In an attempt to defend President Obama’s foreign policy decisions the Center for American Progress has released a terribly misguided one page chart comparing the Iraq war and the Libya war. The chart’s basic message is that Obama is better than Bush, because Obama is much more thrifty when he launches a war, even an illegal one based on lies.

Not much is a better compliment for a person than the quality of the individuals they offend.

I guess there’s a difference between being nervous and being stunned like a trout

Another stirring non-victory by the anti-heroes of the Bush foreign policy team.

A federal court has rejected former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to have a lawsuit dismissed that alleges he is responsible for authorizing the torture of two military contractors. The case, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, et al is one of two cases out of more than a dozen that allege Rumsfeld allowed torture to take place against US citizens in Iraq.

The dismissal means Rumsfeld has now lost two appeals against torture suits filed against him. Last week, a federal court in Washington, DC, released an opinion that upheld the other lawsuit moving forward against Rumsfeld, John Doe v. Donald Rumsfeld, et al, a case that alleges the former defense secretary had a role in the torture and illegal detention of a US citizen that was working in Iraq as a translator.

For any LGBT group, the bottom line should have been that when LGTB rights were pitted against corporate rights, Coronado was willing to give a group of people with seriously homophobic judicial histories enormous power to determine the future of lives of people within the LGTB community

I’m most interested in all the assumptions here, that a bunch of Chinese hackers know precisely how the White House email system works. If that’s true, why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over the emails OVP deleted from the first days of the Plame leak investigation? And why haven’t we asked the Chinese to turn over all those emails hidden on the RNC’s server? Maybe they can also help us find all of John Yoo’s torture emails?

If it couldn’t be laminated or outsourced in the prior administration it wasn’t worth doing.

Condi Rice is, of all Bush’s top aides, the best at managing her reputation. Which is why her interview with Fareed Zakaria yesterday is so interesting.

Sure, there are some examples of Condi’s signature lies, such as when she claims the dedicated group to hunt Osama bin Laden–which was shut down between 2005 and 2009, after which Obama re-instituted it–proves the Bush Administration’s focus on capturing OBL. More interesting, though, is Condi’s confusion about how many Presidents have hunted OBL.

Things were going along pretty well for the Bush Administration Apologists Alumni Association. Sure, they were out of their old offices, but things were good. Obama adopted their wars as his own, the economy has sputtered along long enough to have become (in the public’s mind) at least as much Obama’s fault as theirs (thus the cries of “deficits! deficits! deficits!” from those who launched us into two wars), and most of the BAAAA have landed in cushy lucrative new digs.

Then Obama had to ruin it by getting bin Laden. Suddenly, all the old discussions are back — at least as far as torture goes — and this has at least some of them very worried, like Michael Mukasey.

He should worry. A lot.