Matt Yglesias

The Howard Gambit

A great sign of what a petty, stupid, immoral man George W. Bush is has been his treatment of the Obama family’s request that they be allowed to stay in Blair House for the two weeks before inauguration so that Sasha and Malia could start school on time. Bush turned them down, citing the need for Blair House to host a guest for one night, thus forcing the Obama’s into a hotel and causing various inconveniences to the people of Washington and to the taxpayer as security arrangements needed to be made.

Fittingly enough, it seems that there was no genuine guest scheduled to stay in Blair House. Rather, the Bush administration asked former Australian Prime Minister John Howard to stay at the place in order to give them a pretext to turn the Obamas down. Fittingly, from everything I’ve heard about Howard he and Bush are really two peas in a pod in terms of terrible policymaking.