This past week, to celebrate the opening of the George W. Bush Liberry for Presidentin' on the SMU campus, Republican partisans have been trying to rehabilitate the presidency of the worst president in modern times. Well, at least two conservatives -- George Will and Matthew Dowd -- weren't buying any of it one bit on "This Week."

WILL: Well the American people want to think well of presidents and ex-presidents. The problem with the Bush legacy is the tensions within it. Arguably his greatest decision was the surge. But the surge was to correct for the disastrous implementation of the invasion of Iraq which itself never should have happened, we now know.

Second, his greatest legacy are two superb Supreme Court candidates, nominees, now justices. On the other hand, one of them came after a disastrous suggestion, Harriet Miers.

In Afghanistan you had an invasion he had to take, but you had terrible mission creep afterwards and we got into the business of nation building. The prescription drug entitlement, the first major entitlement he ever passed without a dedicated funding source, aggravated the coming crisis of the welfare state.

And his favorite piece of legislation, "No Child Left Behind" offended every conservative instinct by nationalizing, further nationalizing a quintessential state and local responsibility.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Matthew Dowd you worked for the president for several years. Broke over the Iraq War.

DOWD: Well yeah and I was there for the first five years of the administration, as you say, broke over the Iraq War. I think it was a great moment. These are always great moments that happen, the five living presidents there. They pay respects regardless of party. The libraries and presidential institutions are an important part of our cultural and research and conversation.

And I think the president, reflecting back, had done a number of good things. What he did for aid to Africa. As Donna has pointed out, what he did in the aftermath of Katrina, and a number of things. And I think what you saw, everybody thinks that this is a good man. But the problem that I saw in this whole thing as we had that day and everybody focused on it, it's as if you were asking the people who got off the Titanic, they say, other than that, how was the trip?

And the Iraq War was a disaster. We spent over $1 trillion. We lost thousands of lives. I had a son that served there. We lost thousands of U.S. lives, thousands of lives over in Iraq. And the Iraq War for at least 20 years is going to affect us. It's already affecting our foreign policy in Syria. It's caused the president to not say, well I don't know if I can do this because of what happened in the Iraq War.

It's affected our domestic policy because the lack of funds, the lack of ability. And it polarized the country. And so I think we pause for a moment and say, yes he's a good man. But in the end, the Iraq War was such a disastrous decision, it affected this country so dramatically. His tie to history is going to be completely tied to that.

But he did Keep Us Safe -- except for 9/11, the DC Sniper, the Anthrax attacks, Katrina -- and the 7 embassies that were attacked during his presidency.

(video h/t Heather)

During the ABC's "This Week" Roundtable Sunday, in an attempt to belittle the latest excellent job creation numbers to come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (236,000 jobs created in February), Conservative fanboy George Will made the following incredibly clueless observation:

WILL: If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was just 12 months ago, the unemployment rate would be 8.3 percent. If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was when Mr. Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate would be over 10 percent.

Think about that statement for a moment. Will is actually arguing that job growth under Obama... growing at a rate of more than twice what is needed just to keep up with population growth, and actually produced a 0.2% decline in the Unemployment Rate last month... isn't growing fast enough to make up for the economic catastrophe created prior to President Obama taking office, and therefore is a failure. According to the Fox "business" Channel, jobless claims are actually on the decline.

And sooooo... what? We should return to the GOP economic policies that created the disaster in the first place?

For reference, by this point in Bush's presidency, the unemployment rate had gone from 4.2% the month he took office to 5.4% in March of 2005 following the longest post-war economic expansion of the 20th century and two consecutive balanced budgets under President Clinton (by contrast, unemployment has fallen under President Obama from 7.8% to 7.7% following the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a $1.4 TRILLION dollar Deficit).

[h/t Heather at VideoCafe]

Steven Brill has written a must-read article for this week's Time magazine about health care costs and why we really do have to be concerned about them. Following on that, he made an appearance on the round table segment of This Week to discuss those costs and why he's sounding the alarm.

Anyone who has spent even a day in the hospital knows what the problem is. When one over-the-counter pain reliever administered in the hospital costs as much as an entire bottle at the pharmacy, there's a very, very big problem.

Brill correctly points out that Medicare is an efficient program that Congress has managed to hog-tie into some ridiculous costly measures:

And it actually that bears on the conversation we're having, because a chunk of that money is paid by Medicare. Medicare is I point out in the article is very efficient at most things. It buys health care really efficiently, which is a great irony, because it's supposed to be the big government of bureaucracy.

Where Medicare is not efficient is where Congress, because of lobbyists have handcuffed Medicare. Medicare can't negotiate what it pays for any kind of drugs. It can't negotiate what it pays for wheelchairs, diabetes testing equipment. And if Congress took those handcuffs off of Medicare, you could get about half of the spending cuts that we're sitting around here talking about.

Yes, this. Of course, that assumes anyone in Congress is brave enough to stand up to the mighty PhRMA lobby, which seems to have as deep a lock on Washington as the gun lobby. Brill also makes the compelling argument for lowering the Medicare eligibility age, which I have argued over and over again here at C&L. The single biggest cost-saver for Medicare would be to drop the eligibility age, let people buy in until they actually reach retirement age, and then they would drop to the levels under the Social Security law.

By the way, Steve Brill is not by any stretch of the imagination some liberal socialist out to destroy capitalism. The man is a moderate conservative who has done quite well in the land of free enterprise, which made his declaration is a refreshing breath of intellectual honesty about health care in this country.

Brill makes compelling arguments, and I agree with every single one of them. What struck me about this exchange, however, was how George Will hijacked the conversation to talk about all the people in the whole United States who are nothing but a bunch of health care moochers! It's not the costs of health care, people! No, not at all. What we have in this country are a bunch of moochers who don't carry their own weight.

Here's Will, telling us all we mooch:

Here's an argument against that, for a different kind of reform, all the big numbers, billions and trillions, 12 cents is the most important number. 12 cents is the portion of every health care dollar paid by the person receiving the health care. Someone else is paying the rest. It was 47 cents 50 years ago when Jack Kennedy was president.

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Ahhh...the glory of never having to admit that you're clueless. In the face of tonight's Academy Awards program and the surprisingly high percentage of political films nominated, host George Stephanopoulos asks his panel to give their predictions of who will take home the Oscar.

Whodathunk that the partisan hacks--who are equally as clueless about their domestic policy predictions--use the opportunity to thump Democrats:

Of the three politically charged films up for Best Picture, ABC News contributor George Will thinks “Zero Dark Thirty” should take home Oscar gold.

“It’s a genuine contribution to public education,” he said. “Sufficient reason for voting for it is a rebuke to Sens. Levin, Feinstein and McCain, who have enough to do without being movie critics and falsely accusing that movie of taking a stand on torture it does not take.”

TIME Magazine contributor Steven Brill agreed.

Because, you know, those Academy voters are always looking for an opportunity to teach a lesson to Democratic senators.

And even then, Will doesn't get the criticism correct. Levin and Feinstein did not object to 'Zero Dark Thirty' for taking a supposed stand on torture. They objected to the way the film elides over the years and false information given via torture before they finally did get actionable intelligence, something an FBI agent involved confirmed.

In arguing with Susie Madrak against a 'Silver Linings Playbook' Best Picture win, I reminded her that Academy voters love sweeping epics and elevated films and tend to reward that. Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty' did not do that and even the nominations reflect that:

But I suspect that the real problem for academy voters with Kathryn Bigelow’s film is not the torture sequences, but how utterly devoid of larger context the movie is. Should that matter? No, unless you make the claim, as the filmmakers have done, that your version of “history’s greatest manhunt” carries the imprimatur of journalistic accuracy — durable enough to become the art of record.

The duty of a dramatist is to tell a story, with conflict, peril and resolution. The duty of a historian is much the same, with the added responsibility of assembling a factual narrative. In trying to have it both ways, “Zero Dark Thirty” lost a large segment of thinking movie lovers.

I first saw the film with two highly opinionated women, and we had the same instant reaction: best picture. Maya, the composite character of the C.I.A. band of sisters that tracked Osama bin Laden, was mesmerizing. It was emotionally satisfying to see a mass killer in a body bag. The stomach-turning visual style was similar to Bigelow’s best-picture winner, “The Hurt Locker,” which I loved.

That was six weeks ago. A second viewing with journalist friends who know the story well led to a more troubling take-away. It’s not just the torture and its inherent message that young, attractive Americans got the ultimate payoff in part by doing what German bad guys used to do in the movies.

It’s the omissions. In “Zero Dark Thirty,” several larger truths — the many intelligence mistakes, the loss of focus and diversion of resources, and the fallout from the folly of the Iraq war — are missing. This is a crucial point, because the film is likely to end up as the most popular version of the singular trauma in the first decade of the 21st century.

It’s obvious, now, why the C.I.A. was cooperative with the filmmakers: it couldn’t have asked for better product placement.

The Academy--unlike George Will--does not want to appear to be in bed with the CIA. That's why we can chalk up yet another incorrect statement out of the mouth of Will. Not that it will ever matter to ABC News.

[h/t Heather at VideoCafe]

Last Monday, something remarkable happened. PBS aired their newest Frontline segment on the first four years of Obama's presidency. In the opening segment, Frank Luntz crowed proudly about how the strategy session he organized and which took place four years ago today had proven to be a rousing success.

That strategy was, of course, the decision for Republicans to stand united against anything the President proposed. Anything, even if it was originally a Republican idea. In their mind, that was the only way they could recover from the devastating election results of 2008.

In some ways, this wasn't news. Robert Draper's book about the House of Representatives was the first "official report", but this is the very first time anyone who was actually in that meeting went on the record to talk crow about it.

With that in mind, I am struggling to understand the Villager whine and groan over how, in his second term, President Obama must "bring Republicans to the table."

Politifact, in all of its wisdom, has pronounced that "Obama failed to keep 119 or nearly one-fourth of his promises, including many high-profile ones such as his pledges to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to create a cap-and-trade system to combat global warming and his vow to 'bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda.'"

Politifact's editors know about what I call "The Covenant." Yet they framed a report which actually said that the president kept 73 percent of his campaign promises in terms of a failure to foster bipartisanship.

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I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning. It smells like ... victory.

Especially when it's victory over some of the most loathsome reptilian figures lurking on the modern American political scene, notably, the maroons who tried selling the world on the notion of "Romentum" going into yesterday's election.

Guys like Michael Barone, who predicted 315 Electoral College votes for Romney. Or Karl Rove, who predicted 285 victorious votes for the Mittster.

For some reason last night, they remained in deep denial while poring over the results on Fox. And of course, no mention of their own towering incompetence was made. Instead, they spent the segment calling each other "brilliant".

Though you couldn't help notice the sweat on the brow and upper lip of Rove. Bet he's thinking about all those rich clients who paid gazillions of dollars for his American Crossroads Super PAC to take down not just Obama but a bunch of Democrats ... all for naught.

We also look forward to hearing from George Will, who predicted 321 votes for Romney, and from Dick Morris, who predicted a massive Willard landslide (and a Republican Senate to boot).

Roy Edroso has a rundown of all the right-wing pundits predicting a Romney runaway.

My favorite of the pre-election pundits had to be Michael Walsh at NRO, with his charmingly titled thinkpiece, "Crush Them":

Mitt Romney is an imperfect standard bearer, but tomorrow he is the army we have. Elsewhere, I’ve predicted a Romney victory and even a retake of the Senate, despite the breathtaking tactical stupidity of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, both of whom needlessly wandered into the mine field of social issues (where the media is guaranteed 100 percent arrayed against them) and blew their own feet off. But, should Romney win, he can’t simply assume the vote was a mandate for putting America back to work, and then do his corporate-turnaround thing. If he wins, if his victory is beyond the margin of David Axelrod’s ability to cheat, Mitt needs to understand that a considerable portion of his vote was not only anti-Obama but anti-Obamaism, that it was a repudiation of everything the Marxist Left and its bien-pensant fellow travelers in the media stand for. And, most important, that going forward, it’s a call to substantially reduce their influence on the body politic.

Sorry about that, comrade. We look forward to shuffling your paranoid ass off to a Commie re-education camp soon.

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(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)

Can we officially now eliminate George Will from the roster of Very. Serious. Pundits?

I know that Nate Silver is some sort of evil wizard to conservatives because of ...well, math...you know, having a liberal bias and all, but let's look at the most recent round up of presidential likely voter polls from him:

See that blue line going up? See red line going down? Those are the mathematical averages of national polls, not some crazy leftist fantasy. There is no mathematic way for George Will to get to 321 Electoral College votes. None. Will's such an outlier that even his fellow conservatives at the roundtable, Ron Brownstein of the National Journal and Matthew Dowd, have Mitt Romney losing with 70-90 fewer EV than Will's ludicrous prediction. Hell, even Karl Rove admitted on Fox News that Obama was ahead.

But George Will, encouraged by his cushy, high-paying job that never holds him accountable for being wrong, can go ahead and let his partisan freak flag fly free. He can make a prediction that no one--not one single person on any side of the aisle--thinks is possible. He knows it's not possible either, but he's gonna go ahead and stake it anyway in the hopes that some low info voter will believe George "Villager Idiot" Will and go along with it. And worst yet, he knows that come next Sunday, he'll still grab a paycheck for that seat on the This Week panel and no one will say anything about how monstrously wrong he was, once again.

I'd encourage you to ask Executive Producer Mark Burstein if there's any consequences, any accountability that ABC News requires of their punditry.

On today's This Week With Mickey Mouse, a variety of well-heeled people join in a hearty chorus of "What Do The Simple Folk Do?". Isn't that nice!

JONES: Well, then why -- it's certainly not being revealed. But hold on a second. This is the kind of stuff I think that turns people off from politics. I mean, this is exactly the problem we have right now. Ordinary people don't care about this stuff. And the stuff that regular people care about more than anything is, you know, their houses. Right now, one third of the people who are watching this show, their homes are under water.

It used to be, they were talking about the good old days earlier on the show. It used to be when you signed that mortgage check, you were building wealth for your family. You got a third of Americans who are losing wealth, and in Washington, D.C., the big story that was missed, you got Ed DeMarco, a Bush administration holdover, who is still being held on to by Obama, who sits back and says, Fannie and Freddie are now--

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's the head of the Federal Housing Administration.

JONES: The Federal Housing Administration.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Oversees Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie came up with a report that said if they just reduced some of these mortgages and gave some mortgage relief and stopped overcharging people for their homes, America would save $1 billion in foreclosures and you keep people in their houses. This one bureaucrat says, no way, takes it off the table. That's wrong. That's hurting ordinary Americans. It's not even being talked about in Washington, D.C. President Obama should fire Ed DeMarco, get him out of there, but somebody in office is going to take care of the real issues. The American people can't continue to lose their shirts trying to get people to stay in their houses.

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- didn't do more about that? I know he disagrees, I know he disagrees with Ed DeMarco, but he didn't take action.

RATTNER: Well, look, the housing situation is one of the most complicated policy issues we have, because we all would like to do more for homeowners, but I think there's a feeling in America, which I understand, of sort of equity in the sense that someone who overborrowed, who took out a second mortgage, used it to buy a new television or consume, is now under water, is living next door to somebody who acted responsibly and didn't take out a second mortgage. And so this is a highly emotional issue in Washington.

What he means is, the "responsible" people who had well-paying jobs and enough inherited wealth that they didn't need to use their houses as ATMs to cover up the declining purchasing power of their paychecks.

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(h/t David of VideoCafe)

Republicans - even This Week nutjobs like Dana Loesch and GOP handmaidens like Ruth Marcus - will be much more credible on the economy if they stick to talking about statistics, because the unemployment numbers are simply grim. (And as we know, the real numbers are much worse. There are 22.8 million people in need of a decent job: 12.7 unemployed according to "official" statistics, 7.7 million underemployed, and 2.4 million who have stopped looking. ("The Betrayal of the American Dream," Donald Barlett and James Steele.)

As George Will points out, 68% of Americans know someone who's lost his or her job. And that's a real problem for the Obama administration. The president would have a much better chance if he simply said, "Look, we really thought this would work but I took bad advice. I see now that an inadequate stimulus is like giving your kid half the dosage of anitbiotics for a serious infection, it only made the disease stronger. Elect me and a Democratic congress, and we promise to fix this mess." But as we know, President Obama has Fonzie syndrome when it comes to admitting policy mistakes.

Fortunately, we know conservatives can't control themselves for long, and will also continue to make accusations that are just plain crazy, and turn people off. So the president has that going for him, which is nice:

DOWD: David, I want to turn to the economy, which is, I think, Mitt Romney is going to come back and as quickly as he possibly can and probably start talking about the economy again and hope that he gets some plus from the trip.

CHALIAN: He'll have a jobs report on Friday to help him talk about it.

DOWD: So a jobs report on Friday, which will come out, but we just had a GDP figure that -- 1.5 percent -- that was mediocre at best. From what you've seen over the past, is that a plus for Barack Obama or is that a minus for Barack Obama?

CHALIAN: I don't know how it can be a plus. The GDP number is a minus for Barack Obama, and to me, the single most interesting poll number in the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll that came out this week was the question -- they asked Americans, look forward 12 months, do you think the economy is going to get better or worse or stay the same? Twenty-seven percent of the country thinks that the economy is going to get better. That is the lowest all year long and actually dropped 8 points from last month. That is the weight of three bad months of jobs numbers. This GDP number is going to add to that. And if there's a not significant uptick, I think that each month of these jobs reports, it does compound.

Largely it's baked into the American people. The economy is clearly bad, right? But if we're down to only 27 percent of the people are actually optimistic that the economy will get better in (inaudible) that is a very tough...

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: Donna, are Democrats worried about that? Are they concerned that that -- those sort of baked-in numbers right now are going to make it very hard for President Obama to win this election?

BRAZILE: Oh, look, no question politically it matters. I mean, a weak economy hurts the incumbent. But on the other hand, we're not sitting around on our hands, you know, looking for things to get worse before, you know, we try to help people.

Yes, the economy is tough for President Obama, but I do believe that he has a lot of credibility that he can out there and talk about the things that -- the steps he's taken, the steps that he would like to take, and the steps that the Republicans will continue to oppose, because simply they've decided there's one mission in life, and that is to defeat Barack Obama.

But, you know, back in 1980, when we had a Democratic president during hard times, Ronald Reagan had some credibility in going out there and talking to blue-collar voters, because he came from a union household, he was president of a union, he talked about his father getting laid off during Christmas. He had the narrative. Mitt Romney? He talks about firing people.

WILL: And let me give you another number to add to yours: 68 percent of Americans know someone who has lost his job. Now, the question is, is it going to get better? I think right now we're in what can be fairly called a growth recession. That sounds like an oxymoron. It isn't. We're now in the fourth year of a recovery, and we're growing but receding at the same time, because we're not growing fast enough to create enough jobs to even take account of the natural growth of the workforce.

And look what -- at the variables that have to be feared by the Obama campaign. First is Europe, which means Spain. By the way, in the last 15 months, a majority of European governments have been changed by restive electorates.

Then there's the emerging markets, Brazil, India and China, have slowed down. We have the fiscal cliff coming up with our own tax policy at the end of the year. Dodd-Frank is two years old and still there's so much uncertainty about it, because it's about half-written. Food prices are going up in part because we're putting 40 percent of our corn crop in our gas tanks because of ethanol.

(CROSSTALK)

WILL: And the election itself is a great source of -- of uncertainty.

DOWD: Ruth, some people have begun to get this sense that this economy has been bad for so long and that people are now having to resettle at a different point, and that basically what's going to happen is that Americans sort of shrug their shoulders and say, listen, there's not much a president can do about this, and so I'm going to pick a president that I sort of feel more in sync with, which seems to be an advantage for the president on that issue. But will the economy and those factors that have been talked about still determine it?

MARCUS: I -- I think so. And since everybody's throwing out numbers, my favorite one for the week is 53 percent of those in the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll disapprove of President Obama's handling of the economy. People do understand, I think, that there's a limited amount that a president can do. Nonetheless, I think the most powerful argument from the Republican side this week was he's -- you tried, he's tried, it's not working. Let's give somebody else a chance. That's hard to rebut, given the limp along.

And for all the fun we've had this week with Romney gaffes and Mitt the Twit headlines, I think the worst week went to President Obama because of this unspinnable 1.5 percent growth number.

DOWD: Dana?

LOESCH: And -- and you want to talk about gaffes. Here we have 41 straight months of unemployment that's been over 8 percent, which was -- the stimulus was supposed to have fixed. In terms of gaffes, it's not good to have the president get up in front of people during an election cycle and say, well, if you have a small business, you didn't built that, or as some have tried to say, oh, he took -- the Republicans took something out of context.

Hilary Rosen continues to be a great Democratic representative, turning the Fast and Furious conversation back to where it belongs: Why the Republicans are really targeting Eric Holder. On This Week with Jake Tapper:

WILL: Well, this is being played out in a context of executive aggrandizement, as Republicans see it. First of all, the president rewrites immigration law by executive fiat. Then, while it's saying we must shield the secrets here regarding Fast and Furious deliberations, there's a torrent of leaks on the most sensitive national security matters appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Finally, Mr. Holder himself has made himself obnoxious to Republicans by saying, unlike the Supreme Court, that photo I.D. laws constitute voter suppression, that is, if you have to present when you vote a photo I.D., the way you have to present a photo I.D. to get into Justice -- Attorney General Holder's Justice Department.

I just have to say here: Do you have any idea how frequently this happens, that a president decides where to place enforcement efforts? Ronald Reagan did not want to deal with the PR problems of repealing programs - he simply cut the budgets to make sure they were de facto repealed.. Under George W. Bush, the FDA simply stopped doing random inspections of drug manufacturing facilities, instead moving to a system of self-reporting. (Uh huh.) George Will knows this. He's just a hack who parrots the line of the day. He must hold the world's record for coasting on a Pulitzer Prize, because he hasn't done an honest day's work since.

ROSEN: Now we're getting to the real issue. This is why Republicans don't like Eric Holder, because he has challenged voter I.D. laws under the civil rights statutes as voter suppression rules that they are, because he has challenged the Arizona, you know, discriminatory immigration law, because he has refused to implement the discriminatory anti-marriage law.

So, you know, Eric Holder has shown a lot of backbone in the Justice Department, and the Republicans hate it. So what do they do? They call for his resignation; they throw him with document requests that are impossible to respond to; they just throw more and more stuff at him to distract him from doing the things that actually the president and the people hired him to do.

WILL: Let the record show that the Supreme Court, with Justice John Paul Stevens, liberal justice writing it, said that there's no constitutional flaw in photo I.D. voter laws.

Yes, Stevens did say that. In the same decision, Antonin Scalia wrote in his concurring opinion:

"It is for state legislatures to weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class."

ROSEN: You know, they're going to have to review that in the courts. Thirteen states, George, have instituted new statutes since the Republicans took over those state legislatures in 2010, purely for the purpose of limiting voting.