As you sit stupefied before Cheney preening his soiled and broken feathers on every talk show he can find, relieve the monotony with this thought from Steve Benen:

What Obama really ought to do, according to Dick Cheney, is seek out the former vice president’s advice and follow it. After all, Cheney believes he’s proven himself on the issue.

I seem to recall the Bush/Cheney era a little differently. Cheney thinks it was a sterling success when it came to national security and counter-terrorism. Perhaps there’s something to this. After all, except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks against Americans, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the Bush/Cheney record on counter-terrorism was awesome.

After the previous administration established a record like that, President Obama didn’t ask Cheney for tips? The nerve.

I am curious about something, though. Terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, early on in President Clinton’s first year in office. Six people were killed, hundreds more were injured. The Clinton administration caught those responsible, subjected them to the U.S. criminal justice system, and foreign terrorists did not strike again on U.S. soil during Clinton’s terms in office.

So, at any point in 2001, did the Bush White House turn to Bill Clinton and Al Gore and ask, “How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?”

Isn’t that little Rove boy just the cutest thing?

Robert Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, said the material released Tuesday demonstrated that there was “absolutely no evidence” the White House had used inappropriate political motivations to punish federal prosecutors. Mr. Luskin said Mr. Rove and other White House aides were legitimately concerned about voter fraud and were debating “completely reasonable and legitimate policy questions.”

Unknown News put me onto an intriguing story from The Hill that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Two bits that caught my eye…

This:

Moreover, a public-relations maxim of the Bush White House and its press officers was to shorten the lifespan of any bad press to make sure that it got out as widely as possible to as many major news organizations on the same day. For example, in February of 2006, after learning that The New York Times was going to run a story about an administration program to covertly obtain bank records to track down potential terrorists, the White House briefed reporters from the competing Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times so that they would all be able to publish the story that same night.

The case study of what occurred in that instance became the playbook for how public-relations specialists for the administration handled minimizing the impact of bad news and putting their own spin on it: Get everything out everywhere at once, get it out to authoritative news sources, and get your version out first.

And this:

After [Arizona U.S. Attorney] Charlton’s firing, there was speculation in the media that it may have been due to his pursuit of Renzi. (Charlton himself never publicly suggested that that was the case.) Yet the report into the firings of the U.S. attorneys concluded there was “no evidence” of that.

Charlton was targeted, the report said, because he clashed with Gonzales over a death penalty case. Charlton wanted the Justice Department to foot the bill for recovering a murder victim from a landfill to make absolutely sure the forensic evidence supported the conviction. Gonzales refused. “I didn’t want to be left to wonder a year later, or 10 years later, or 20 years later whether a life might have been taken unjustly just to appease some political paradigm,” Charlton said.

The first excerpt came as a surprise to me, although I spent a good many years as a press officer for a U.S. Embassy, the Carter campaign, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Silly me, I never thought of (or heard of) diluting the news value of a reporter’s story by leaking it immediately to the competition.

As to the second, no great news there, I guess. Just another example, no more ripe than a hundred others, of the schweinerei that Bush and Rove made of the United States Justice Department. Who would have expected the ineffable Alberto Gonzales to spend the taxpayers’ money just to find out if a condemned man was really guilty?

Don da Man sends this along, claiming that it would make me chuckle. He was right, and so I post it in its entirety. But click on the link, too. The blogger, Paul Tatara, is a first-rate writer. He has, that is, the ability to make interesting a subject in which the reader has no interest. In this case, bad popular music.

So go see. And meanwhile:

1. I am fascinated by words, but not so much by sentences.

2. I feel the basis of any stable relationship is my ability to strike first.

3. I don’t mind if someone I distrust is made to feel like he or she is drowning.

4. When my daughters are drunk I often feel jealous.

5. Just because I am the only person in the room and the mirror suddenly breaks, that doesn’t mean I broke the mirror.

6. If I had my life to live over again I would not eat pretzels.

7. Sometimes when I talk to Jesus, he tells me to do stupid stuff. But I still do it.

8. I believe empirical evidence is too often misleading.

9. When confronted by a brick wall, I will slam into it again and again until my head looks like a mass of bloody pulp. This, I think, is my key strength as a person.

10. I feel that people who die because of me are heroes. Unless they’re not American, then they’re just dead.

11. I have always believed that if you live near a levee, don’t have any money, and are too old to swim, you get what you deserve.

12. I enjoy throwing out the first pitch at baseball games because there’s no umpire to get all judgmental.

13. When Dick Cheney says something nice about me I blush like a schoolgirl. But he usually just makes that animal noise.

14. I’m always amazed what Americans will say on the telephone when they don’t know you’re listening.

15. I like to make up funny nicknames for people so I’ll look more like a regular guy and less like one of them arrogant douche bags.

16. Laura is both the love of my life and my best friend, now that everybody else has pretty much backed off.

17. On those occasions when I pull my head out of my ass it takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the light.

18. The next time I see the Pope I plan to trade infallibility stories with him.

19. Over time, I have come to dislike celebratory banners.

20. I have long felt that the best co-workers are those who agree with every fucking thing you say.

21. My favorite food is Texas-style barbecue ribs cooked by an old Negro.

22. It seems pretty obvious to me that if man really evolved from monkeys, God would have made Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve. Or something like that. I don’t remember the actual jingle.

23. I’m sorry I never got to thank Ken Lay for dying.

24. Sometimes I wish I knew if I was ever in the military.

25. I will badly miss my “veto erections.”

Another Bush League bait-and-switch operation, brought to you courtesy of the xenophobic /racist wing (is there any other?) of the GOP?

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

We owe George W. Bush a huge debt for making possible the election of our first African-American president — and, of somewhat lesser importance — for giving Jimmy Carter’s once-derided presidency a welcome and well-deserved boost.

The first excerpt comes from The Rude Pundit, embedded yesterday deep within the huge crowd shown in my last post. Read the rest of his description, too. Those familiar with his œuvre will see a new side of the man revealed.

The second passage is from The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows, like myself a former Carter speechwriter.

R.P. — Everyone released purgative, cathartic boos at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The television coverage may have muted it, but it was there. A young woman half-heartedly said, “Oh, c’mon, ya’ll, that’s mean,” but she cracked up when the Rude Pundit said, “Sometimes a man deserves to be booed by a couple of million people.” The most touchingly surprising crowd reaction was the cheer that went up for Jimmy Carter.

J.F. — In keeping with earlier testimony to the basic good will of the crowd — as I witnessed it as one of the 2 million or so (my crowd here) — the “boos” when George Bush or Dick Cheney appeared on the screen seemed almost perfunctory. People felt they had to do it, but their hearts weren’t in it. To me, the most spontaneous-sounding and surprising cheers were for (a) Colin Powell, and (b) Jimmy Carter, and the most spontaneous surplus-hostility boos were for ... Joe Lieberman. Just reporting on my part of the crowd.

Despite the fact that we will be living with the consequences of the most disastrous administration ever to disgrace the walls of the White House and Washington, thanks to a talented Youtuber, I offer up a final video farewell to the most corrupt and evil regime that led this nation closer to fascism than any before it in the long history of this country.

Good riddance, George and Comrades. If we see you again, we want it to be under oath or at the bar of justice facing those you have wronged.

May our leaders have to good sense and fortitude; and our citizens have the courage, stamina and outrage, to insist that none of the of fascist tendencies and extreme corruption that stained our nation in the last eight years (that have been thoroughly documented elsewhere and will be revealed in much more detail in the years to come) can ever every happen here again. Otherwise, say goodbye to your country, as it won’t survive another century, or will morph into the most extreme totalitarian state in world history.