41757454_a5af0d598c_m.jpgCheck out this jaw-dropping apologia of the Bush era from Michelle Malkin of the SF Chronicle, which begins with this objectively false claim:

From the day President Bush took office, the long knives were out for him – in ways they will not (and should not) be out for President-elect Barack Obama. The chattering class saw Dubya as a walking style crime in a cowboy suit. They hit Bush for everything – for the way he mangled syntax, for the books he read, because he worked out too much.

You keep seeing some variation of this spin from Bush revisionists, but as we all know, the media fawned over Bush during the 2000 campaign. They overlooked his many glaring shortcomings and instead obsessed about Al Gore’s earth tones and his stiffness and sighing, while happily regurgitating wingnut "invented the Internets" and "Love Story" lies. Why? Because the Village press liked Bush. They branded him "the guy you wanted to have a beer with." And Bush’s approval rating was in the 50s and 60s for most of 2001. There were no long knives.

Then Saunders starts to tick off some of Bush’s greatest hits.

Under Bush’s watch, Osama bin Laden evaded capture.

Worse, Bush’s slowness in changing strategies in Iraq suggested a presidency in a fetal position when Bush should have been managing the store and demanding results.

There is no comfort – there is no upside – to be had in the $810 billion Bush bailout. The Bush administration should have been on alert to contain the damage from the housing-price drop and mortgage foreclosures…It was like the Katrina trailers all over again – except this preventable and unnatural disaster left toxic trailers strewn across America.

So why all of these epic failures, Debbie?

There’s an out-to-lunch sloppiness to the whole mess. It feels as if the barrage of criticism made the Bush engine seize up and stop running the business of the nation.

Ah. So it’s not that Bush, who’d spent a lifetime failing at pretty much everything, was an incompetent, inarticulate boob who couldn’t successfully manage a little league baseball team. No, if only those Bush haters hadn’t been so mean and distracted him, everything would’ve been just peachy.

But Debbie, determined not to let Bush go down as a bumbler, manages to dig through all the rubble and find an upside: at least he kicked ass.

Osama bin Laden may live, most likely quivering in a cave. But no one thinks America is a paper tiger anymore.

Yes, even though we’ve led the world in countries invaded/bombed for the past 30 years, our enemies were beginning to question our willingness to take their bait and get bogged down in costly unwinnable land wars.

Bush sure showed them!