America's worst President... Ever

Bush and friends are desperately looking for a way to deflect attention from their failures. Republicans have overseen a disastrous foreign policy unparalleled in American history.

COMMENTARY
Costs all around to prolonging the war
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

It will be costly and painful to prolong the war in Iraq for another 21 months so that those who started it can hand off the harder decision of how to end it to the next occupant of the White House.

President Bush isn't extending and expanding the war in a search for victory. His dream of victory in Iraq cannot be achieved. Not by sending 30,000 more American troops. Not by making parts of Baghdad temporarily safer by billeting American troops in violent neighborhoods and pushing the slaughter into the northern and southern suburbs - or into the Green Zone where U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work.

Not by letting American soldiers bear the brunt of combat, targeted not only by our enemies, the Sunni Muslim insurgents but also by our supposed allies, the Shiite majority and the murderous militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In March, more American troops died in Iraq than Iraqi soldiers.

This is a search for a fig leaf to cover the emperor’s nakedness - a way for Bush to go home to Texas with a ringing but hollow declaration that "Iraq wasn't lost on my watch." ...(more)

And beyond Bush's meaningless "stay the course" rhetoric, his Administration is flailing about, trying to shift the blame for its many foreign policy failures.

Pelosi's 'mixed message' to Syria is more direct than the president's

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney has accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of "bad behavior" for visiting Damascus and talking to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Look who's talking -- the man who told the world he knew where the weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. Have you heard any apologies or mea culpas from Cheney even after he was proved wrong? Of course not.

And did you hear anything from Cheney repudiating the visits to Syria by Republican U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia and Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania? Another recent Republican visitor was Rep. Darrel Issa of California. Silence from the veep. That's because the Bush administration needs every vote it can muster on Capitol Hill to support its disastrous foreign policy. ...(more)