Come on, kids, grab the graham crackers and marshmallows and some pointed sticks as we gather around the campfire to sing heart-warming songs of the good ol’ days of the W. Presidency!

Remember those salad days right after the planes hit the World Trade Center when our country’s leader was nowhere to be found? Oh, and when he dismissed the millions of anti-war protesters around the world as merely a “focus group“? Who among us can ever forget Bush’s first “surprise visit” to the troops in Iraq? Or “Preznit Give Me Turkee“? The Scooter Libby trial, endless signing statements, FISA, and my personal favorite, Gitmo. Good times, my friends. Good times.

The GOP’s standard bearers obviously got a blastfax last week from some unnamed evil genius (Karl? Is that you?), throwing a new, fanciful, revisionist twist into the run-up to Election Day 2010. Despite all the polls and acres of column space dedicated to the Republicans’ inevitable gains in the House and with Dick Cheney still laid up in the hospital, pulseless, the NRCC has to rely on its own members to shoot it in the face.

“Tell me how you do it,” a frustrated Gregory interjected. “Name a painful choice that Republicans are prepared to say we have to make?”

[NRCC Chairman] Sessions had none, save to hint that the policies he wanted to pursue were the ones tried by the previous administration. “We need to go back to the exact same agenda that is empowering the free enterprise system rather than diminishing it,” he said.

O RLY? Do the Republicans really think that crowing about extending tax cuts to the wealthy, blocking unemployment benefits, positioning for MORE corporate deregulation, ignoring a stagnant economy while they shovel money into Wall Street’s pockets, and another eight years of runaway spending on two wars will get their candidates elected? (Obama has already put the Donkey Stamp on the fucked-up Social Security privatization ploy, so they can’t claim credit for taking the initiative on that one.) Guess what, guys? It’s STILL the economy, stupids.

And really. George Bush, President of Tortureville? That George Bush? Popular? Maybe in that alternate universe episode of “Star Trek”…

The NRSC’s John Cornyn also engaged in some magical thinking on the Sunday nattersheit shows:

CORNYN: Look, I think President Bush’s stock is going up a lot since he left office…I think a lot of people are looking back with a little more — with more fondness on President Bush’s administration, and I think history will treat him well.

Um, no, Mister Cornyn. Several points does not constitute “a lot”. And you know what would treat Bush really well? Prison time.

But seriously, President Bush will be remembered not so much as that “Bumbling but Loveable Goofy Guy Who Had the Misfortune to Be President on 9/11″, but as the “Idiot King Who Drove a Once-Great Country Headlong Into a Ditch”. (At this point, President Obama and crew are spinning the tires deeper in the mud.) This has got to be either the most overblown publicity push for George Bush’s “memoir”, which is set to drop in October or . . . GASP! . . . an elaborate plot to run Jeb Bush in ’12.

To be continued. Now pass me a s’more.