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Monica Crowley this morning, appearing on Fox News' Happening Now, followed in Newt's footsteps in her eagerness to deny that shoe bomber Richard Reid's case -- also tried in civilian courts by the Bush administration -- bore any similarity to that of "Underwear Bomber" Umar Abdulmutallab, a fact that undermines their brazen attempts to attack President Obama for his handling of the "war on terror".

That is, she lied:

Crowley: There are some unanswered questions here, Julian. Is Abdulmuttalab answering questions or cooperating because he got a plea bargain?

Also, Richard Reid was matriculated into the civilian justice system because military tribunals did not exist in late 2001, and the only reason we got a conviction in the Moussaoui case is because he plead guilty.

In fact, as Julian Epstein points out, military tribunals have been around in the United States a long time -- in fact, they've existed since the Revolutionary War. Moreover, the Supreme Court long ago set the precedent, in Ex parte Milligan (1866), that military tribunals used to try civilians in any jurisdiction where the civil courts were functioning were unconstitutional.

Crowley cannot even claim that she actually meant that Guantanamo Bay, where terrorism suspects bound for military tribunals have been held since 9/11, was not operating. In fact, terrorism detainees began arriving there on October 7, 2001, more than two months before Reid's arrest on December 22.

But then, facts have never been deterrent for right-wingers intent on bashing President Obama.

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(U.S. Troops in Haiti in 2004 - ten years after we put the guy we're getting rid of in power . . confused?)

After invading Haiti in 1994 to unseat Military dictator Raoul Cedras, and reinstate Jean Bertrand Aristide as President of the country, ten years later we're getting rid of Aristide in favor of someone else.

Now you know why the Haitians are a bit nervous around U.S. Marines? Wouldn't you?

The 2004 coup was murky at best. Generally acknowledged to have been aided and abetted by the U.S. government, the Bush Administration put U.S. troops ashore to "establish order and set up a democratic government" - or words to that effect.

One of the key players in the overthrow was a right wing think tank known as Haiti Democracy Project, their spokesman Lawrence Pezullo was interviewed by the BBC on February 26:

Lawrence Pezullo (Haiti Democracy Project): “I think the Haitian people have had enough experience with something short of democracy, and have had a lot of experience looking at the means to put governments together that might offer participation by the citizens. And I think the leadership level, certainly that you see today is mature enough to at least put the form together whether or not they have the means to educate the people and contain it remains to be seen.”

The 2004 coup and our involvement was only the latest in a long line of "excursions" into the business of our Caribbean neighbors going back to the beginning of the last century. It further establishes a certain skittishness where the subject of American aid is concerned, even in humanitarian terms. The concept of "once bitten, twice shy" seems more than appropriate here.

Above is a capsule rundown of events on March 2, 2004 as reported by the BBC.

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And for our French friends, or readers who are fluent, I am adding a bonus broadcast from Radio France International concerning the situation in Haiti and the ouster of Aristide. A special program from RFI Soir on February 26, 2004 with interviews and actualities of the situation on the ground.

Two points of view. One big mess.

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of President Obama signing an executive order to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. We were all cheered and encouraged by this bold move on the president’s second full day in office — it signaled he was ready to make a clean break from the Bush administration's unlawful and shameful detention policies.

But when the Obama administration finally does close Guantánamo, it's vital that the administration also puts an end to the policy of detaining prisoners without charge or trial. Indefinite detention is one of the practices that's made Gitmo a disgrace in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Late last year, we debuted a video that included interviews with five former Guantánamo detainees.

Last week we released four break-out videos featuring the same five men telling their stories in more depth: They talk about their lives before ending up in U.S. custody, their experiences at Guantánamo and other U.S.-run detention facilities, and how they've pieced their lives back together after Gitmo. All of the men featured in our video series, like hundreds of others who were held for years at Guantánamo, were eventually released without any charge.

British citizen Moazzam Begg was in Afghanistan, working to open a school for girls, when he was captured. He says in the video: "My experience of America prior to this was everything I had seen in the films: the concept of the good guys, the concept of people trying to do the right thing. And that was shattered."

Bisher al-Rawi was captured in Gambia, where he hoped to open a peanut factory with his brother.

Omar Deghayes was detained at Guantánamo for six years. He was blinded in his right eye after a Gitmo prison guard jabbed him in the face with his fingers.

Childhood friends Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed are two of the "Tipton Three," the subjects of the documentary Road to Guantánamo. They traveled to Afghanistan after attending a friend’s wedding in Pakistan, and were captured there. They both spent 2 ½ years detained by the U.S.

More than 700 men have been detained at Guantánamo since it opened eight years ago; 198 remain. Most of them could tell similar stories about their years-long detention.

To close Gitmo properly, the remaining detainees must either be released, or charged and tried in federal courts, which are better-equipped to handle these cases than the unconstitutional military commissions. Consider the military commissions' track record: A grand total of three cases have been completed since Guantánamo opened as a detention facility in January 2002. Federal courts, on the other hand, have successfully tried more than 200 terrorism cases, including those of the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussoui for conspiring in the 9/11 attacks. The so-called underwear bomber, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, was arraigned in federal court on terrorism charges 14 days after he tried to blow up an airplane. In contrast, most detainees at Guantánamo have languished there for years, without charges brought against them and no end to their detention in sight.

Of those detainees who remain at Guantánamo, Bisher al-Rawi says: "If the U.S. thinks somebody is a criminal, that’s fine. Take him to court and let him have his day in court…either you release people or give them justice, true justice, with no deception, no lies."

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(Katrina aftermath - grief rides a puffy white cloud)

As the news filters in, and each new report brings the tragedy of Haiti into sharper perspective, I'm reminded of disasters we've faced in the past, and some in the not too distant past. As someone who lives in Southern California and who has been through the 1971 and 1994 earthquakes (and countless "aftershocks" in between) I know how horrifying an earthquake can be. There is nothing like it - oh, maybe a terrorist bombing comes close. Most all other disasters you can see coming and there is some window, however short, to escape or prepare. An earthquake is sudden and violent and disorienting and its destruction is instant and complete. The initial terror and shock become compounded as aftershocks rumble on for hours, days and weeks afterward - you continue to never know when the next one will hit. But somehow you can never convey the true sense of terror of an earthquake until you've been in one and experienced it. You will never forget it.

Needless to say, since Haiti was not considered part of "Earthquake Country", the shock and terror are double fold. And the amount of death and destruction surely reflects a place that hasn't experienced one in a long, long time. I heard a report last night that the last time an earthquake hit that region was in the 1700s. At this point its a miracle anything is left standing.

But I bring up Hurricane Katrina as a reminder of how devastating a disaster can be, no matter what the circumstances. The past few hours have seen a reaction from the comfortable and smug as to why President Obama reacted as quickly to the disaster as he did. Katrina is a reminder of a President who acted in the opposite - and the reaction is still being felt, almost five years later.

President Bush: "Brownie, you're doin' a heckuva job!"

So, as a refresher course in disasters past and how we, of all people, aren't immune to them, here is a radio documentary produced by CBS Radio in September of 2005 "Katrina: A National Disaster".

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Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, they played the video ad cooked up by Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" outfit attacking President Obama for his supposedly slipshod handling of the Underwear Bomber and his slow response while on vacation.

O'Reilly thought the ad was just cracker jack, calling it "devastating." Yeah, devastatingly hypocritical.

Jane Skinner was there to provide some kind of pushback, I guess, and she managed to at least point out that maybe turning the national response to terrorism into a partisan political is not really in the public's best interest. Of course, some of us pointed that out eight years ago, too, but no one listened then, either.

But utterly unmentioned was the fact that, when faced with identical circumstances in 2001, the Bush administration waited six days before responding publicly. Indeed, ignoring this fact is part of the new double standard when talking terrorism: Whatever Bush-Cheney did was right, whatever Obama does is wrong.

This is part of the steady drumbeat of fearmongering we've been getting from the Cheney crowd since the election, and the media -- outside of Rachel Maddow and the left blogosphere -- is letting them get away with it.

More importantly, they are obliterating from public view the fact that Bush’s post-9/11 anti-terrorism policies in toto made us less safe, because they intensified the conditions that lead to terrorist recruitment. This was enunciated clearly by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, which "found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."

Some prime recent examples include the recent attack on the CIA base in Afghanistan, in which the perpetrator's wife claimed he had been radicalized by the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Finally, there’s Cheney’s unmentioned (on Fox, at least) role in the release of the two men who founded Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

It’s almost as if Bush-Cheney intentionally sabotaged the incoming administration by ensuring future terrorist attacks. Indeed, that question has been raised.

Even more disgusting is that these same connivers are trying to lay the blame for the evil fruits of their malfeasance on the back of the man elected to clean up their mess.

It's been a popular refrain by conservatives that the Detroit Underwear Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, ought to be turned over to the military so that he can be "squeezed" for information. Yes, that's because it's worked so well in the past... but more to the point, how's the former administration's track record on civil and military trials of terrorist suspects? From the UK's Guardian:

The Bush administration -- in which Liz Cheney's papa held a fairly high position, you might recall -- prosecuted, after 9-11, 828 people on terrorism charges in civilian courts. At the time of publication of this excellent report from the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law last year, trials were still pending against 235 of those folks. That leaves 593 resolved indictments, of which 523 were convicted of some crime, for a conviction rate of 88%.

With regard to military tribunals, the Bush administration inaugurated 20 such cases. So far just three convictions have been won. The highest-profile is the conviction of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. The Hamdan legal saga, rehearsed here, doesn't exactly suggest that military tribunals provide swifter and surer and tougher justice. In the end, he was convicted all right, but sentenced -- not by a bunch of New York City Democrats, but by a military jury! -- to five and half years.

Then, the tribunal judge, a US Navy captain, gave Hamdan credit for time served, which was five years. So he served six months after conviction. Today he's back in -- guess where? -- Yemen.

Now far be it for us to accuse the Republicans, Faux News, and many conservatives of deliberate hypocrisy. But it's hard to look at the numbers and then suggest that the right-wing hysteria is anything but deliberate political gamesmanship without any regard to due process or actually addressing the threat of terrorism.

Those were definitely words that we in the wilderness wanted to hear, after the secrecy and closed doors of the Bush administration. To be fair, I'm not sure how much control even the President has over how much transparency Congress is willing to allow, but that doesn't mean we're not going to remind him of his campaign promises:

My colleagues Igor Volsky and Matt Yglesias have eloquently argued on ThinkProgress that C-Span’s cameras should not be allowed to film the final negotiations between the House and Senate as they hammer out health care legislation that President Obama will soon sign into law. While I respect their arguments, I take a very different view. I have long believed that openness and transparency are essential bedrock measures for ensuring public accountability of our government. Letting C-Span cameras into health care conference meetings will keep negotiators honest, give the public an opportunity for input, and allow the process to be more collaborative.[..]

Critics have argued that the presence of cameras is likely to produce political posturing and grandstanding by politicians. And indeed, with the cameras rolling, Republicans have said health care reform is a bigger threat than terrorism, claimed that seniors would be told to “drop dead,” and even called the President a liar. But I’m glad cameras were there to capture those demeaning comments. They have helped all Americans gain a better understanding of the unwillingness of some on the right to engage in a rational debate.

The presence of cameras has also produced some beneficial outcomes. For instance, C-Span cameras exposed House GOP efforts to silence members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus when they tried to speak on the floor. The cameras also shamed Senate Republicans when they tried to filibuster the debate by forcing the reading of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer amendment.

Democrats have nothing to fear from an open debate. They are working to expand affordable coverage to 31 million uninsured Americans, lowering premiums, ending the insurance industry’s denial of pre-existing conditions, and ensuring women will no longer be charged much more for the same coverage as men. When the House and Senate meet in the coming weeks to discuss this historic legislation, I would humbly urge them to let the cameras roll. We can handle the truth.

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O'Reilly and Bob Barr go at it over Obama's anti-terror policies. Of course we get more chest thumping and support for torture out of tough guy O'Reilly.

O'REILLY: Continuing with our lead story. President Obama defending his terror policies. Joining us from Washington, former Congressman Bob Barr who left the Republican party to be a libertarian.

And Mr. Barr, you say the president deserves some respect in the national security area. So do you disagree with Karl Rove and I?

REP. BOB BARR: On some issues, very strong on some, but not on everything. My main criticism of those who are criticizing the president, such as the former vice president, Mr. Cheney, is that I think it's simply politics and partisanship and not substantive criticism, because when you have the vice president from the prior administration criticizing the current administration, really what they're criticizing is themselves because the problems that we see, and I think the president has done a good job of laying out the problems that we have, I disagree with him on some of the solutions. But the problems long predate January 20th of 2009 when Mr. Obama came in.

For example, the problem with the State Department issuing visas when perhaps they shouldn't or not telling people who they've issued visas to was the result of then Secretary Colin Powell early in the Bush administration coming up to the Congress, myself on the Judiciary Committee, for example, and saying don't give the authority to approve visas to Department of Homeland Security. We want to keep it in the State Department.

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Obviously, this is going to do wonders for our image in Iraq:

WASHINGTON — In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of five former Blackwater security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 wounded.

The judge cited misuse of statements made by the guards in his decision, which brought to a sudden halt one of the highest-profile prosecutions to arise from the Iraq war. The shooting at Nisour Square frayed relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration and put a spotlight on the United States’ growing reliance on private security contractors in war zones.

Investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault near the crowded traffic circle on Sept. 16, 2007. The guards contended that they had been ambushed by insurgents and fired in self-defense.

A trial on manslaughter and firearm offenses was planned for February, and the preliminary proceedings had been closely watched in the United States and Iraq.

But in a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”

In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.

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It seems that the Fox talkers who have been attacking President Obama this week for allegedly being "soft on terror" -- particularly Wayne Simmons, who sneeringly referred to Obama as 'the boy king' earlier this week -- are especially upset that two of the key leaders of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the organization claiming credit for the attempt attack on Flight 253, are men who were released from Guantanamo Bay and sent back to Yemen.

Simmons was on Fox's Your World yesterday with David Asman, and they both were appalled that these men had been freed.

Asman: You stay in touch with all your exes in the military and intelligence community. What's the morale like there, where people see prime targets being released back where they can do damage?

Simmons: It's pathetic. It's low. It's horrible. It's frustrating. It's every adjective you can think of to describe the work that these outstanding men and women in the intelligence community and in the military put into tracking these guys down and killing them or capturing them. And then end up now like maybe the SEALs do. So, a lot of men and women are questioning, just where is the leadership? Or why is there a lack of leadership? They are putting their lives on the line, grabbing these guys, only to have them turned loose again. It's pathetic.

But there was one little fact missing from the entire discussion: These two men were released by the Bush administration and returned to Yemen to participate in "art therapy."

In fact, it was none other than Dick Cheney himself -- who only the day before was similarly attacking Obama -- who secretly released the men. As Eric Massa pointed out:

"I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret. I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president," Massa said in an interview. "He is personally responsible for that."

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Karl Rove went on Fox News twice yesterday -- first on Your World and later on Hannity, where he essentially repeated his earlier performance -- to accuse the Obama White House of being soft on terrorism because it did not declare Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of that Northwest flight into Detroit, an enemy combatant:

Rove: This shows the big difference in this administration's approach to it. This guy was treated not as an enemy combatant, and turned over to the FBI and the CIA for interrogation, he was charged criminally, which means he immediately lawyered up and the amount of information we're going to get from him is going to be this much, compared to what we could get if he was just simply sweat by the FBI and the CIA -- not even using enhanced interrogation techniques, just using what police would be able to use if you weren't lawyered up. This is a very troubling way in which the administration has handled this.

On Hannity, he claimed that by filing criminal charges, "we treat him as a guy who tried to knock over a Seven-Eleven or got caught shoplifting."

Memo to Karl: Convenience-store robbers and shoplifters do not get charged with terrorism in federal court. Just sayin'.

Moreover, the problem with Rove's claim that "this shows the difference" between the Bush and Obama administrations is flatly false (aka a lie).

Faced with nearly identical circumstances with would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid -- who was attempting to use the exact same kind of explosive on an American flight -- the Bush administration in 2001 did exactly the same thing: it filed criminal charges and eventually tried Reid in federal court.

What's worth noting is that Reid, too, was potentially an intelligence bonanza, since he had numerous operational ties with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.

Then there was Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was eventually convicted of plotting with Al Qaeda to participate in the 9/11 attacks. He, too, was treated as a federal criminal by the Bush administration.

Finally, it should be noted that declaring suspects "enemy combatants" -- especially when they are captured away from the field of battle -- is actually a legal minefield fraught with far greater uncertainty than the use of federal criminal statutes. The classic example of this was the case of Jose Padilla, who was declared an "enemy combatant" by the Bush administration and whose case wound up taking years to be settled by the Supreme Court -- which eventually insisted that he be tried in federal court. Padilla's case was somewhat different, since he is a U.S. citizen, but one can rest assured that the issue of habeas corpus central to his case would be resurrected should Obama have followed Rove's advice.

But then, anyone who follows Karl Rove's advice deserves everything that inevitably will happen to them.

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Seems Mary Matalin was doing a bit of history revision on this week's State of the Union on CNN. Think Progress has more--Mary Matalin claims President Bush ‘inherited’ the September 11th terror attacks:

On CNN today, GOP strategist and former Dick Cheney adviser Mary Matalin argued that President Obama is speaking too much about the severe debt, deficits, and economic recession he inherited from the previous administration. Defending her former boss, Matalin charged that President Bush had in fact “inherited a recession” and the September 11th attacks from President Clinton.

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As Lee noted, it looks like Matalin is joining the ranks of Ms. We Did Not Have a Terrorist Attack on our Country During President Bush's Term Perino with trying to whitewash the record of the Bush administration.

KING: The politics of the economy. Do the Republicans have that right? Deficits and maybe giving Congress too much control in writing this legislation? Is that a problem for this president? How has he been as a leader in his first year?

MATALIN: It's not just the deficits. It's the dud. It's incomprehensible. And it's the Bush fashion in perpetuity. Never gives a speech where he doesn't explicitly or implicitly look backwards.

I was there. We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history. And President Bush dealt with it. And within a year of his presidency at this comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent. And we were creating jobs.

So there are two different ways to deal with this. He's choosing the way that Democrats always deal with it. But doing it at such a magnitude. The spending is unprecedented. The debt is unprecedented. And whatever the recession was that he inherited that was global did not -- the response is such an overkill that we will be settled with this forever.

If any of your loved ones are serving abroad, you might be interested to know the Obama administration, by virtue of SCOTUS's refusal of the case, just got the Supreme Court's blessing to torture. Obviously, other countries will follow our lead:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because at that time it was unclear whether abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" – did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any constitutional rights.

The circuit court ruled that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."

That opinion was written by Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson, who was appointed to the federal circuit court by Ronald Reagan in 1986 and to the Appeals Court in 1990 by George H.W. Bush.

The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to Britain in 2004 with no charges ever having been filed against them.

Eric Lewis, lead attorney for the detainees, said, "It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when the Supreme Court lets stand such an inhuman decision. The final word on whether these men had a right not to be tortured or a right to practice their religion free from abuse is that they did not."

"The lower court found that torture is all in a days’ work for the secretary of defense and senior generals," he added. "That violates the president’s stated policy, our treaty obligations, and universal legal norms. Yet the Obama administration, in its rush to protect executive power, lost its moral compass and persuaded the Supreme Court to avoid a central moral challenge. Today our standing in the world has suffered a further great loss."

Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal, co-counsel on the case, told IPS, "In many ways the opinion the Supreme Court left standing today is worse when one gets past the bottom line – no accountability for torture and religious abuse – and digs into the legal reasoning."

"One set of claims are dismissed because torture is said to be a foreseeable consequence of military detention," he said. "How will the parents of our troops captured in future foreign wars react to that?"

The news in the last few days has continued the drumbeat of demoralizing events which started in the Bush administration, and with only a few hiccups has continued through the Obama administration. It is clear that Obama is, fundamentally, Bush's 3rd term.

First we have the health care "reform" debacle, where it has been confirmed that the White House pushed Harry Reid to accept Lieberman's ultimatum, not go to reconciliation. There will be no public option in the Senate bill. There will be no Medicare expansion. There will be no cap on yearly limits. What there will be is a mandate forcing people to buy insurance, some subsidies which can still leave people spending money they can't afford, and guaranteed issue of lousy plans (Plans where only 70% of the premiums have to be spent on care, for example.) Unless progressive Senators are willing to filibuster, or House progressives are willing to vote against en-masse, something very close to the Senate plan is what will pass, because as I noted some time ago, the White House's bottom line is that something, anything must pass, and conservative Dems are willing to kill the bill to make sure it doesn't actually threaten health industry profits in any way, shape, or form. (Thus why drug importation, which would cost Pharma money, will be made illegal.)

All of this was completely predictable. Furthermore the weakness of progressive and liberal legislators, is largely to blame:

Obama and the Democratic leadership's bottom line is they must pass some bill called "health care reform". Unless you threaten to take away their bottom line, they will take away anything that isn't progressives bottom line

This is Negotiation 101, and progressive legislators either don't understand it, or are spineless. As a result they, and Americans, have been rolled yet again. What is depressing about this is that it should be a surprise to no one, but apparently has surprised many.

It is also noteworthy that spending billions on turning brown people into a fine red mist (a.k.a. the Afghan war) is acceptable, but health care (a.k.a. saving actual American lives) is something which can't cost money. What an interesting--and clearly evil--set of priorities that reveals. I guarantee that real healthcare reform would save more American lives than the entire war on terror—assuming said "war" hasn't cost more American lives than it's saved, which is almost certainly the case.

Next we have what Glenn Greenwald is calling the creation of Gitmo North, in which people whom the government judges there is not enough evidence to convict, will be held indefinitely without trial. This is the very definition of tyranny. Any nation which does this is a nation of men, not laws. America has forsaken its fundamental premise and proved its degradation. Yes, this started under Bush, but as Obama embraces this, it because a bipartisan project and the new elite consensus. This is now something which has been confirmed as US policy which is extremely unlikely to change no matter who is in power.

Then we have bankers are giving themselves bonuses larger than the entire economy's GDP growth this year.

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Ex-White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told Greta Van Susteren last night on Fox that she wished President Obama would stop making those unpleasant allusions to her old boss, George W. Bush. Because, you know, Bush has not been taking shots at Obama.

Oddly, nary a mention of Dick Cheney was heard.

Perino was upset that Obama, in his interview for 60 Minutes, referenced Bush's military triumphalism:

Obama: And one of the mistakes that was made over the last eight years is for us to have a triumphant sense about war.

There was a tendency to say, "We can go in. We can kick some tail. This is some glorious exercise." When in fact, this is a tough business.

But Van Susteren at least pointed out that when George W. Bush was president, there was no shortage of blaming the previous administration:

Van Susteren: When President Bush 43 took office, was he critical in a similar way of President Clinton, his predecessor? Because one of the things I think we all want to think about, is we want our presidents having greatness about them and not getting petty.

Perino: I wasn't there at the beginning, and I think there is a certain amount of comparison that has to go on at the beginning. But almost everyone -- the left, right, and center -- columnists, even late-night talk-show hosts, are suggesting to President Obama that he lay off.

Well, no, Dana, you weren't around in the early years of the Bush administration. So maybe you weren't there for the endless list of things that Bush blamed Clinton for -- some of which included the following:

In 2002, he blamed Clinton for the recession.

Also in 2002, for the mess in the Middle East.

In 2004, for manufacturing job losses.

Also in 2004, for a shortage of flu vaccine.

In 2005, for "running from terrorists" and generally causing 9/11.

In 2006, for Bush's own failures in containing North Korea.

In 2008, for the soaring deficit.

But the best part came when she suggested Obama should not blame Bush for anything because Bush has been nice and quiet since the election and not criticized Obama:

Perino: Look, I think the other thing that you've seen is that President Bush has been an incredibly gracious post-president during the transition, and he said, 'President Obama deserves my silence.' and I would daresay that he deserves a lot more respect than he's getting right now.

Sure, Bush has been "gracious" because all Republicans have to do is send out Bush's surrogate thug, Vice President Cheney -- who in fact probably had at least as much to do with the direction of policy matters in the Bush administration as Bush himself did -- to do the dirty work for him.

Just last week, Cheney told the nation that the Obama administration was committing treason.

Before that, Cheney accused Obama of "dithering" on Afghanistan. He attacked Obama's decision to investigate torture policies under the Bush/Cheney regime. And he criticized Obama's Iraq withdrawal plans.

Yeah, pretty freaking gracious, those Republicans.

It's important to remind the public just how we got in this mess, and to remind them that the people who got us here want us to forget that fact. Their only hope is to cover their tracks, and Dana Perino is in the business of doing that.