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One of the more laughably adolescent and petulant aspect of Bush's Farewell Legacy Tour is the refusal to examine any aspect of his presidency, brushing it off with a "Well, you may not agree with me, but you have to agree that I made tough decisions."

Maybe it's not so surprising that the guy who got to Harvard and Yale on legacy and who needed to be bailed out by Daddy and friends on every business he attempted thinks that he deserves credit for merely sticking it out and not pushing off "hard" decisions to others. Certainly, that has been his modus operandi before public office. But clearly, that excuse isn't flying with the media any longer, as exemplified from this segment of The Chris Matthews Show, which highlight the fatal flaw of Bush's reasoning: you don't get credit for making the tough decisions, you get credit for making the right decisions.

KAY: Of course he had to face tough decisions. Because that’s the job of the American president, you have to face tough decisions. And you have to face them well and make the right decisions. I think the trouble is in all the interviews he’s given—these farewell interviews—he still really hasn’t answered satisfactorily the central question of his presidency: Why did he invade Iraq? It’s not enough to say it was a tough decision, so I made it, you have to say it was the right decision. [..]

RATHER: As far as it goes, it’s a fair estimate that great presidencies are made out of crises. If you come up with the right answers. The business of tough decisions, every president has tough decisions to make. Herbert Hoover had tough decisions to make. He made some of the wrong ones. Gen. Grant, for all his generalship when he was president, made tough decisions, but made the wrong decisions. This is the way history goes, fairly or unfairly. It seems to me, you make the wrong decisions, you pay the price. [..]

WHITAKER: Chris, you know, Bush likes to think of himself as the Great Decider, but I think one of the things that history is going to record is how indecisive he was at key moments. You think about Katrina, and handling that crisis. You think about the current economic crisis, that he’s leaving and how he was sort of asleep at the switch as that all happened. And even on Iraq, even though he was decisive on going to war, he was incredibly indecisive about the aftermath of the war. And I think that that’s the root of a lot of the problems we’ve had there.

Wow, you know, these Media Elite types are actually starting to sound like us DFHs, aren't they? Too bad their honesty only kicked in as Bush got kicked out.

Transcripts below the fold

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John Amato has blogged about this and this clip from this week's The Chris Matthews Show is proof positive that the progressive blogosphere must be smart about picking battles in pushing a liberal agenda for America. Let's face it, you and I and the rest of the liberal blogosphere have been right more often than not and certainly exponentially over the Villagers that populate The Chris Matthews Show. But they're not ready to give up their coveted place at the table, and certainly not to upstart bloggers who don't have the decency to take them at their word any longer.

So to those oh-so-wise Beltway bobbleheads, we will be the "angry left" that Obama must marginalize in order to have a successful presidency. It won't be the Republicans with their bag of obstructionist tricks, ones of which WaPo's Ceci Connolly doesn't even have memory, that give Obama a hard time, it will be us, the "angry left." We are the ones to not give Obama a "honeymoon period" and we will be the ones fighting him as he attempts to execute his agenda.

Sigh. Do anyone of these chuckleheads ever consider that the reason the left has been so "angry" for the last eight plus years is that what we've said and what we've valued has been criticized, dismissed, sneered, condemned, denounced and our characters attacked? Of course not. And when the nation shows that they have awakened to what we've been saying all along and announced with their vote that they want to give the left a shot, we're still criticized, dismissed, sneered, condemned, denounced and our characters attacked because we might like to see some people actually reflective of our values in office.

Good to see the open minds of the Very Serious Villagers remain. Would that they would be so condemning of those who have been so very wrong all this time.

Transcripts (courtesy of Heather) below the fold

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Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Koran down the toilet...

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts....read on

What a nightmare.

MahaBlog

Because it shows how hard it is to get the facts out.

The wet kiss headline is “Judge Seen as Conservative, Fair”.

And it just gets worse from there.

Savage uses the GOP talking points early in the piece, telling his readers that Owen “comes across as a mainstream conservative.”

He quotes a total of four people that he interviewed. All the quotes are pro-Owen. Read on...

Read on...