Books and George Bush haven't always been the best of friends. While the First Lady, and former librarian, knows her way around a novel, her husband has always been more famous for holding them upside down. But not for much longer.
Presidential libraries provide their namesakes with their last, great chance to make a statement. And with just 206 days left in office, $500 million plans for George W. Bush's are well underway.
With all this in mind, The Chronicle of Higher Education solicited back-of-envelope reader designs for Bush's Presidential Library. An underground bunker? Floating on fountains? Equipped with a labryinth for Cheney? Book shaped? In they all came.
You can see the designs and vote for your favourite entry here.
Alice Fishburn
I haven't had a chance to read Scott McClellan's new book on his experience as President Bush's press secretary, but apparently it commands attention.
It is being used to draw attention to the mediocrity of Bush's personal appointments.
My friend David Frum was scathing about McClellan's time in office noting that in his “televised confrontatations with the savage White House press corps,” McClellan looked “frightened, like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a persecuting gang of bullies."
David feels he is letting out his frustration on Bush, but that Bush got the team he deserved.
It makes me wonder what the books will say when Brown's inner circle finally get round to publishing their stories, as surely one day they will.
(Hat tip: Daniel Blatt)
Here's President Bush at an Air Force Academy commencement. Captions on a postcard please.
Hat Tip: Wonkette
 The 43rd President has spent the past week basking in the glow of his daughter's wedding. But Karl Rove may have shattered his bridal bubble. Here he is in the Washington Post:
Get your facts right -- there are at least three president who had worse approval ratings [than George W. Bush]: Truman, Johnson and Nixon.
Ouch. Talk about damning with faint praise. But, as the Fact Checker asks, is Rove even right?
Alice Fishburn
Finally, a highlight for the jaded DC press corps in this most prolonged of primary seasons.
The annual Correspondents Dinner took place at the White House on Saturday night. Rumour has it that President Bush has honed his comic technique over the past eight years (either that or anything not involving the endless Obama-Clinton fistfight seems especially amusing right now).
Make up your own mind about his comic genius by watching this footage.
 Remember the "special relationship" between Jack Straw and Condi Rice? Well now it seems that Jack has moved on...
Murad Ahmed
 Catalogue Man here is modelling a more subversive look than usual - the date on his shirt may give you a clue. It is part of the merchandise retailed at Bush's Last Day.
People waiting for the big man to go can buy key rings with digital countdowns, Bush-shaped natural dog biscuits (slogan: 'Crunch, crunch, he's gone') and - a subtle dig this - Fire Bush hot sauce. The purveyors instruct us to "use liberally". Saucy.
Alice Fordham
Karl Rove has a lot of enemies. And those who don't like him, and don't like his boss, really don't like him and really don't like his boss. So can I say I few word in his defence?
A right wing frat boy? A dirty tricks merchant? Always dealing from the bottom of the deck?
No. Karl Rove is one of the most creative political strategist of the era.
It was a brilliant idea to cast his candidate as a compassionate conservative, a position which gave him an appeal to centre voters while gratifying the base. And it was a correct, if ruthless, strategy four years later to run on security and an appeal to more traditional voters. The result was two election victories in most unpromising circumstances.
The key to Rove is not his ruthless political instinct, it is his understanding of history and ideas.
In 2002, while preparing to go and see Rove for what remains, I think, his only UK newspaper interview (read it here), I learnt this: Jim Pinkerton, an adviser to Ronald Reagan and the older George Bush, despaired of the latter’s lack of interest in domestic policy, and said so publicly. So he was surprised, when passing through Texas in 1995 promoting a book of ideas about public service reform, to be given red-carpet treatment by the former President’s son. Rove laid on a whole day of events for him, including an intimate lunch with the Governor.
Behaviour like this, repeated with many different people over many years, explains why, in Pinkerton’s words, “at one time or other every conservative intellectual in America thought Bush was listening to them”.
His understanding of history, and interest in the problems facing McKinley and Republicans at the turn of the last century, lies behind the President's position on immigration and the desire to win over Hispanic voters.
The key to Rove, in other words, is that secretly the Republican tough man is an intellectual.
America got a new President over the weekend, didn't you notice?
Well, it was only for a couple of hours as President Bush temporarily handed over power to (shudder) President Cheney while George W. was having a colonoscopy.
The Daily Show cover the story in typical style. See the President as you've never seen him before, as their report comes complete with keyhole camera footage from inside Bush's body. A great way to start your morning.
Murad Ahmed
 Andrew Sullivan is incredulous, E J Dionne is mad as hell. And me? Well, it's not my country, so I'm simply baffled.
I'm talking about the Scooter Libby decision. American journalists are attacking the President for his decision, quite rightly in my view. How can it be just to reduce the sentence of one man, chosen just because you know him?
But this simply leads a Brit to ask - why on earth does the President have this power?
I thought this when Marc Rich was pardoned, too.
I was brought up to view the American seperation of powers as one of the greatest of all constitutional features, something to admire, something we should emulate. Yet for all its flaws, the British constitution would never allow something so egregious.
Jefferson fought against any pretence at monarchy, yet here is an American President behaving in a way that would, unquestionably, end the monarchy if the Queen attempted it.
Last week, as the Libby decision was hitting the headlines, Gordon Brown moved to end some of the few remaining confusions between the role of the executive and that of the judiciary. He is proposing to end the right to choose judges and to change the role of the Attorney General so that there is no further role for the executive in individual prosecutions.
It's none of my business, of course, but isn't some sort of constitutional amendment in order in the US, too?
Here's an interesting article. It praises Bill Clinton's appeal to the centre and believes that abandoning Clintonism is a mistake. And it is written by a former senior adviser to the President.
Here's an interesting article
Not that surprising? It is written by a former senior adviser to President... Bush.
The author is Michael Gerson, the man behind some of W's best speeches, a White House loyalist and insider. The key paragraphs are these: The immigration debate is a reminder to the memory-impaired that President Bush ran and won in 2000 as "a different kind of Republican" - meaning the kind that isn't libertarian or nativist. Bush was orthodox on tax cuts and moral values.
But from the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out policies - a federal role in improving education, humane immigration reform, Medicare prescription drug coverage - that borrowed more from Roman Catholic social thought than from Friedrich Hayek.
Bush's first major policy address of the campaign, which I helped prepare, talked of seeking the "common good," asserted "solidarity" with the poor and declared that "the American government is not the enemy of the American people." Ed Crane of the libertarian Cato Institute complained that the speech epitomized "Bill Clinton's impact on the American polity".
He argues that both Clinton and Bush put forward policies, which were a mix of traditional and original positions, and had at least some positions with a strong centre appeal.
He detects that this is missing so far in the race. I think he is right and that victory will go to the candidate who plugs the gap.
Just in case you've missed this story. Keep an eye on Bush's left wrist. It all happens very quickly.
 1. Will Marshall. In 1992, the President of the Progressive Policy Institute was visited by two young British Labour politicians. One of them was Gordon Brown, he forgot the name of the other.
But the impact on Blair of Marshall and his colleagues in the Democratic Leadership Council was greater. Brown and Blair were visiting to get tips from Clinton associates. The PPI was one of the most fruitful sources. Their working papers helped new Labour get started on a new policy agenda - with a Centre Right bent.
The identity of thinking became so great that Marshall now says that the balance of intellectual payments has changed and that the Democrats are drawing from new Labour. Blair became a new Southern Democrat.
 2. Bill Clinton. The election of Clinton profoundly altered Blair and his associates. Philip Gould, Blair's pollster and one of the biggest influences upon him, spent time working on the campaign and absorbed its lessons.
Clinton changed Blair in three ways. First, the Blairites copied Clinton’s "War Room" and began combating the Tories in every news cycle. Second, Tony Blair learned from Clinton's immensely effective rhetorical style. He too began to feel the pain of the middle class. And finally, Clinton's failings hardened Blair. He reacted against the criticism that Clinton avoided hard choices by becoming harder himself. This trait first showed itself during the Kosovo conflict.
 3. Rupert Murdoch. Your estimation of the influence of the proprietor of The Sun and The Times on the Prime Minister depends very much on what you think of Tony Blair. Do you think that his politics are on the Centre Right anyway or do you believe that he moved to the Right simply to win the support of the tabloid press? Perhaps it's a bit more complicated than that. Mr Blair provided his own assessment of the relationship last summer in a speech to a gathering of News Corp executives:
Rupert, it’s great to be back at the News Corp conference after all these years. When I first met you, I wasn’t sure I liked you, but I feared you. Now that my days of fighting elections are over, I don’t actually fear you, but I do like you.
This captures perfectly the way Blair has changed during his period in office - what he may have started out doing through necessity, he ended up doing though conviction.
 4. Dick Morris. When Bill Clinton was choosing his holiday destination, he turned to his pollster for advice. He ended up in Wyoming. The obsessive use of focus group polling became part of Tony Blair's working method too.
In his book, Behind the Oval Office, about his work for Clinton, Morris set out his methods for developing policy. Morris suggests neutralising the Right on their strong issues - crime and the economy - leaving them to fight where they are weak - education, the environment and so on. Blair followed Morris's methods and ideas very closely.
In fact, Behind the Oval Office, written as a memoir of Morris’s time advising Clinton, remains one of the best texts on Blair's political methods.
 5. George W. Bush. The partnership of Bush and Blair, the linking of their names in the public imagination, is an unlikely one. It happened because of Tony Blair's natural liberal interventionism and his view of the importance of the "special relationship". If George Bush had not chosen to invade Iraq, Tony Blair almost certainly would not have advocated doing so. But once the US President had made up his mind to proceed, the British prime minister was never going to allow the Americans to act alone.
Acting together with George Bush has changed Tony Blair in two ways - it has reinforced his interventionist instincts, making that a more prominent part of his political make-up; and it has made him a harder, more ideological politician. He became less reliant on popularity, less concerned about it. And lucky for him that he did, since at the same time he also became a great deal less popular.
 A group of conservative bloggers have set up thefisk.com. This is its purpose:
At The Fisk you'll read daily rebuttals of comment articles, speeches, government leaflets and blogs. In the internet age no sloppy thinking is free from exposure and analysis
Well, hooray. Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers Alliance makes a good fist of fisking; he marshalls his facts and exposes the flaws in Polly Toynbee's arguments. Alas, most of the other posts are just right-wing shouting (There's nowt wrong with right-wing shouting, but let's not call it fisking when it isn't fisking.)
Take Cramner on Rowan Williams' slave-trade pilgrimage:
It is a bizarre sense of spiritual priority that the Church should bring to the attention of the media the sins of those died a couple of hundred years ago, while the needs today’s widows and orphans go ignored. The poor and outcast live in poverty and loneliness, while the Church seizes a media opportunity to remind us all that the Archbishop of Canterbury is still alive.
Come off it! Just because the Archbishop is paying penitence for the slave trade, doesn't mean that he or the Church is doing nothing about the poor and outcast. It just happens that an anti-slavery pilgrimage is considered more newsworthy than a hundred sermons or workaday acts of charity. Not his fault.
 Or take the post on The Independent's frontpage, "It's the war, stupid". The writer simply asserts that:
if one lifts the veil of characteristic simplicity of the front page, an altogether more worrisome message is revealed. That message is one of rampant anti-Americanism, along with a more subtle – but no less important – air of anti-western sentiment.
Well, have a look at the frontpage: I can't see rampant "anti-Americanism". "Its the war, stupid" is a perfectly reasonable headline for an article on the US midterm elections that in many states hinged on the war in Iraq. Yep, The Indy does occasionally have a sneery anti-American tone, but the author of the post doesn't provide a scintilla of evidence to make his/her case. The Fisk if it really fisks lazy, illogical or inaccurate journalism will be a great service to media junkies. But fact-free, dogmatic right-wing assertion is as dreary as tired old liberal myths.
Robbie Millen
Just before the Iraq war began, The Times commissioned the great American speechwriter and author Peggy Noonan to answer this question: How much will America be willing to suffer? What kind of losses will America accept and absorb, if it comes to that?
The piece she wrote in March 2003 is very much worth re-reading today, following George Bush's announcement that he is sending fresh troops to Iraq.
Peggy had this to say: My own hunch is that Americans are more patient, persevering and accepting of pain than we know. We found that out on 9/11, and we may be about to find it out again. But Americans are practical. They all know how to do a cost-benefit analysis. They will be patient, persevering and willing to absorb pain as long as they feel they can win and are winning. They will accept bodybags as part of the price of victory, but not for a second will they accept them if they start to see evidence of defeat.
She argued that once America began negotiating a withdrawal in Vietnam the deaths quickly became intolerable. The split in the leadership of the country over whether to continue was also important in eroding support.
If Noonan's hunch is correct (and I think she got it right) then it is clear that the much touted Baker middle way was not really an option for the President. Beginning a slow withdrawal from Iraq, combined with international negotiations would have made every American death seem utterly pointless, a wasted life on the way to certain defeat.
So he really had to choose between rapid and complete defeat or one more attempt at victory. That is why he has sent the fresh troops. For it is only so long as the American people believe that their political leadership is committed to victory that they will tolerate being in Iraq at all.
In this morning's Times former Secretary of State James Baker recalls his role as George W. Bush's representative during the Florida vote recount in 2000.
In this essay (via Real Clear Politics) Walter Isaacson wonders whether Baker's role as a partisan in this fight will deny him a place in history as one of the "Wise Men". (Isaacson is an expert on the Wise Men, having written a superb book on the subject)
I'd say that depends on how wise the Baker report on Iraq turns out to be.
John Bolton has resigned as US Ambassador to the UN. The Economist argued that his main success has been to unite the southern hemisphere against the rich north. Newt Gingrich in this National Review article from last year defended Bolton from the accusation that he is too tough, rough and uncompromising. From the Left, the stalkerish website Bolton Watch has been keeping tabs on him. And here you can read The Nation's take on Bolton's original appointment: Perhaps the real damage is the signal Bush has sent to the other members of the UN: that the United States is not really serious about the organization it helped to found. Almost as worrying is the implicit message of encouragement to the know-nothings on the extreme right of the Republican Party, who get their news and geography from Rush Limbaugh and Fox, and see the UN as a cabal of gun-reforming, gay-liberating, abortion-peddling, US Constitution-undermining foreigners.
But does the UN deserve to be treated seriously? If you read Rosemary Righter's splendid (but long) piece in The Times Literary Supplement, the answer will have to be "no". The UN is looking rather beside the point. The UN no longer exists, as it did in 1945, in lonely eminence. It must compete for influence in a world of instant communications and multiple voices, and of networks inside and outside government that operate across frontiers with unprecedented ease. Globalization is transforming not only the world economy, but also the relations between governments and their increasingly mobile, disconcertingly better-informed citizens. The inter-state threats which the UN’s security machinery was designed to address have been largely displaced by the problems of collapsing, dysfunctional states and the globalization of organized crime and terrorist networks.
Robbie Millen
 Get ready for a massive irony.
For the last four years, Tony Blair has stood accused of being George Bush's poodle. His slavish support for White House has exposed him to ridicule and contempt from opponents of the war.
Now, Donald Rumsfeld has been pushed out and a more conventional figure put in his place. John Bolton looks like he's on the way out and the James Baker report is due. In other words, as Gerard Baker argues in a characteristically lucid column, the Bush regime is shaping up to change its Iraq policy.
And what will Tony Blair do? He will lead those of us who feel that to retreat is disaster, and who insist that we do our best to achieve as secure an Iraqi democracy as possible. Britain will be stiffening American resolve.
Here's where the irony comes in. All talk of poodles will be forgotten. Mr Blair will be attacked for being on his own as even America moves away from him. He will, in other words, stand accused of being insufficiently slavish.
 My old friend David Frum has been reading Bob Woodward's State of Denial and blogging as he goes.
His penultimate post on the subject is particularly interesting, because it deals with Woodward's comments on Bush's speechwriting team. Why particularly interesting? Because Frum formed part of that team, most famously working on the Axis of Evil speech.
Frum, whose book on Bush was generally complimentary, is now less so. Take this, for example: There is everywhere and always a gap between an administration’s rhetoric and its actions, but seldom has it gaped as wide as in this one.
It is striking that the criticism of the Bush administration made by this former insider is so close to the criticism that is commonly made of Tony Blair's period in Downing Street.
Almost everything written by Bob Woodward is worth reading. His latest book returns to the Bush policy on Iraq. All you need to know is that it is called State of Denial.
And excerpts are now being posted on the Washington Post website.
Confused by President Bush's "torture" proposals? Worry not. Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central will make it all crystal clear.
Robbie Millen
Daniel Finkelstein
is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column. Comment Central is his rolling guide to the best opinion on the web. Click
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