Wow:

[President Bush], who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting [of G8 leaders] with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Matt Singer reminds me of a good laugh from the 2004 archives of The Onion, which still rings true:

WASHINGTON, DC—According to a study released Monday by the Hammond Political Research Group, many of the nation's liberals are suffering from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.

"With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it's simply too daunting for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger," said Rachel Neas, the study's director. "By our estimation, roughly 70 percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and exorbitant military expenditures."

San Francisco's Arthur Flauman is one liberal who has chosen to take a hiatus from his seething rage over Bush Administration policies.

"Every day, my friends send me e-mails exposing Bush's corrupt environmental policies," said Flauman, a member of both the Green Party and the Sierra Club. "I used to spend close to an hour following all the links, and I'd be shocked and outraged by the irreversible damage being done to our land. At some point, though, I got annoyed with the demanding tone of the e-mails. The Clear Skies Initiative is bogus, but I'm not going to forward a six-page e-mail to all my friends—especially one written by a man who signs his name 'Leaf.' Now, if a message's subject line contains the word 'Bush,' it goes straight into the trash."

Stoller makes a very cogent point about America's historic role -- and Bush's declining role -- in world affairs:

Much of what America did in international affairs prior to the Bush Presidency was to act as sort of buoy, or a neutral third party in negotiations, a bulwark that other nations could broadly trust. America didn't always keep its word, and it wasn't always a perfectly done role, but there really was no alternative. And I think what the Iraq war has shown is that the alternative really is total chaos, and that means that America can reclaim a leading role in global affairs if we begin to rebuild our credibility. Because of Iran's recent bad behavior, nations around the world want to see us reclaim that role, though with more checks on our range of action.

Bush, aside from the ability to start new wars, is largely irrelevant to that goal. Most Presidents find their influence waning in the final two years, but with Bush, it seems like that decline will be larger than usual. Bush lies almost constantly, except when he doesn't know what he's talking about and says something nonsensical. Domestically and internationally, that means it's useful to try to ignore him as much as possible and do business with the people that will be in charge when he's gone. Pelosi, in going to Syria, and in telling Bush to calm down, is looking much more like a President than Bush is. Bush is even having his role as commander-in-chief challenged, by both his own ineptitude and the public's willingness to strip him of power. By default, that power is slowly bleeding over to Pelosi, Reid, and whichever member of Congress is leading that day and filling the massive void Bush has left. This is not an ideal scenario, but it's the one that Bush set himself up for when he refused to acknowledge the results of the 2006 elections and what that meant for his method of governance.

He may hold the constitutional office, but he is less and less the President every day.

I was in DC last week, and let me reiterate, for the record -- one more time! -- how much I loathe that town.

To be fair, its restaurants are fine and its nightlife entertaining, in a bemused art-student-at-a-frat-party sort of way; and certainly the cherry blossoms blooming in January added a charming lift to people's gait as they strolled down the street.

But our nation's capital is, to put it mildy, insular, if not downright self-obsessed. We live in a time when the world is on fire, and the only heat felt by the DC elite is the burning envy that someone else gets to hold the fiddle for a while.

But if we didn't have the madness of the chattering classes, would we have to invent it? Perhaps. If we could. I think it would take a good deal of psychotropics and days upon days of staring at Rorschach inkblots to even begin to make the connections that many of our best and brightest pundits make in explaining the world to us.

Digby has been tracking their latest erudite observations, and their brilliant ability to make connections between dots that most of us don't even see:

One of the sillier theories I'd been bouncing around was that the punditocrisy and the reporters had spent so much time riffing and boozing during that interminable period of mourning for Ford that they somehow conflated their tributes to his moderation and bipartisanship with some sort of mandate from the American people in this last election.

Up to that point, the media had seen the Democrats' post-election promises to "work with the other side" --- as a rhetorical rebuke to the way the Republicans had governed. They were right. While I'm sure the Democrats had no intentions of running the congress like a plantation as the Republicans had, nobody thought it meant that they would follow the president's agenda or compromise on issues on which they had run, like the war or preserving social security. The election, after all, was a referendum on a party that had had six years of total power and who's approval ratings were hovering in the low teens. The press had had to extract assurances that the Democrats wouldn't impeach the president, for crying out loud. Bipartisan kumbaaya was clearly not on the agenda.

Suddenly, Jerry Ford died and it seemed to me that days and days of eulogizing Ford's legacy just prior to the new congress taking over (and during the holiday drinking season) had caused the media to literally confuse the Ford ascension in 1974 with the election last November.

As Woody Guthrie said, any fool can make something complicated; it takes a genius to make it simple. Expect to see a great deal of foolishness in the coming days as the talking heads explain to you how George Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq is precisely what the American people voted for when they voted Democratic last November. We were, after all, already pining for the Ford Era. We just didn't know it yet.

The Washington Post has a good article today on the degree to which George Bush's petulant escalation of the war ("Screw Jim Baker!") goes against near uniformity among the military leadership:

When President Bush goes before the American people tonight to outline his new strategy for Iraq, he will be doing something he has avoided since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003: ordering his top military brass to take action they initially resisted and advised against.

Bush talks frequently of his disdain for micromanaging the war effort and for second-guessing his commanders....

But over the past two months, as the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated and U.S. public support for the war has dropped, Bush has pushed back against his top military advisers and the commanders in Iraq: He has fashioned a plan to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground. As Bush plans it, the military will soon be "surging" in Iraq two months after an election that many Democrats interpreted as a mandate to begin withdrawing troops.

Pentagon insiders say members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have long opposed the increase in troops and are only grudgingly going along with the plan because they have been promised that the military escalation will be matched by renewed political and economic efforts in Iraq.

Apparently the Joint Chiefs are the last constituency in America to believe the President's word on anything. But then, they're under duress, aren't they?

What Digby sez:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

"I didn't ask you that, I asked how he's doing," Bush retorted, according to the source.

I've omitted Webb's response, which you are more than welcome to read about at the link, because I want to focus entirely on the unspeakable callousness Bush displayed here.

Folks, political enemy or friend, that is no way - ever- for anyone to talk to the father of a kid who's in a combat zone.

And that book will be My Pet Goat:

Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush fund-raisers hope to get approximately $250 million from what they call “megadonations” of $10 million to $20 million each. Among the candidates for "megadonations".... Bush loyalists have already identified wealthy heiresses, Arab nations and captains of industry as potential “mega” donors and are pressing for a formal site announcement - now expected early in the new year.

Bush allies feel they need enormous funds to shape how history views Bush’s legacy. A Bush insider said, “The more [money] you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert.” Much of the money will be used to build a “legacy-polishing” institute.

Shameless.

More bad news for Republicans in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, not least of which is President Bush's growing credibility gap:

Mr. Bush’s job approval has slipped to 34 percent, one of the lowest levels of his presidency, posing a complication for the White House as it seeks to send him out on the road to rally the Republican base voters. Mr. Bush’s job approval rating has even slipped with his base: 75 percent of conservative Republicans approve of the way he has handled his job, compared with 96 percent in November 2004.

Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of pre-9/11 intelligence reports that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware....

So far, it appears that — at least nationally — Republicans have had little success in pressing what have been their two biggest lines of attacks against Democratic challengers this fall: taxes and terrorism. The poll found that 41 percent of respondents thought Republicans were stronger on handling terrorism, compared with 40 percent who named Democrats, a statistically insignificant difference. Before Labor Day, Republicans had an edge of 42 percent to 34 percent on handling terrorism.

And in a month in which Republicans have sought to discredit Democratic challengers as advocates of big spending and high taxes, 52 percent of respondents said Democrats would make the right decisions on how to spend taxpayers’ money; 29 percent said Republicans would.