PERINO: And we had a terrorist attack on our country. And we should call it what it is. Because we need to face up to it so that we can prevent it from happening again.

HANNITY: I agree with you. And why won’t they say what you just so simply said?

PERINO: They want to do all of their investigations. I don’t know. All of the thinking that goes into it. But we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think we ought it to the American people to call it what it is.

Watch it:

Of course, the terror attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 — eight months into President Bush’s first term. But also, conservatives like to claim that the Bush administration prevented any terror incidents in the U.S. since 9/11. But they conveniently forget the anthrax attacks on U.S. news organizations and members of Congress over the course of several weeks beginning on Sept. 18, 2001.

Senior Bush administration figures including Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Baghdad, and Jay Garner, the retired general who led reconstruction efforts immediately after the war, are leading a new business push into Iraq.

The two one-time senior officials are among a raft of former US soldiers and diplomats either leveraging their war experience helping foreign companies to enter the Iraqi market or starting businesses there themselves.

Recently, former American diplomat Peter Galbraith, who was a key adviser to Iraqi Kurdish politicians, admitted that “he has had business dealings involving oil companies in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2004.” “The business interest, including my investment into Kurdistan, was consistent with my political views,’’ he told the Boston Globe. “These were all things that I was promoting, and in fact, have brought considerable benefit to the people of Kurdistan, the Kurdistan oil industry, and also to shareholders.’’

Asked whether al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden could be alive, Bush said “I guess he is not dead.”

He, however, noted that Laden is hiding and “not leading victory parades” or “espousing his cause” on TV.

He expressed confidence that Laden will be brought to justice which “he deserves to be” and it was a matter of time.

Bush, who failed to properly resource the Afghanistan war over the term of his presidency, had some advice for Obama as he considers whether or not to send more U.S. troops into that conflict. “I hope we don’t abandon the people of Afghanistan,” Bush said, adding that U.S. withdrawal would cause the return of “brutal tyranny” in the nation.

Bush, like other ex-presidents before him, was reportedly paid at least $100,000 to appear at the motivation seminar. He will headline another in San Antonio. [...]

It was a rousing, upbeat celebration of positive thinking and conspicuous success. Speakers were introduced with peppy music, confetti drops and bursts of pyrotechnics exploding from each corner of the stage (but not for Bush – Secret Service orders).

Bush is reportedly receiving $150,000 for other speeches, which doesn’t include the private jet he sometimes receives.

PERINO: That was a coordinated, calculated attack. It was unbecoming. And if you look at some of the coverage of what mainstream media covers when, for example, somebody like a Hugo Chavez shuts down television stations, he calls them illegitimate.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this White House believes that they are going to come over here and shut down Fox News. But they are defining a narrative in their first year, and it’s going to be very hard to recover from it. [...]

Through our State Department, we are trying to help emerging democracies get journalists and government officials to talk to one another, because freedom of the press is essential to any democracy. Believe me, they are watching this, and they have — surely are raising questions.

Watch it:

The Obama administration, according to Reporters Without Borders, is actually setting quite a strong example of press freedom for the world. In 2008, the organization found that in terms of press freedom, the U.S. ranked 36th out of 173 countries. Its report singled out “wars carried out in the name of the fight against terrorism” as a cause for the steep decline in press freedoms around the world. Just one year later, the United States has jumped from 36th to 20th. “Barack Obama’s election as president and the fact that he has a less hawkish approach than his predecessor have had a lot to do with this,” concluded Reporters Without Borders.

So what type of example did the Bush administration set? A few lowlights:

– The Pentagon had a secret program to use retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Most of these analysts had “ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.” When the “message machine” became public, Perino defended the program as “absolutely appropriate.”

– The U.S. military was “secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.” The articles contained anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials — which may or may not have been authentic — and “read more like press releases than news stories.”

– The Education Department paid conservative pundit Armstrong Williams hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Even after the corruption was uncovered, the administration defended it as “a permissible use of taxpayer funds.”

– The Government Accountability Office found that the Bush administration violated anti-propaganda laws when it disguised two promotional ads — on federal drug policy and Medicare — as news reports. The “reports” aired on dozens of stations, and the GAO “faulted the administration for distributing seemingly independent, ready-to-air reports that did not inform viewers that they came from the government.”

Bush also called a New York Times reporter “a major league asshole” — and never apologized. In fact, Bush never gave the NYT a single interview throughout his presidency. (Update: Bush gave the New York Times interviews in 2001, 2004, and 2005.) The White House frequently went after NBC News, and Perino has admitted that they essentially froze out MSNBC “towards the end.”

Transcript:

WALLACE: Enough. I’m tired of asking my wacky question. I want to turn to one last thing, and that is the latest chapter in the Obama White House’s war on Fox News and what some people are calling the administration’s Chicago way of doing business.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN CONNERY AS JIM MALONE: He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: That’s the Chicago way. You’ve got to love Sean Connery in that.

Dana, the latest chapter in the Chicago way was that the administration made an effort this week to use the White House pool — that’s the — all the five major networks — to try to exclude Fox from interviewing pay czar Ken Feinberg.

The White House now says, Well, it was just an honest mistake. Question: When you were in the Bush White House, did you ever try to do that against CBS when they were trashing President Bush? Or do you know of any White House that’s ever tried to use the White House pool to eliminate somebody, to kick somebody out?

PERINO: Certainly not with the pool. I mean, there are ways to exclude doing interviews with other networks, such as what happened to Fox News about four weeks ago when President Obama did all the other networks and decided not to do this one.

But you never use the pool. It’s a huge no-no. And I was glad to see that the reporters in the — in the room decided to stand up and have solidarity, because they could be next in this Chicago-style way.

WALLACE: And what do you make — it was happening as we were on the air a week ago today — of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod going on other Sunday talk shows and, in effect, lecturing the mainstream media Fox is not a legitimate news organization and don’t follow them?

PERINO: That was a coordinated, calculated attack. It was unbecoming. And if you look at some of the coverage of what mainstream media covers when, for example, somebody like a Hugo Chavez shuts down television stations, he calls them illegitimate.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this White House believes that they are going to come over here and shut down Fox News. But they are defining a narrative in their first year, and it’s going to be very hard to recover from it.

The best thing they could do is try to find a way to, you know, give a — send out an olive branch, try to get this behind them and to move on.

WALLACE: You were telling me earlier — and we’ve only got about 45 seconds left — that you deal with the free press in emerging democracies and you worry about the message being sent.

PERINO: Every — everyone across the world watches and listens to everything that the White House is saying.

Through our State Department, we are trying to help emerging democracies get journalists and government officials to talk to one another, because freedom of the press is essential to any democracy. Believe me, they are watching this, and they have –surely are raising questions.

And the next time we go to them and say, You want to make sure that you have reporters covering this, they’ll say, Why should we do that? You don’t.

WALLACE: Thank you, Dana.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Watch it:

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

Also on This Week, conservative pundit George Will praised Obama’s process on Afghanistan, stating, “Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point.”

Transcript:

WILL: Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point. We have much more to fear in this town from hasty than from slow government action.

The question of whether an actual troop request was made with any sense of urgency is not clear to me. The fact that one is being made by McChrystal — and whether it’s 40,000 or whether the 40,000 represents a negotiated down from 80,000 request is something that I don’t know and we should know after careful, protracted deliberation.

PODESTA: I think that the deliberation that’s going on is actually exemplary, and I completely agree with George on this. It seems that the Bush administration, for eight months, did sit on Gen. McKiernan’s request for more troops, which Obama —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s because the troops just weren’t there. It wasn’t the President saying, “I’m not going to do this if the troops are there.” They just didn’t have them.

PODESTA: Well, I don’t know, I never heard Vice President Cheney going off and giving a speech assaulting President Bush for not acting on those requests at that time. And they did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

So they handed him off a problem, and it’s a deep and difficult one, and I think he’s doing the appropriate thing by taking his time before he commits to not what looks to be surge, but what looks to be something that would commit the United States to these high troop levels for a very long time in Afghanistan.

Inside the regal Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel, a relaxed-appearing Bush spoke with very few regrets about some of the most controversial moves of his presidency.

“I am confident that I made decisions based on principle, that I made calls as best I could, and I did not sell my soul,” Bush told an audience of about 1,000 men and women at the $400-a-seat steak luncheon.

Bush also said that he regretted appearing in front of a “Mission Impossible” sign in 2003 during an address about the Iraq war. Of course, the sign actually said “Mission Accomplished.” Maybe “Mission Impossible” would have been more appropriate. (HT: Raw Story)

KILMEADE: And not only did you not go after them, you gave them interviews, as did the president.

DOOCY: Sure.

KILMEADE: Gave them all interviews. Read Ronald Reagan’s diaries…

PERINO: Towards the end we didn’t do a lot with MSNBC. That’s, that is the case.

Watch it:

Perino said that it would have been “a bridge too far” for her to “go after MSNBC” from the White House Briefing Room. But she seems to be forgetting the public letter that her White House colleague Ed Gillespie sent to NBC News President Steve Capus, in which Gillespie accused NBC and MSNBC of blurring the line between “news” and “opinion.” As ThinkProgress noted last week, Fox News cheered on Gillespie’s shot at NBC.

The Republican elder statesman said, “It’s not just the right.” He complained, “there are plenty of people on the left.”

While he said he does not believe in personal name-calling, he singled out MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow calling them “sick puppies.”

“The way they treat my son and anyone who’s opposed to their point of view is just horrible,” Mr. Bush said.

Last night, Maddow invited Olbermann, who was out sick, to call in and discuss Bush’s statements on her show. “I think that I can speak on your behalf here and say that we’re very grateful for the former president’s concern about our health,” Olbermann joked. He then noted the irony behind Bush’s attack. “I mean he’s the father of the process that took us to the place we are now. He is the man who employed Roger Ailes. He and Roger Ailes are the men who ran the Willie Horton ad against Mike Dukakis.” Watch it:

[INTERVIEWER]: If there was one guy on the planet you could dunk on, who would it be? That teacher?

[JAMES]: If it doesn’t have to be a basketball player, George W. Bush. I would dunk on his ass, break the rim, and shatter the glass.

Getting dunked on is considered an embarrassing insult in basketball terminology.

(HT: Huffington Post)

In a Special Report piece on the controversy, Fox correspondent James Rosen compared Obama to President Nixon. On his Fox show last night, Sean Hannity made a similar comparison, adding that he thought the media would freak out if a Republican White House did the same thing:

HANNITY: We have a White House that has now set up a Web site specifically to attack the FOX News Channel because we ask tough questions and they do not like that. They’re not used to that with the fawning news media.

So — I mean is this an enemies list? It seems like it to me. I can’t imagine a Republican doing this without, you know, a media outcry.

The website that Hannity is referring to is most likely the White House blog, which has mentioned Fox News twice, including one post that directed readers to Politifact for the truth about more “Fox lies.” Watch it:

Fox’s incredulous reaction to the White House is somewhat ironic, considering the supportive response of the network’s personalities last year when the Bush administration attacked the credibility of NBC News. In May 2008, then-White House counselor Ed Gillespie publicly sent a scathing letter to NBC News President Steve Capus, accusing them of deceptive editing and blurring the lines between “news” and “opinion.”

In fact, two Fox News contributors, filling in for Bill O’Reilly, suggested that the Bush White House should have considered freezing out NBC and MSNBC all together:

– INGRAHAM: Now Karl, why would the White House agree to do an interview with Richard Engel? I mean, this is the guy who, you know, really didn’t want to give the surge any credit and NBC, an organization, obviously that’s called this a civil war. Now it’s kind of not gone back and changed his view on that. We’re in a recession, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, why bother really at this point? [The O'Reilly Factor, 5/19/09]

– E.D. HILL: You know, I’m sure you know from watching this program that, you know, Bill has, you know, has been reporting for more than a year on a pattern suggesting that NBC News basically panders to the left and is, in essence, in the pocket for Barack Obama. Why go on a venue like that to begin with?

GILLESPIE: Go on a venue like MSNBC?

HILL: Yes.

GILLESPIE: I don’t know. It’s — you know, the – you know, there are elements there who are clearly advocates for a candidate or a point of view, not even commentaries or commentators really or analysts. So I don’t know why he would. [The O'Reilly Factor, 5/22/08]

Gillespie appeared to be supportive of freezing out NBC at the time. On his radio show, Glenn Beck asked Gillespie about Democrats “trying to blackball Fox,” adding, “You don’t see Republicans doing that to NBC, do you?” “No, and sometimes I question why,” replied Gillespie. “It is beyond me frankly.”

HANNITY: [Yasser Arafat] got the Nobel peace prize. Excuse me, a terrorist got the Nobel peace prize. Some people deservedly so. You know who else deserved it? Ronald Reagan. And frankly, I would’ve given it to George Bush.

Watch it:

As many commentators have noted, the Nobel Prize appears to have been motivated in part by anti-Bush sentiment, which makes Hannity’s suggestion particularly absurd. After all, George W. Bush engaged in the torture of detainees, waged an unprovoked and illegal war, and brought about the largest protests in history against U.S. policies — hardly behavior that is fitting for a Nobel Peace Prize.

(HT: TP reader Mark)

Later that night, Hume joined Bill O’Reilly to continue defending the network’s news coverage. O’Reilly and Hume agreed that Fox “routinely hammered President Bush on Iraq” and was “very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq”:

O’REILLY: Now you and I came up in the old school, where we were taught as a reporter you should be skeptical of everybody. I mean, that’s your job as a reporter.

HUME: Right.

O’REILLY: To be skeptical, skeptical of the Democrats, skeptical of the Republicans. It doesn’t really matter. And I have to say that when President Bush was in trouble in Iraq, this network and this program and your program, as well, routinely, routinely hammered President Bush on Iraq.

HUME: Well, we certainly — we were very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq.

O’REILLY: Absolutely.

“There was no cheerleading of President Bush on this network when his administration ran into trouble,” claimed O’Reilly. Watch it:

O’Reilly and Hume appear to have a selective memory when it comes to their cheerleading of the Bush administration. When Hume stepped down from the Special Report anchor chair, he marveled that Bush had put America on “an amazing” foreign policy “path.” During his time at Fox, Hume repeatedly spun bad news for Bush and pushed misleading information that bolstered the Bush administration’s faulty case for invading Iraq. Perhaps this is one reason why a 2003 study found that 80 percent of those who primarily relied on Fox News believed falsehoods about why we went into Iraq.

When it came to Iraq war coverage, O’Reilly explained his philosophy on his radio show in June 2007 after the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox covered the war less than CNN and MSNBC. Claiming that Fox’s competitors were reporting on violence “because they want to embarrass the Bush administration,” O’Reilly said, “Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No!” “There’s little news value in broadcasting daily bombings,” O’Reilly added on his Fox show.

Transcript:

O’REILLY: Now you and I came up in the old school, where we were taught as a reporter you should be skeptical of everybody. I mean, that’s your job as a reporter.

HUME: Right.

O’REILLY: To be skeptical, skeptical of the Democrats, skeptical of the Republicans. It doesn’t really matter. And I have to say that when President Bush was in trouble in Iraq, this network and this program and your program, as well, routinely, routinely hammered President Bush on Iraq.

HUME: Well, we certainly — we were very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq.

O’REILLY: Absolutely.

HUME: .for a very long period of time. The criticisms were made of him were reported and discussed at length on FOX News. Now, he had his defenders. The war had its defenders.

O’REILLY: But there was no cheerleading.

HUME: There were commentators.

O’REILLY: There was no cheerleading of President Bush on this network when his administration ran into trouble. There was no cheerleading, you know. It was skeptical coverage. Iraq’s going south. When the economy started to wobble last September, we were right on that.

Now, what has changed, in your opinion, from when you and I came up in the journalistic ranks and we were told — taught in school and then told by our bosses you be skeptical of those in power. Doesn’t matter where they are, what party they are. That does not in many quarters take place anymore.

HUME: Well.

O’REILLY: We mentioned NBC and CNN. And certainly those networks are dramatically favorable to Barack Obama. What is happening.

HUME: Well, I think that – well, I think what happened in this particular case — look, it has been universally recognized for a long period of time and survey after survey has shown it that most reporters vote Democrat, particularly in presidential elections. The journalists who inhabit Washington, and I think it’s fair to say the key spots in the network headquarters and newspaper headquarters in New York with very few exceptions are Democrats, or at least they vote Democratic. They tend to be liberal in their outlook. That was true for a long time.

The level of discipline, exercised by the conventions of journalism on them have weakened.

KILMEADE: It’s been 10 months. Should Leader Hoyer be looking backwards, and is he accurate?

BUSH: I was on the plane coming up to Washington yesterday, and I heard someone complaining that their child’s acne was because of George Bush. Of course, last week the Olympics didn’t come to Chicago — that was my brother’s fault. And at some point, people are going to have to put on their big-boy pants and assume responsibility for the great challenges and opportunities our country has. I don’t know how much longer leaders — responsible leaders in Congress — can continue to say these things.

Watch it:

No, President Bush is no longer in office making decisions. But Obama and Democratic leaders are forced to make many of their decisions based on what they inherited from Bush. Eight years is a long time, and the consequences of Bush’s actions didn’t disappear just because he went back to Texas. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal recently noted what the country is still dealing with, according to recent Census figures, after Bush’s two terms:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.

In terms of the deficit that conservatives are always so upset about, Matt Yglesias has put together a pie chart looking at what has actually caused the growth:

So while Fox News pundits complain about the current administration and Congress having to spend so much money, they need to keep in perspective why that spending is necessary.

Transcript:

KILMEADE: Some people think — I was listening to the Sunday shows — they were too focused on our debt, and we should be focused more on spending. Here’s what Steny Hoyer says. He says who’s to blame for all this: “Today’s new deficit estimate for the fiscal year 2009 shows two things: fiscally reckless policies by the Bush administration and actions taken to rescue our nation’s economy from collapse. While the later [sic] was absolutely necessary, the former was both unnecessary and damaging to our nation’s fiscal outlook.” It’s been 10 months. Should Leader Hoyer be looking backwards, and is he accurate?

BUSH: I was on the plane coming up to Washington yesterday, and I heard someone complaining that their child’s acne was because of George Bush. Of course, last week the Olympics didn’t come to Chicago — that was my brother’s fault. And at some point, people are going to have to put on their big-boy pants and assume responsibility for the great challenges and opportunities our country has. I don’t know how much longer leaders — responsible leaders in Congress — can continue to say these things.

DOOCY: Well, in the news this morning, apparently the Minnesota Twins are blaming George Bush for their loss to the Yankees last night.

CARLSON: No, they’re not. As a native of Minnesota, I can tell you that’s not true. He may be blamed for a lot of things, but that would be lack of sleep that their loss happened.

Fox is patting itself on the back over a job well done, according to a new Time magazine article. “The fact that our numbers are up 30 plus in the news arena on basic cable I’d like to think is a sign that we are just putting what we believe to be the facts out on the table,” said Michael Clemente, Fox’s senior vice president for news. He then compared the network to veteran journalist Sam Donaldson, who was doing a good job because he was “enemy number one” to both the Carter and Reagan White Houses:

As for Fox’s journalism, Clemente said the White House criticism was typical of other administrations who have been critical of certain reporters. “It reminds me a little bit about what happened to Sam Donaldson when he was covering the White House,” said Clemente. “The Reagan White House thought he was enemy number one. He had the same relationship with the Carter White House. They thought he was enemy number one. He thought he was doing his job.”

Of course, the difference is that Fox News hasn’t met a Republican administration it didn’t love. While it may be out of favor with the Obama administration, it was the best friend of the Bush White House. Remember, Fox was the network:

– that received “unprecedented access by George W. Bush” for a one-hour documentary — “George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish” — highlighting the administration’s accomplishments.

– that happily used talking points provided to them by the Bush administration.

– whose reporters couldn’t help from editorializing that Bush put America on an “amazing” foreign policy path, defending Bush by saying he “inherited” the 9/11 attacks, and arguing that critics who compared Bush to Nixon were guilty of a “gross misreading of history.”

Further demonstrating the love between the network and the Bush White House, Vice President Cheney always demanded that the televisions in his hotel rooms be turned to Fox News.

KRISTOL: Our economy doesn’t need the boost of the Olympics. And then an American president in sort of a George W. Bush-like way goes and tries to bully the International Olympic Committee. [...]

Come walk with us. I’m here for America. Can you imagine if some Republican — if Bush had done this and we hadn’t gotten it? Typical Bush heavy-handedness, cowboy unilateralist, hegemonic imperialist action. Obama falls into that trap and they went for it. I must say you couldn’t help be amused by it.

Watch it:

First of all, Kristol was a big fan of the Bush administration’s policies, so it’s not clear why he wouldn’t like Obama going to Copenhagen. But more importantly, Obama’s trip was not a “hegemonic imperialist action.” Brazil, Spain, and Japan — the other three 2016 finalists — all sent their country’s leaders to Copenhagen, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out on NBC’s Meet the Press today. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks said that he was proud Obama had “put his country ahead of his own personal prestige”:

MADDOW: In 2012, London got the Olympics after Blair tried for them. In 2014, Russia got them after Putin tried for them, and in 2016, all four finalists sent their head of government or head of state to make the argument. Obama did nothing unreasonable, and it would have been a shock if Chicago won. For them to be cheering America’s loss here on the right, I think is sort of disgusting. [...]

BROOKS: Nonetheless, I have to say, I’m with Obama on this. He took a risk, he comes away somewhat humiliated, but he took a risk for his town, he took a risk for his country, he put his country ahead of his own personal prestige, and he lost one. I actually don’t mind it. I think he was all right on this.

E.J. Dionne added that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential slogan was “Country First,” but “in this case, it was Obama-hatred first on the right, not the country.” Watch it:

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.”

A “harrowing experience” may be an understatement. Immediately after 9/11, the Bush Administration began requiring fingerprints and photographs of tourists from all but 28 countries entering the US. President Bush required that all foreigners register online within three days of travel. Thirty-five (mostly European) countries now participate in the US Visa Waiver program, however tourists from the rest of the world still have to jump through the following hurdles:

• Pay hefty visa processing and issuance fees.
• Undergo an interview by a visa officer at the US Embassy.
• Provide evidence which shows the purpose of the trip, intent to depart the United States, and arrangements made to cover the costs of the trip may be provided.
• Present convincing evidence that an interested person will provide financial support if the applicant does not have sufficient funds to support him or herself.

The average wait for a US visa has risen to about three months. Brazil, which will host the 2016 Olympic summer games in Rio de Janeiro, has a reciprocal visa policy with all countries. US tourists are required to have a $130 advance visa before entry into the country and are fingerprinted and photographed upon arrival — matching US requirements for Brazilians.

Friend, this is the type of propaganda you would see in Stalin’s Russia or Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. I never thought the day would come when I’d see it here in America.

But as Huffington Post recalls, “back in 2006 children from Gulf Coast states serenaded First Lady Laura Bush with a song praising the President, Congress, and Federal Emergency Management Agency for their response to — of all things — Hurricane Katrina.” Back in April 2006, ThinkProgress reported that Bush was treated with lyrics that extolled the administration: “Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!“

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civil award, and is given to individuals who have contributed to: 1) the security or national interests of the United States, 2) world peace, or 3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

In his new book, Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor, former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer reveals how politicized the revered Presidential Medal of Freedom became during the Bush administration.

Latimer writes that administration officials objected to giving author J.K. Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom because her writing “encouraged witchcraft” (p. 201):

This was the same sort of narrow thinking that led people in the White House to actually object to giving the author J.K. Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged withcraft.

Latimer also writes that when he suggested bestowing the honor upon Ted Kennedy, who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, fellow speechwriter Marc Thiessen objected because Kennedy “was a liberal” (p. 201):

When Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I suggested that the president might at least consider awarding Kennedy the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Marc objected wtih the genteel diplomacy he was known for. “That’s crazy!” he thundered. Kennedy was a liberal, he noted (of which I was well aware).

The Bush administration was notorious for awarding the medal to its staunchest Iraq war allies. Bush’s final three recipients of the Medal of Freedom were two supporters of his war in Iraq — former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard — and leading human rights violator and Bush foreign policy ally Alvaro Uribe. Other recipients included a whole lineup of figures heavily involved in the Iraq war, including Paul Bremer and George Tenet.

When President Obama took office, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 16 recipients, including Kennedy and former congressman Jack Kemp, a Republican.