(from the 2008 Colbert Green Screen Challenge)

If I could remove one word from the lexicons of the Sunday Morning News Shows and other corporate media outlets, it would be "EXCLUSIVE!" There is nothing exclusive about having John McCain on your show for the upteenth time, David Gregory. And if you're trying to convince me that it's some sort of "catch" to get him on any specific Sunday, pull my other finger. I mean, leg.

"Face the Nation” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee; Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee; Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Jan Crawford, CBS News Chief Legal Correspondent; David Martin, CBS News National Security Correspondent

“Meet the Press” Exclusive! Senator! John! McCain!
Also Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Sebastian Junger, author of "WAR"; Army combat veteran Wes Moore; Tom Ricks, Contributing Editor of Foreign Policy magazine and author;
NBC Military Analyst Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.), Former Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Southern Command.

“Fox News Sunday” Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Mike Huckabee;

“ABC's This Week” Jake Tapper has an Exclusive Interview! with CIA Director! Leon! Panetta! The Panel will be: George Will, David Sanger, Robin Wright, Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

”The Chris Matthews Show” with Panelists Dan Rather, Gloria Borger, Katty Kay, and John Harris: Questions: Does General Petraeus Now Own the Afghanistan War? Sarah Palin's Year As Private Citizen: How's that Working Out For Her?

As a former constituent of Senator Sessions, my money's on him to bring the crazy this morning. What's catching your eye on the airwaves this am?

I am sure that John Hannah, former deputy national security advisor to VP Dick Cheney, didn't mean to confess how badly the Bush administration screwed up Afghanistan before it turned over the mess to President Obama, but that's exactly what his post in the Foreign Policy Magazine's "Shadow Government" blog did. Spencer Ackerman provides a very appropriate take-down of the Hannah lecture:

Wherein the former foreign-policy aide to Dick Cheney attempts to exonerate the Bush administration’s complete and total fuck-up-itude on Afghanistan. Words fail. It’s hard to excerpt. But I’ll try.

“Eight years of drift,” according to Obama administration officials seeking to explain their lengthy deliberations over strategy and troop numbers. But, as Stephens suggests, the reality is a good deal more complex. The fact is that, after a period of genuine progress following the Taliban’s removal in late 2001, the situation in Afghanistan only began to deteriorate markedly between 2005 and 2006. Suicide attacks quintupled that year. Remotely detonated bombs more than doubled. Insurgent attacks nearly tripled. And the trends have steadily worsened every year since.

Yeah, except for that, it was all going so well!

The question is why?

An ideological inability to embrace the necessity of state-building? A defense secretary who refused to allow U.S. forces to perform peacekeeping tasks? Consistent and thorough underresourcing? A president who never treated Pakistan as a theater of the Afghanistan war? Or who reduced policy in both countries to two chiefs of state? A totally unnecessary additional war that you geniuses decided to launch?

I certainly don’t have an exhaustive answer…

May I offer one?

To summarize Hannah's three points, the US advisor to Karzai left in 2005 to go to Iraq on Bush's orders; NATO took over operations, largely because the Bush administration didn't want to put more US troops in Afghanistan and it wanted European troops there; and the Bush administration didn't hold Pakistan to any accountability to hold down its side of the border. It's interesting how Hannah forgets to mention that these were all key Bush decisions.

The most ironic part of his post is the ending, where Hannah says (paraphrasing his words), "yeah, we screwed it up pretty good and now it's going to cost a lot more than we anticipated, but hey, at least we'll stop those Taliban tribes from taking over Pakistan and stealing its nukes." What an incredibly lame and useless man this is.

What have I said, over and over? Bill Kristol is NEVER right. And even Foreign Policy Magazine agrees with me, as they list the worst predictions of 2008 and who else but our favorite war-mongering chickenhawk neocon, William "The Bloody" Kristol.

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Oh Hallelujah! What a Christmakwanzukkah present that would be. Also in the Hall of Shame:

2. Jim Cramer of Mad Money, for advocating holding onto BearStearns stock six days before it lost 90% of its value and was eventually sold to JP MorganChase.

3. Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, for seriously underestimating the potential risks to oil tankers along shipping lanes.

4. Donald Luskin, for not only denying the existance of a recession, but questioning the sanity of anyone who thought we might be in a recession.

5. The Economist Magazine, for their rose-colored view of Kenya's presidential election.

6. Business Week for their prediction that Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg would duke it out for the Democratic nod, only to have surprise underdog John McCain win the presidential election.

7. Scientist Walter Wagner for his opposition to the Large Hadron Collider by suggesting everything from mini-black holes to all out planetary destruction would result.

8. Goldman Sachs analyst Arjun Muti for predicting $200/barrel oil by year's end.

9. Charles Krauthammer, for his completely wrong forecasting of the battle between South Ossetia and Georgia...(not predicting foreign warfare correctly is a specialty of Krauthammer, evidentally).

10. Henry Paulson, for assuring that the banking industry was stabilized by his magic spewing of $700 billion to various industries with little to no oversight.

Please, can we call out an end to taking seriously people like Kristol, Cramer and Krauthammer now?