to antagonize the tiny minority of people who care about long-run budget projections and impress . . . who, exactly? People, it seems, who don’t care enough about long-run budget projections to unravel the trivially obvious gimmicks they were using. But why do you care what those people think?

In a lot of ways, the Bush administration always struck me as a group of people who were just so impressed with their own shamelessness and dishonesty that they wildly exaggerated the extent to which lying about stuff is a useful governing tool. They loved the game, they loved the gamesmanship, they held the public in contempt, experts in more contempt, and the press in even more contempt, and so they just went and did it.

Bush Forced to Buckrake in Canada Since All Real Americans Despite Him

I think this does not qualify as a worthwhile Canadian initiative:

Former President George W. Bush’s first confirmed speaking engagement since leaving office will take him from Crawford to Canada.

Invitations to the event, billed as “a conversation with George W. Bush,” say that the former president will “share his thoughts on his eight momentous years in the Oval Office” during a March 17 speech in Calgary, Alberta. [...] But the Canadian firm organizing the lunch has paid sizable fees to Lance Armstrong, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan. Former President Bill Clinton was paid $150,000 for a March 2006 speech in Edmonton, according to a Canadian newspaper.

But don’t go too hard on our Canadian friends, Alberta is sort of like the Alaska of Canada—an unusually right-wing petrostate where things like working relentlessly to doom the planet to ecological catastrophe are considered worthy of high praise.

Gitmo and NIMBY

One piece of soggy toilet paper the right is now throwing up against the wall is the idea that it’s unsafe to imprison suspected terrorists in prisons located on the North American continent rather than in a facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This is pretty absurd on its face—if there’s one thing our government does a lot of it’s build prisons and hold people there—but it’s worth observing the element of bad faith here as well. The Gitmo location was, recall, never initially motivated by considerations related to the physical security of the space.

Rather, the appeal of the location was its ambiguous legal status. Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, not the United States of America. But since the Cuban Revolution of 1958, we’ve had no Status of Forces Agreement with Cuba authorizing the presence of an American military base. Consequently, argued the Bush administration, neither Cuban nor American law applied there. This was somewhat daft if you ask me, albeit clever, but whatever you think of the merits of the argument that is why the prisoners were sent there. The Bush team never felt it was unsafe to send prisoners to Fort Leavenworth or to the supermax prison in Colorado, they just didn’t want to be in a position where they had to follow the law.

Well-Said

Steve Benen sums up the conservative take on the Bush legacy: “Most of the arguments are tiresome and familiar: except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s record on counter-terrorism was top notch.”

Morals With Dianne Feinstein

Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean shot an unarmed man who was running away from them. That’s a crime. Indeed, it’s a serious crime. And, no, the fact that Ramos and Compean were Border Patrol agents and the unarmed man they shot in the back was a drug dealer doesn’t magically make it okay. But apparently George W. Bush thought they deserve clemency and Dianne Feinstein thinks two wrongs make a right:

Nor did the furor over the case break along neat liberal-conservative lines, as demonstrated by statements made in 2007 by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California who is considered moderate to liberal. “It is true that the bullet left Aldrete-Davila permanently injured and that what the agents did was wrong,” the senator said. “But it is also true that Aldrete-Davila was not likely a low-level wrongdoer who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I don’t really understand what the relevance of these considerations are supposed to be. I take it that the federal maximum security prisons are filled with people who aren’t “low-level wrongdoer[s] who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But still if you were to wade into such a prison and go on a killing spree, that wouldn’t be okay. It would be a big deal! Mass-murder! There’s no special rule where it’s okay to shoot at people as long as they’re “bad guys.”

A Coda

Jeremy Lott nails this:

For example, unpaid Bush shill Fred Barnes recently wrote “for the editors” of the Weekly Standard that “Bush had 10 great achievements (and maybe more) in his eight years in the White House.” Among his undisputed successes on the foreign policy front were “enhanced interrogation of terrorists”, “the rebuilding of presidential authority” and “the surge”.

That an organ of conservative opinion would tout Bush’s moves toward torture and autocracy should be shocking. Notably absent from Barnes’s list was Bush’s decision to launch the invasion of Iraq in the first place, so the best that one of Bush’s most ardent defenders can say is that Bush managed to partially ameliorate one of his worst calls. That should change hearts and minds all right.

The vast majority of the country hates Bush, as is appropriate, but a substantial majority seems to have undergone a hideous moral and intellectual transformation into Bush’s image.

Bush Joins the Ranks of the Unemployed

In 2007, George W. Bush spoke of a desire to “replenish the ol’ coffers” with post-presidential speaking engagements. Daniel Gross has an appealing theory indicating that this won’t work:

For many of President Bush’s critics, the fact that he is now seeking work in the worst job market in a generation is poetic justice. As Bush noted in his farewell press conference, he is too much of a Type A for “the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, sitting on some beach.” (He might want to reconsider: Thanks to the recession, tropical resorts are running great promotions.)

Given recent history, Bush probably expects to profit from ex-presidency. Bill Clinton reported income of more than $90 million from 2000-07. But Bush is very unlikely to earn Clintonian numbers. Ex-presidents peddle image, presence, and experience. In Bush’s case, each is tarnished. To aggravate matters, many of the industries in which ex-presidents make easy money are a) doing poorly, and b) based in the Washington-Boston corridor where Bush hostility runs deep.

I think this is probably wrong and at the end of the day Bush’s unpopularity will probably have only a mild negative impact on his future earnings. For one thing, itt’s a mistake to try to generalize about which industries are the ones “in which ex-presidents make easy money.” Bush’s actions in office should have earned him the undying loyalty of the core GOP business base in the oil, coal, pharmaceutical, defense contracting, and agribusiness industries. It’s true that given the recession these firms may not be able to be as generous as they would in other times. But by the same token, their continued profitability depends heavily on their ability to convince today’s politicians that loyal friends of industry will be taken care of. If Bush really wants money, the money will be found.

Remember That Time When Bush Killed Osama?

Fred Barnes explains the glories of George W. Bush:

President Bush had strong nerves. President Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not.

Once again, from reading this homages to the genius of Bush-era counterterrorism you would never know that an order of magnitude more Americans were killed by transnational Islamist terrorists under George W. Bush’s watch than under all previous presidents combined. Barnes here seems to think that Bush’s nerves of steel are what allowed to him finally nail Osama bin Laden, but the missing part of the picture here is when Bush let bin Laden get away and he’s still at large years later with no real prospects for the U.S. killing or capturing him. It’s a disgrace.

What Bush Got Right

There’s an episode of The West Wing that I saw on Bravo a couple of weeks ago and have been thinking about since. It involved a scene where one of the staff is talking to President Bartlett about an upcoming State of the Union speech. The speech is going to include something about federal grants to provide cell phones to neighborhood watch groups. It’ll include that because it polls very well, and because the President is in political peril and needs a great State of the Union address to stay afloat. It was a reminder of the pettiness of mid-1990s politics, but also a reflection of the fact that the Bartlett administration, like the Clinton administration, and like many other politicians, had a certain imagine in its head of how politics worked. In this image, the public is full of people with all kinds of opinions. And if you ask them questions, you could discern their opinions. And if you identify things that public opinion favors, and that you also deem defensible policy goals, and then go do these things, the public’s opinion of you will go up. And that’s how politics works!

Except the evidence suggests that that isn’t actually how politics works. The evidence is that public opinion is largely incoherent, that voters do much more rationalizing than reasoning, and that people have little information about what politicians are doing or saying anyway. What matters for political sense is a few big, crude factors. And the Bush administration, whatever you say about them, seems to me to have basically understood this. There was a lot of sentiment in December 2000 and January 2001 that the weird nature of Bush’s accession to the presidency meant that he not only would but had to basically ditch his governing agenda in favor of a more centrist posture. The Bushies correctly ascertained that whether or not he succeeded in getting bipartisan glamor shots three and a half years earlier was going to have nothing to do with his re-election prospects. They saw that a President has certain powers to shape policy, that the vast majority of policy decisions have no impact whatsoever on voter behavior, and that the best thing you can do is just press ahead with what you think is best.

Unfortunately for the world, George W. Bush’s ideas about what’s best are stupid and morally deficient. And that, of course, completely vitiates whatever virtues his methods may have had.

The Strangeness of the Bush Era

After something happens, it can begin to seem inevitable. The extent to which the actual has its origins deep in the past, and the present-day has been unfolding for decades, becomes clear to us all. On occasion, it’s useful to have a jarring reminder that things didn’t always seem that way. Here, for example, Joschka Fischer, a very admirable and savvy foreign policy thinker and the German Foreign Minister who tried to lead opposition to the invasion of Iraq, recalls how things seemed to him eight years ago:

We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.

Needless to say: Oops.

Above the Law?

What Krugman said:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

And, look, the idea of enforcing the laws inherently involves the idea of looking backwards. If John Yoo walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot a guy in the head, we wouldn’t say “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” even though it would be as true as ever that it’s important to look forward. And more than one person has died as a result of Bush-era torture policies. The idea of an accountability-free executive is bound to have some appeal to a new administration. On the one hand, embracing it earns you plaudits for bipartisanship. On the other hand, you’re the executive now, so why not embrace it? But for the rest of us it’s not such a great deal.

UPDATE: And recall Brian Beutler’s point here that the illegality of, say, waterboarding was an established principle of American law for decades before Bush came around. We tried Japanese soldiers as war criminals for doing it during World War II. And it’s not like we took “well you have to understand, the Americans were a serious security threat” to be a viable defense.

Faithfully Executing the Laws

Via Mark Kleiman, Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands observe that the Torture Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, “every state has a treaty obligation to criminalize torture, and to prosecute torturers itself or extradite them for prosecution elsewhere.”

Again, I completely understand the Obama administration’s hesitancy to open their new administration with this particular issue. But simply deciding to let it slide and say bygones are bygones isn’t a very viable strategy. Torture is illegal in the United States, a legal obligation exists to prosecute torturers, we have at least one legal determination that torturing has happened (and this is absent an inquiry) and many credible further allegations of such, we have confirmation that waterboarding—which has always been considered torture until Dick Cheney came along—has taken place, and we have a President-Elect about to take an oath to, among other things, “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Something has to be done. Ideally something that isn’t—and doesn’t look like—an unseemly partisan witch hunt.

The Legal Cost of Torture

One of the big problems with the Bush administration’s decision to break the law constantly in pursuit of counterterrorism is that once you’re doing a bunch of illegal stuff, it’s very hard to stop. For example, Muhammed al-Qahtani is someone who it seems like you’d like to prosecute for terrorism-related crimes but it seems we can’t since he was tortured, ruining the evidence:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

This is one reason why veteran interrogators and criminal investigators always tended to be extremely skeptical of the enthusiasm for torture coming from the top of the command chain and some of the other government agencies — they have an understanding of the value of doing things the right way. Evidence obtained via torture is useless.

It’s also a reason why I have some doubts about the viability of a “let bygones be bygones” attitude toward Bush-era war crimes. We have here a legal determination that a captive in US custody was tortured. And if he was tortured, that means someone tortured him. And torture is a crime. And most likely, someone ordered the torture. And someone knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it. And as we attempt to regularize the legal status of various other people being held by the United States similar findings will be relevant to future questions about who can and can’t be prosecuted and for what. To me, it doesn’t make any sense to say that we’re going to have determinations that people were illegally tortured and yet we’re just not going to do anything about it. It’d be one thing to pardon people for this kind of thing as part of some larger legal or investigative strategy. But to just leave it hanging? If Crawford thinks Qahtani can’t be prosecuted because he was tortured, then it stands to reason that there’s someone who can be prosecuted for the torturing.

Bush As Crank

Kevin Drum links back to an old idea of his:

I’ve long viewed George Bush as a temperamental conservative, the kind of guy you meet in a bar who slams down his drink and asks belligerently, “You know what this country needs?” and then proceeds to tell you.

Maybe this is just fuzzy and sentimental of me, but I think that guy in the bar actually quite earnestly cares about the country and what it needs. If through some twist of fate he became president, he might do a terrible job initially. But if that was the case, then as problems mounted I think he would either become chastened, take advantage of the president’s ability to get the counsel of better-informed people and start doing a better job, or else become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and abdicate in favor of someone better-suited to the job.

Bush has remained seriously jerky to the end, taunting the rest of the G-8 about his crappy environmental record, vetoing health care for poor children, utterly unrepentant in his goodbye interviews, delaying needed fiscal stimulus and plunging the world into depression, fighting tenaciously to keep American troops in Iraq in the teeth of opposition from the American and Iraqi publics, etc.

In other words, I get the analogy to the drunk in the bar. But ultimately I think it’s unfair to people who like to rant and rave in bars. This is how Bush really is, year after year.

UPDATE: See also Brian Beutler on Bush the nice guy versus Bush the jerk.

Unorthodox Stimulus Proposal

Hm:

U.S. President George W. Bush will deliver a televised farewell address to the American people on Thursday night, the White House said.

I bet if you auctioned tickets to this, and let the audience throw tomatoes at the speaker, and then donated the proceeds to community soup kitchens and the like that you’d have a high multiplier effect.

Hertzberg on History’s Greatest RINO

Rick Herztberg almost destroyed my laptop as I spit out soda laughing at this joke:

The President-elect’s performance can’t fully explain the public’s welcoming view of him. Part of it, surely, reflects an eagerness to be rid of the incumbent. A gangly Illinois politician whom “the base” would today label a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—once pointed out that you can fool some of the people all of the time. We now know how many “some” is: twenty-seven per cent. That’s the proportion of Americans who, according to CNN, cling to the belief that George W. Bush has done a good job. The wonder is that this number is still in the double digits, given his comprehensively disastrous record. During the eight years of the second President Bush, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 per cent to 7.2 per cent and climbing; consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low; a budget surplus of two hundred billion dollars became a deficit of that plus a trillion; more than a million families fell into poverty; the ranks of those without health insurance rose by six million; and the fruits of the nation’s economic growth went almost entirely to the rich, while family incomes in the middle and below declined. What role the Bush Administration’s downgrading of terrorism as a foreign-policy priority played in the success of the 9/11 attacks cannot be known, but there is no doubting its responsibility for the launching and mismanagement of the unprovoked war in Iraq, with all its attendant suffering; for allowing the justified war in Afghanistan to slide to the edge of defeat; and for the vertiginous worldwide decline of America’s influence, prestige, power, and moral standing.

Say what you will about Bush, but him being such a horrible president has been good for the field of liberal political commentary. I think Hertzberg at least owes him that much.