George W. Bush

Hundred years hence, liberals will still be whining about Bush v. Gore. In a television appearance as inexplicable as first lady Michelle Obama announcing the Oscar for best picture, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor was among Rachel Maddow's guests last night, plugging her new book, "Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court." (video clip after page break)

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough had an at times heated discussion about budget deficits, debt, and the economy on PBS's Charlie Rose Monday evening. At one point Krugman got so rattled by the facts that he actually said Scarborough quoting what he had said in the past was making an ad hominem attack against him (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Did you know that the mortgage interest deduction was a major contributor to families' distressed circumstances leading to the housing bubble? Or that George W. Bush's (really modest) tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, not the Internet bubble of the late-1990s led the nation from fiscal surplus to deficits? The reason you don't "know" these things is that they're not true. But the Associated Press's…

The Morning Joe panel was tough today on the Obama White House for threatening Bob Woodward by telling him he would "regret" his reporting that it was the Obama administration that had devised the sequester,   In the course of the opening segment, various panel members described the Obama White House response as "mickey mouse," "pathetic" and "childish." But at the same time, a theme emerged…

On the eve of Sunday's Academy Awards presentation, former George W. Bush CIA Director Michael Hayden has made a strong statement about the hunt for Osama bin Laden film "Zero Dark Thirty." In an interview to be aired on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday, Hayden said, "If you look at the movie, it was artistically true, not factually true. Artistically, it portrayed the CIA interrogation…

My nominee for Media Puppet of the Day (we should consider making such an award a daily or weekly event) is Kathleen Hennessey at the Los Angeles Times. From her perch at the paper's Washington bureau, she wrote a pathetic story today about how President Obama is so much more relaxed now that he's in his second term. Among other howlers, Hennessey claims that "Obama's vacations have been rare…

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "fabricating" hypocrite. Her Sunday column about the lack of veracity in the current crop of award-nominated movies, "The Oscar for Best Fabrication," has some interesting revelations on the true history behind the stories of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Lincoln." But Dowd is the last person to credibly comment on the subject, given her own history (item #3)…

That's right -- not just Nixon ... Nixon and Bush. Can vilification from the left get much worse than that? Cornel West continues to demonstrate why parents might want to think better of sending their children to Princeton, where West purportedly teaches when he isn't gushing over hip-hop and engaging in arcane rants over the airwaves. (audio clips after page break)

It's always interesting when liberals disagree on something because each one believes he or she is always 100 percent correct on any issue, a stance that often leads to fiery confrontations and personal attacks. The latest example of this concept is the angry Twitter debate between Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall over an article entitled “7…

NewsBusters readers know that one of my guilty pleasures is exposing Bill Maher's lack of knowledge on subjects he pompously pounds the table about. On Tuesday evening, Maher gave me a doozy when he wrote on Facebook, "Wow, what a shameless liar this Marco Rubio guy is - Obama created more debt than Bush? Well, if you don't believe in science, why not math too?"

In all too predictable fashion, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger, in his first and perhaps only report (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) on January's Monthly Treausry Statment which showed a small surplus, pulled out the old "Bush ran deficits too" bromide to minimize the historically outsized deficits the Obama has overseen. Crutsinger also…

An unsigned and undated Justice Department white paper, obtained by NBC News, reports The New York Times, "...is the most detailed analysis yet to come into public view regarding the Obama legal team's views about the lawfulness of killing, without a trial, an American citizen who executive branch officials decide is an operational leader of Al Qaeda or one of its allies." The proviso is they…

Suppose our enemies declared war on us—and we didn't show up? In a variation on the pacifist line from the 60s, that's essentially what Chris Hayes has proposed as American policy. On his MSNBC show this morning, the hopelessly naive Hayes suggested that rather than debating "big war"—boots on ground—versus "small war"—targeted strikes—we go for a third option "no war."  In Hayes's fantasy-…

News that the New York Times and Washington Post kept secret until recently the secret U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia is once again raising questions on the paper's politicized double standards on keeping state secrets related to the war on terror. Contrast the deference paid to the Obama administration's request for secrecy, going along with the national security arguments advanced by Obama…