The Bush Presidency: Is Nothing Real?

This pretty much sums up the last 8 years of Bush II.

By Leonard Pitts with the Miami Herald
Richard Nixon was a crook. He was also a liar and an anti-Semite who sought to subvert the Constitution.

I wish he were president again.

I'd also take Jimmy Carter, widely perceived as being about as effectual as Elmer Fudd, or Bill Clinton, fastest zipper in the West.

Flawed men, yes, but say this much for them: When it came to a choice between people and party, between the public and the politics, there was at least a bare chance they would put the people, the public, first.

No such chance exists with the current occupant of the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. Given a choice between what's best for the country and what suits his political and ideological needs, George W. Bush will invariably, unfailingly, pick the latter.

More proof, not that any is needed, arrived last week.

The testimony before a House committee of Dr. Richard Carmona - until 2006 the nation's surgeon general - was not the biggest W-related news of the week. That distinction would likely go to the new report that the Iraqi government has met half its benchmarks of progress. Or to the classified intelligence analysis, which reportedly says that, four years after the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaida is the strongest it's been since September 2001.

Yet Carmona's testimony is still worth noting for the insight it offers into the administration's mindset.

Not that he said anything we've never heard before. Carmona told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the administration censored him whenever his science conflicted with their ideology.

He said he was prohibited from speaking about condom use because the administration believes in abstinence-only sex education. He was told not to speak about stem cell research. He was refused permission to make a speech at the Special Olympics because that was seen as helping a political opponent, but he was asked to speak at events benefiting the GOP.

Read the entire article here.