KING: A man who once held your job at the United Nations, John Bolton, saying “it comes perilously close to negotiating with terrorists.” Sending Bill Clinton over there and giving North Korea, certainly, a propaganda victory with those photographs. Perilously close to negotiating with terrorists?

RICE: Absolutely not. That’s, in fact, a ridiculous statement. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, that’s the policy of the United States. But this was an unique opportunity for the former president on a private humanitarian mission to obtain the release of two American women who’ve been held for many months. It would have been disgraceful for the United States, having verified that this was a real opportunity to obtain their release, to leave them in captivity.

Watch it:

Earlier this week, when CNN’s Fareed Zackaria mentioned Bolton’s name to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she erupted in laughter, saying, “”[I]f President Obama walked on water, he would say he couldn’t swim.”

However, yesterday, Berman dropped the provision. He explained that he struck it because he felt “confident that this would be taken care of by the Administration.” According to an e-mail sent by an LGBT community leader who was familiar with yesterday’s proceedings, Berman received a call from John Berry, head of the Office of Personnel Management, who promised that the benefits issue would be addressed through regulatory changes.

Another person who spoke with Berman before yesterday’s hearings was Amb. Michael Guest, the first publicly gay man to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as a U.S. ambassador and a strong advocate for expanding partner benefits — such as medical access and security training. In 2007, Guest resigned because he was frustrated by the State Department’s unwillingness to redress the discrimination against LGBT employees. Today, ThinkProgress spoke with Guest, who said that he believed there would be changes for LGBT employees at the State Department within weeks:

GUEST: So when I went to the hearing and he [Berman] asked me in advance to come back, he explained communications that he had had that led him to believe that there was every expectation that there will be movement. And I take him at his word and have to assume that he would not have been told the things that he’s been told without them being true. So I’m quite confident that there will be action and I simply hope that it will be very soon.

Q: Did you get a sense of the timeline at all? Would it be the next year, the next few months, weeks even?

GUEST: I think on the latter end. I think it will be more in the question of weeks, certainly not years. I mean, if it were a question of years, I would have pushed back because I feel for the gay and lesbian foreign service officers who are about to enter the transfer season.

Guest added that he never felt any discrimination while working at the State Department and believes that employees there would have no problem with benefits being extended to same-sex partners. Indeed, a poll earlier this year found that 71 percent of foreign service officers support “official recognition and benefits for same-sex domestic partners of Foreign Service members.”

Guest expressed frustration at former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s lack of willingness to do anything on this issue:

GUEST: [C]ertainly in terms of leadership skills, I found her lacking. She spoke very frequently about discrimination she witnessed as a child, and I don’t want to take away from that at all. [...]

But I don’t understand how she couldn’t see that this was also an issue of discrimination. She really was not attached to the building, she had a very small circle of people around her, and she served up the President. She didn’t act as the leader that the State Department needed for its workforce.

Guest also said that the Obama administration’s movements on LGBT issues so far has been “pretty sparse.” “That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working on say, economic stimulus and ending the war — those are important issues for all Americans,” said Guest. “But the President himself has said, ‘Hey, we can do more than one thing at once.’ And I don’t accept that we can’t move forward on this area.” Listen to portions of ThinkProgress’s interview with Guest here:

Transcript:

Q: I know that yesterday you went to the hearing with Chairman Berman and he spoke to you beforehand and explained that the provision was being removed. And I was just wondering what he said to you and what his explanation was for why it was being taken out?

GUEST: Well, I don’t want to get into the specifics of that private conversation. I thought it was very gentlemanly, very nice of him to ask me to come back. I’d been working with the Committee for some time on this language, specifically because the State Department had not yet acted. And of course, the issues at the State Department were what caused me to leave the State Department — leave my career. And I thought — and still believe — there is a very clear path toward executive order action that will remedy them. So when the State Department hadn’t moved, that’s when I started working with the Committee to have these provisions inserted.

So when I went to the hearing and he asked me in advance to come back, he explained communications that he had had that led him to believe that there was every expectation that there will be movement. And I take him at his word and have to assume that he would not have been told the things that he’s been told without them being true. So I’m quite confident that there will be action and I simply hope that it will be very soon.

Q: Did you get a sense of the timeline at all? Would it be the next year, the next few months, weeks even?

GUEST: I think on the latter end. I think it will be more in the question of weeks, certainly not years. I mean, if it were a question of years, I would have pushed back because I feel for the gay and lesbian foreign service officers who are about to enter the transfer season. Actually, the transfer season for State Department usually starts around in May. Most of jobs are transferred between May and September to coincide with school year for kids and so forth. So most of the jobs come open in that time period. So if they don’t move now, there will once again be people that are treated unfairly. And I think it’s important that we move as rapidly as we can to resolve discrepancies that unfairly affect the lives of gay and lesbian people, including in this area. [...]

Q: And so if the State Department does extend these benefits, what are some things that foreign service officers and State Department employees would begin to see immediately?

GUEST: Well, there’s a whole range of issues that amount to unfair discrimination for lesbian and gay employees at the State Department. Partners are not allowed to take security trainings — Secretary Rice did amend that to say on a space-available basis — but in general, otherwise they’re not allowed to take security training to learn how to recognize possible terrorist threats or counterintelligence traps. They’re not allowed to take language training, they’re not allowed to take area training to understand the region that they’re moving to. They’re not allowed to take effectiveness courses, such as the courses given to the spouses of deputy chief of mission and ambassadors to help them be effective in formal community leadership roles that they play.

They’re not allowed access to embassy medical resources on an equal basis as spouses and other family members, which is particularly bad in so many countries around the world where there is no adequate medical care and the only thing you can do is go to the embassy clinic. They’re not allowed to be medically evacuated if there’s some sort of emergency that really requires you to leave country to seek medical treatment that’s not available in the country. They’re not allowed to be evacuated from embassies if there’s political insurrection or some kind of uprising. They’re not paid plane transportation to and from posts, even though our pets are paid for transportation. I mean, the list just goes on and on.

So all of these things, if the decision comes down to change them by changing the definition of what a family member is — because that’s how it’s codified in State Department regulations — then they will be entitled to them. And my understanding is that would be effective immediately as soon as the regulations are changed. So I hope that someone has done the business of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and preparing the regulations to be changed, effective the moment a decision is announced. [...]

Q: Do you get the sense that most foreign service officers support benefits for partners — same-sex partners?

GUEST: Oh yeah. State Department foreign service officers are used to traveling around the world and living in different cultures where there are different understandings about how life is organized. I think people in the foreign service tend to pride themselves on being objective and nuanced in their understanding of cultural issues because that’s part of our business. And so we understand that these issues are cultural in part both overseas and at home. There’s also this sense of tolerance and acceptance in the State Department of people from all different religious and cultural and other backgrounds and certainly I never felt any discrimination on the same-sex issues at State from the body politic — from my colleagues — and I don’t know of any colleague that wasn’t supportive of the need to have benefits for partners. So I would be very surprised if there was anyone in the community who says this is wrong. They just need to have action at the top.

Q: So why do you think Condoleezza Rice never made any movement on this issue?

GUEST: You know, I don’t know. I’ve spoken about Secretary Rice before and I won’t judge her for her overall tenure at the State Department; I think historians will do that. But certainly in terms of leadership skills, I found her lacking. She spoke very frequently about discrimination she witnessed as a child, and I don’t want to take away from that at all. Myself, I’m from the South, and I know what the South was like in my growing-up years, in terms of racial discrimination. So I don’t take anything away from her in that regard.

But I don’t understand how she couldn’t see that this was also an issue of discrimination. She really was not attached to the building, she had a very small circle of people around her, and she served up the President. She didn’t act as the leader that the State Department needed for its workforce. [...]

[Obama's movement on LGBT issues is] pretty sparse. I really can be done and more should be done, and I know there are a lot of issues on the President’s plate. I know there a lot of issues on the congressional plate. But these are issues related to the fundamental constitutional rights related to a whole class of American citizens. So I really do think that it’s time to pull back and say, “What is government about? We’re supposed to be helping people and not putting all the issues before it.”

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be working on say, economic stimulus and ending the war — those are important issues for all Americans. But the President himself has said, “Hey, we can do more than one thing at once.” And I don’t accept that we can’t move forward on this area. I do understand — or at least I’ve been told — that there is an effort underway to move on a number of these things, but I really want to see the President speak to it, and I really want to see Congress — congressional leadership — speak to it also.

Q: Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Today, Dan Abrams released the transcript of a panel discussion he conducted with former attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales that same day. When Abrams asks them a question similar to the one posed to Rice, Ashcroft and Gonzales come to a very conclusion — Nixon is wrong:

ASHCROFT: When the President does it. If he has the authority to do it, it means it’s not a crime.

ABRAMS: Take away the caveat there. If has the authority to do it. What President Nixon was saying was “When the President does it, that means its not illegal.”

ASHCROFT: Well, no. Obviously the President does not have carte blanche to do things – [Applause] that are illegal. [...]

ABRAMS: Do you disagree with President Nixon as well? [...]

GONZALES: I think that’s its dangerous to say that the President would have that kind of authority.

Also in the interview, when asked how about the job President Obama is doing, Gonzales replied, “I tend to follow President Bush’s model in terms of saying less — as opposed to Vice President Cheney’s [Laughter]. I’m often asked the same question.”

Transcript:

DA: Let me ask you – I want to read a famous quote, Attorney General Ashcroft. Richard Nixon. . .when he said “The President does it – [Laughter] that means it’s not illegal.” And the follow up was, “If the President for example approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of the threat of internal peace and the order of significant magnitude, then the President’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out without violating the law, otherwise, they’re in an impossible position.” Do you agree with Richard Nixon?

JA: There are –

AG: I’m glad he asked you that – [Laughter]

DA: Well, you’re getting it too. [Laughter]

AG: I want to see how he answers that.

JA: There are things that a President only has the authority to do. And no one else has the authority to do.

DA: But when the President does it –

JA: When the President does it. If he has the authority to do it, it means its not a crime.

DA: Take away the caveat there. If has the authority to do it. What President Nixon was saying was “When the President does it, that means its not illegal.”

JA: Well, no. Obviously the President does not have carte blanche to do things – [Applause] that are illegal. And the law –

DA: Even because of national security?

JA: That’s correct, there are certain things the President doesn’t have the right to do, even in national security. But there are significant powers that the President has in national security, and I believe that there are some powers that are “inherent’ in the presidency that come to him in the constitutional designation as Commander In Chief.

DA [to AG]: Do you disagree with President Nixon as well?

AG: I think that the President can make the decision for the executive branch. But the courts have the final say. The framers envisioned a system of checks and balances, and the checks on the executive branch are the decisions by the court. And so if the courts tell President Nixon that he’s done something that’s unlawful –

DA: But if the courts haven’t ruled on it yet. There’ll be times when the President will have to make a decision. President Nixon was saying — if the President approves something because of national security, or because of the threat to internal peace and order, than the President’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law.

AG: I think that’s its dangerous to say that the President would have that kind of authority.

“Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country,” she said. “But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country.”

She added: “I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country.”

According to Misha’s mother, he originally planned to ask a tougher question — “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for torture?” — but he was asked to change it. “They wanted him to soften it and take out the word ‘torture.’ But the essence of it was the same,” Inna Lerner said.

RICE: Now, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] also had access to Guantanamo. And they made no allegations about interrogations in Guantanamo. What they did say was that indefinite detention, where people didn’t know whether they’d come up for trial — which is why we tried under the military commissions system to let people come up for trial. Those trials were stayed by who? Who kept us from holding the trials?

STUDENT: I can’t answer that question.

RICE: Do your homework first. … It was the Supreme Court.

Watch it:

Of course, the Supreme Court “stayed” the Bush administration’s military commissions because they were woefully inadequate. The Court — three separate times — required the administration to come up with meaningful judicial review of suspects’ detentions. Indeed, last June the court held that military commissions “are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus” and thus “operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.”

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur, who obtained the video, said Rice “absolutely pulls a Nixon” in her answer. Watch it (Rice’s answers come at 0:57):

Rice is attempting to hide her central role in approving torture, as the Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week highlighted. She gave verbal authorization to then-director of the CIA George Tenet to waterboard Abu Zubaydah in July 2002 — one month before the Office of Legal Counsel gave the legal justification for such torture.

Rice’s opinion that a presidential authorization — “by definition” — grants something legality is deeply disturbing. In fact, the United States — and its president — are bound by U.S. statute and international treaties that ban the use of cruel, humiliating, degrading treatment, the infliction of suffering, and the attempt to extract coerced confessions.

Memo to Rice: Bush may have been “the Decider,” but he didn’t have the authority to make an illegal act magically legal.

Not coming to next week’s session is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who in the final days of the administration argued with Mr. Bush about his failure to pardon Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury and other counts for his role in the leak of Valerie Wilson’s employment with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Cheney also broke with the President on a same-sex marriage ban, firing Donald Rumsfeld, overturning Washington DC’s gun ban, and removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror.

(ThinkProgress has been keeping a close eye on developments with the Bush library, and we will continue to do so. Read our related posts here.)

RICE: My view is, we got to do our way. We did our best. We did some things well, some things not so well. Now they get their chance. And I agree with the president; we owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it. [...] These are quality people. I know them. They love the country and they won’t make the same decisions, perhaps, that we did. But I believe they’ll do what they think is best for the country.

Watch it:

President Obama hit back at Cheney on 60 Minutes last Sunday and The Hill reported this week that congressional Republicans are urging him “to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.”

ROSE: But you didn’t believe it had anything to do with 9/11.

RICE: No. No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11.

ROSE: No one.

RICE: I was certainly not. The President was certainly not. … That’s right. We were not arguing that.

Rose also tried to press Rice on whether Cheney pushed the link, but she didn’t answer. Watch it:

Of course, there was no link between Saddam and 9/11. But these supposed ties formed the basis of the administration’s causus belli. A letter from the White House to the House Speaker on March 18, 2003, read:

“(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

In his book, Bush At War, Bob Woodward noted that Bush said after 9/11, “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now.” Rice was no exception either. On Sept. 15, 2002, she said that Saddam had “links to terrorism [that] would include al-Qaeda.” As late as September 2006, she remarked, “there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back for a decade.” Cheney still believes there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

In recent weeks, former Bush administration officials have continued to push the link. Bush maintains that he was right to make a false link between Iraq and 9/11. Former press secretary Ari Fleischer said last week, “But after September 11th, having been being hit once, how could we take a chance that Saddam Hussein might not strike again?”

I met last week with a number of career State Department employees and was surprised when one said she was looking forward to the “Glinda Party” next week. I asked her: if Hillary was Glinda, the Good Witch of the South from the Wizard of Oz, did that make Condoleezza Rice the Wicked Witch of the West?

“You’re on to it,” she said. Another person pointed out to me that after Rice’s arrival in 2005 the tone of official State Department publications changed; they began to praise and glorify Rice. “No prior secretary,” said the twenty-year veteran, “did anything like this.”

Clinton was given what the LA Times dubbed a “celebrity welcome” this morning at the State Department.

Next week, “change is coming to America,” as President George W. Bush wraps up his tenure as one of the worst American presidents ever. He wasn’t able to accomplish such an ignominious feat all by himself, however; he had a great deal of help along the way. The ThinkProgress team heralds the conclusion of the Bush 43 presidency by bringing you our list of the top 43 worst Bush appointees. Did we miss anyone? Who should have been ranked higher? Let us know what you think.

1. Dick Cheney — The worst Dick since Nixon. The man who shot his friend while in office. The “most powerful and controversial vice president.” Until he got the job, people used to actually think it was a bad thing that the vice presidency has historically been a do-nothing position. Asked by PBS’s Jim Lehrer about why people hate him, Cheney rejected the premise, saying, “I don’t buy that.” His top placement in our survey says otherwise.

2. Karl Rove — There wasn’t a scandal in the Bush administration that Rove didn’t have his fingerprints all over — see Plame, Iraq war deception, Gov. Don Siegelman, U.S. Attorney firings, missing e-mails, and more. As senior political adviser and later as deputy chief of staff, “The Architect” was responsible for politicizing nearly every agency of the federal government.

3. Alberto Gonzales — Fundamentally dishonest and woefully incompetent, Gonzales was involved in a series of scandals, first as White House counsel and then as Attorney General. Some of the most notable: pressuring a “feeble” and “barely articulate” Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.

4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled its aftermath. Rumsfeld is also responsible for authorizing the use of torture against terror detainees in U.S. custody; according to a bipartisan Senate report, Rumsfeld “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

5. Michael Brown — This former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association was appointed by Bush to head FEMA in 2003. After Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Brownie promptly did a “heck of a job” bungling the government’s relief efforts, and was sent back to Washington a few days later. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

6. Paul Wolfowitz — As Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, Wolfowitz was one of the primary architects of the Iraq war, arguing for the invasion as early as Sept. 15, 2001. Testifying before Congress in February 2003, Wolfowitz said that it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Wolfowitz eventually admitted that “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” as a justification for war, “because it was the one reason everyone [in the administration] could agree on.”

7. David Addington — “Cheney’s Cheney” was the “most powerful man you’ve never heard of.” As the leader of Bush’s legal team and Cheney’s chief of staff, Addington was the biggest proponent of some of Bush’s most notorious legal abuses, such as torture and warrantless surveillance, and is a loyal follower of the so-called unitary executive theory.

8. Stephen Johnson — The “Alberto Gonzales of the environment,” EPA Administrator Johnson subverted the agency’s mission at the behest of the White House and corporate interests, suppressing staff recommendations on pesticides, mercury, lead paint, smog, and global warming.

9. Douglas Feith — Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005, Feith headed up the notorious Office of Special Plans, an in-house Pentagon intelligence shop devised by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to produce intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. A subsequent investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found the OSP’s work produced “conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

10. John Bolton — As Undersecretary of State, Bolton offered a strong voice in favor of invading Iraq and pushed for the U.S. to disengage from the International Criminal Court and key international arms control agreements. A recess appointment landed Bolton the job of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, despite his stringent animosity toward the world body. Today, he spends his time calling for war with Iran.

11. John Yoo — As a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo authored a series of legal memos giving military interrogators authority to use torture and coercive techniques when interviewing terrorist suspects. Yoo said that only those techniques that inflict pain equivalent to “death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions” constitute torture. Last year, he refused to answer whether or not the president could order a detainee to be buried alive.

12. Ari Fleischer — Bush’s first press secretary helped redefine the role as that of liar-in-chief rather than informer of the public, earning a reputation as “the world’s most dishonest flack.” Whereas his successors sometimes looked uncomfortable lying, Fleischer was having fun, spinning a cowed and gullible press corps through two massive tax cuts and the initiation of a war undertaken on false pretenses.

13. John Ashcroft — In 2003, as Bush’s first Attorney General, Ashcroft approved waterboarding and other torture techniques on detainees. Ashcroft’s nomination was controversial, as he had a history of opposing school desegregation. The chief architect of the invasive Patriot Act, Ashcroft maintains to this day that Bush is “among the most respectful of all leaders ever” of civil liberties.

14. Henry Paulson — Even as the financial system was crashing down around him, Treasury Secretary Paulson insisted for months that the banking system was “safe and sound.” Once he decided that the economy needed saving, Paulson requested nearly unfettered authority to send billions of taxpayer dollars to banks with no oversight.

15. L. Paul Bremer — This Presidential Medal of Freedom winner took over the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. Under his mismanagement, the insurgency exploded in Iraq. Bremer claimed he had all the troops he needed to secure the country, overestimated the strength of the new U.S.-trained Iraqi army, disbanded the Iraqi army leaving thousands of Iraqi soldiers with no income and no occupation, and enacted a de-Baathification law that barred many experienced Iraqis from government positions.

16. Bradley Schlozman — As a recent DOJ Inspector General report demonstrates, Schlozman was a central figure in Bush’s politicization of the Justice Department. Violating civil service laws, Schlozman used political and ideological considerations to ensure that only “right-thinking Americans” received jobs. He eventually lied to Congress about his efforts.

17. J. Steven Griles — A former energy lobbyist and no. 2 official in the Interior Department, Griles went to jail for lying to Congress about illegal favors he did for corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Griles also abused his position “to unlock nearly every legal barrier to exploitation” of our nation’s oil and mineral reserves. Before his conviction, Griles left the White House to become a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.

18. Condoleezza Rice — As Bush’s national security adviser, Rice was another strong advocate for invading Iraq, once famously warning that the U.S. should attack Iraq and not wait for solid proof of its WMD because “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Rice also ignored an urgent warning from the CIA before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that a strike inside the U.S. was imminent.

19. Scooter Libby — Cheney’s former chief of staff was a key player in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame as part of the Bush administration’s quest to punish Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publishing an op-ed debunking one of the White House’s main justifications for invading Iraq. Libby was ultimately convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in a federal investigation into Plame’s outing but later had his 30-month prison sentence commuted by Bush.

20. Monica Goodling — Goodling was the most notorious graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University during her tenure in the Justice Department. As the White House liaison at the DOJ, she based the department’s hiring of candidates on their sexual preference, GOP loyalty, and adherence to conservative ideology.

21. Alphonso Jackson — As Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Jackson let the U.S. housing market crumble while he was busy giving lucrative contracts to his golfing buddies, retaliating against Bush critics, and erecting giant photo homages to himself.

22. Michael Hayden — As director of the National Security Agency, Hayden ran Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and misled Congress about the program’s legality. After moving to the CIA, he dismissed the destruction of evidence implicating the CIA in torture as “in line with the law.”

23. Lurita Doan — The former head of the General Services Administration (GSA)who doled out a no-bid contract to a friend, Doan famously hosted a meeting of White House political operatives where she asked how GSA employees could “help ‘our candidates’ in the next election.” After the Office of Special Counsel called for her firing, she was forced to resign

24. Gale Norton — A former industry lobbyist and Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior, Norton pushed a radical ideological agenda “through regulatory rollbacks, suppression of science, preferential treatment, and collusion with industry” — including doctoring scientific findings on the impacts of oil drilling on caribou. After resigning under the cloud of ties to Jack Abramoff, she joined Shell Oil.

25. Lester Crawford — After promising to act on the morning-after contraceptive pill during his confirmation hearings, the former FDA Commissioner “indefinitely postponed nonprescription sales of emergency contraception over the objections of staff scientists who had declared the pill safe.” Crawford resigned after just two months on the job and later pleaded guilty “to charges that he hid his ownership of stock in food and drug companies that his agency regulated.”

26. Harriet Miers — Well-known for being Bush’s failed Supreme Court nominee, Miers also thought it was “important” to her as White House Counsel that Rove protege Tim Griffin was installed as a U.S. Attorney, making her a central figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal. She is said to have called Bush “the most brilliant man she had ever met.”

27. Hans Von Spakovsky — Originally a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, Spakovsky “injected partisan political factors into decision-making” and used every opportunity “to make it difficult for voters — poor, minority and Democratic — to go to the polls.” In 2008, Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration for the FEC, following months of opposition from lawmakers and civil rights groups.

28. Tommy Franks — As head of U.S. Central Command from 2000 to 2003, Franks oversaw Osama bin Laden’s great escape from Afghanistan, gave orders for the stabilization of Iraq via PowerPoint, assumed that the U.S. would draw down to 25,000 troops by the end of 2004, and had American soldiers stand idly by as chaos and lawlessness took hold after the invasion.

29. Thomas Scully — As chief administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Scully was the White House’s head negotiator on the Medicare prescription drug bill. Scully threatened to fire chief actuary Richard Foster if he revealed that Bush’s Medicare Part D legislation “would cost 25% to 50% more than the Bush administration’s public estimates.”

30. Julie MacDonald — A top Interior Department appointee, MacDonald “interjected herself personally and profoundly” and “tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species” over a five-year period, intimidating the staff with “abrupt and abrasive, if not abusive” tactics. MacDonald also leaked government documents to a young acquaintance whom she met while playing “internet role-playing games.”

31. William Haynes — As the former general counsel at the Defense Department, he was part of a five-person team of high-level administration lawyers, dubbed the “War Council,” that tossed the Geneva Conventions aside and hatched out the legal framework for torture in secret meetings.

32. David Safavian — Safavian was (twice) tried and convicted for his role in the jack Abramoff scandal. Safavian was found guilty of “lying and obstructing justice” in an attempt to cover-up “his many efforts to assist Abramoff in acquiring two properties controlled by the GSA.”

33. James Connaughton — As chairman of the White House Council of Environmental Quality, Connaughton wrote EPA press releases downplaying the danger of the air quality in lower Manhattan following 9/11. “A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters,” Connaughton insisted “there’s a lot of disagreement” about humans’ impact on global warming, and he touted a bogus study purporting to show that the 20th century was not unusually warm.

34. William Luti — A former Navy officer and Cheney aide, Luti was dispatched to the Pentagon in 2001 to work underneath Feith to find “evidence” to support his boss’s belief in conspiracy theories linking Saddam to al Qaeda. Luti was an integral component of Cheney’s campaign to pressure intelligence professionals to conform their judgments to administration policy rather than reality.

35. Susan Orr — As Assistant Deputy Secretary for Population Affairs, this former Family Research Council officialIt’s not a medical necessity that you have [contraception].”

36. Christopher Cox — Under Chairman Cox, the Securities and Exchange Commission censored internal reports showing that it ignored critical signs pointing to Wall Street’s meltdown. Cox’s SEC also failed to detect Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, despite a decade of warnings.

37. Elliott Abrams — An Iran-Contra convict pardoned by Bush 41, Abrams was named by Bush 43 as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. As a foundingIsrael’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon into Syria and advocated a Fatah coup after Hamas won the February 2006 Palestinian elections.

38. Philip Cooney — A former oil lobbyist who served as chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Cooney doctored climate reports to “soften” words and phrases linking greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. After his political interference was revealed, Cooney left the White House to become a lobbyist for Exxon.

39. Colin Powell — Though Bush called him “an American hero” when he appointed him to be the first African-American Secretary of State, Powell placed an ugly “blot” on his record when he pushed the Bush administration’s faulty case for the Iraq war in a speech to the U.N. on Feb.5, 2003, using inaccurate information. Liberal hawks and the media rallied around Powell’s false case, calling it the “winning hand” for war.

40. Elaine Chao — The Labor Secretary made it through all eight years of the Bush administration, driving morale at the Labor Department so low that staffers threw a “good-riddance party” to cheer her departure. She leaves behind a “deeply troubled department” that “spent eight years attacking workers’ rights, strong workplace health and safety rules, and unions while they carried the water for Big Business.”

41. Julie Myers — After being hired as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement based on little more than her personal connections, Myers made herself famous by awarding “Most Original Costume” to an employee who dressed up in blackface and a prison costume for Halloween. She was also heavily criticized for conducting politically-motivated immigration raids.

42. Wade Horn — As Assistant Secretary for Community Initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn funneled millions of tax-payer dollars into right-wing abstinence-only programs. Shortly before he resigned, it was revealed that he had given nearly $1 million “to the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI), where he was the president for at least three years until joining the Bush administration in 2001.”

43. George Deutsch — As a young, inexperienced press officer for NASA, Deutsch “told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word ‘theory’ at every mention of the Big Bang.” He resigned in 2006 after it was discovered he had lied on his resume, falsely claiming that he had a journalism degree from Texas A&M.

Dishonorable Mentions: Bush appointees who didn’t quite make the list included a child pornography aficionado, a patron of hookers, a shoplifter, a mail fraudster, an operator of an illegal horse gambling ring, and a CIA official who took bribes in the form of prostitutes.

He said that Rice spent an “unprecedented” three days working on the resolution, and that the United States drafted a big portion of the resolution, which he described as “very reasonable.”

Mark Leon Goldberg asks, “What’s curious to me, at least, is why the United States would not vote in favor of a resolution that its ambassador considered ‘very reasonable’ and its Secretary of State worked so hard on drafting?”

In part because of this disregard for the public, President Bush leaves office with the lowest approval ratings in modern history — 34 percent. In an exit interview yesterday with Larry King, Bush made clear that he is quite happy ignoring the public, saying that he doesn’t “give a darn” that Americans simply disdain him:

KING: How do you feel personally when you — you see the ratings and the polls that — and have you at 25, 30 percent…

BUSH: I don’t give a darn. I feel the same way as when they had me at 90 plus.

KING: The same?

BUSH: Yes, look it — these opinion polls are nothing but a, you know, a shot of yesterday’s news.

Watch it:

Yesterday, in an interview with Bloomberg, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went a step further, arguing that the she doesn’t “care about perceptions” of the U.S. abroad:

Q: Why do you think we don’t get enough credit – you don’t get enough, he doesn’t get enough credit then? Because the perception is is that the U.S. has not smartly exercised its power around the world.

RICE: Oh, I don’t care about perceptions, Mike. I’ve learned in –

Q: But can you not (inaudible)?

RICE: No, of course, you can – you don’t – you shouldn’t.

According to Pew, “positive views of the United States declined in 26 of the 33 countries where the question was posed in both 2002 and 2007.” Curiously, in his recent press conference, Bush remarked, “I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged.”

Larry King asked Bush, “Don’t you want to be liked?” “Kind of,” admitted Bush, adding that “you really want to be liked on the day that really matters, when you are running for president, election day.” Apparently, on the other days, Bush can be as reckless as he wants.

In a conversation that stretched to 75 minutes — and which Rice seemed reluctant to end — the secretary of state said she was counting the hours until Jan. 20. But she yielded little ground in defense of her record or the administration’s performance over the past eight years. After being peppered with questions about regrets, she joked, “Aren’t you going to say, ‘Aren’t you thrilled that . . .?’ ” [...]

Arguing that Iraq shows signs of becoming an inclusive state — it even “declared Christmas a national holiday” — Rice said that if the country eventually emerges as a democratic, multiethnic state that has friendly ties with the United States, “that will be more important than what anybody thought in 2002 or 2003.”

For the record, the United States has declared only Christian holidays as national holidays.

But in reality, Rice was essentially ready to support the resolution — until a last-minute intervention from President Bush. In a speech in Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragged that he called Bush at the last minute, urging that the U.S. not vote to support the resolution. Bush acquiesced to Olmert’s demands:

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.”I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour.”

Rice had worked extensively on the resolution with Arab, British, and French foreign ministers. “She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour,” Olmert said.

In a briefing Friday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack maintained that “we fully support the text, the objectives, and the goals of that resolution” and boasted that the “resolution never would have come into being as it was without the efforts of Condoleezza Rice up there.” But he struggled to explain how the Department could both abstain and support the resolution:

Q: So we — so when the secretary comes out and you come out and you say, We support this resolution, we support the language in it, we support the goals, why — what message does it send when you don’t vote for it? I mean, it’s just, it’s completely inconsistent, no?

McCORMACK: Well, you’re — you’re certainly welcome to your interpretation.

“Look, it’s a nuanced argument,” McCormack said. The simple reality, however, is that Bush overrode Rice at the behest of Olmert. Ironically, asked whether he thought Bush had ordered Rice to abstain at the eleventh hour, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said, “I don’t know.”

Q: Looking at the big picture of what’s the whole foreign policy of this Administration – you come out of the academic tradition so I think it’s fair to ask, what kind of grade do you give yourself and this Administration on foreign policy?

RICE: Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the subject. I’m sure that there are some that deserve an A-plus and some that deserve a lot less. … We’ve left a lot of good foundations.

Q: You know, you say that, but the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a new report very recently. On the very first page it says, “The U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere.” … It has to be more than just a perception problem.

RICE: No. Rita, first of all, it depends on where you’re talking about. In two of the most populous countries, China and India, the United States is not just well regarded for its policies, but well regarded.

When pressed further, Rice responded by saying, “It’s not a popularity contest.”

While the U.S. is indeed well-regarded in India, Rice’s claim that the U.S. is “well regarded” in China is puzzling. The Pew Survey that Braver noted found that in China, the U.S. is viewed favorably by just 41 percent of the country. Similarly, just 30 percent of China has confidence in the Bush administration. A BBC poll from April of this year found similar results for many other nations around the world.

Overall, the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda has seen few successes. U.S. influence abroad is predicted to decline over the next 20 years. The U.S. military is weaker now than it was five years ago, while the State Department is suffering from staffing shortages and low morale. The recent violence in Israel dramatically highlights the fact that Bush largely ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No matter how many times Rice repeats herself, the fact that the world does not look kindly on the Bush administration’s foreign policy record will not change.

Also during the interview, Rice would soon “start to thank this president for what he’s done.”

As part of an investigation into pre-war intelligence claims, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked the White House to provide examples of times that the CIA had cleared such uranium references for use in speeches. On January 6, 2004, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a letter to Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) on behalf of Condoleezza Rice that claimed the CIA had “orally cleared” the uranium claim for two of Bush’s speeches.

But in a new memo, House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that he has found evidence contradicting Gonzales’ assertions:

The information the Oversight Committee has received casts serious doubt on the veracity of the representations that Mr. Gonzales made on behalf of Dr. Rice. Contrary to Mr. Gonzales’s assertions, the Committee has received evidence that the CIA objected to the uranium claim in both speeches, resulting in its deletion from the President’s remarks.

When White House speechwriters tried to put the uranium claim into Bush’s Sept. 12, 2002 speech to UN, the CIA rejected it because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech”:

During an interview with the Committee, John Gibson, who served as Director of Speechwriting for Foreign Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), stated that he tried to insert the uranium claim into this speech at the request of Michael Gerson, chief White House speechwriter, and Robert Joseph, the Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation, and Homeland Defense at the NSC. According to Mr. Gibson, the CIA rejected the uranium claim because it was “not sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech.” Mr. Gibson stated that the CIA “didn’t give that blessing,” the “CIA was not willing to clear that language,” and “[a]t the end of the day, they did not clear it.”

When National Security Council staff refused to take the uranium claim out of Bush’s Sept. 26, 2002 speech, Jami Miscik, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA, called Rice personally to request it be removed:

According to Ms. Miscik, the CIA’s reasons for rejecting the uranium claim “had been conveyed to the NSC counterparts” before the call, and Dr. Rice was “getting on the phone call with that information.” Ms. Miscik told Dr. Rice personally that the CIA was “recommending that it be taken out.” She also said “[i]t turned out to be a relatively short phone call” because “we both knew what the issues were and therefore were able to get to a very easy resolution of it.”

According to Waxman, Rice refused to testify to the Committee about the pre-war claims, so he is unable to say “how she would explain the seeming contradictions between her statements and those of Mr. Gonzales on her behalf and the statements made to the Committee bv senior CIA and NSC officials.”

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war?

SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq.

QUESTION: Really?

SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Watch it:

Rice’s pride is misplaced. Indeed, leaving aside the fact that the war was predicated on false intelligence, Rice cannot credibly argue as a “political scientist” that invading Iraq was in the interest of the U.S. “geostrategically.”

Indeed, Iraq posed no military threat to the United States in 2003. As Rice herself explained in July of 2001, Saddam Hussein had been unable to reconstitute himself militarily following the 1991 Gulf War. More importantly, the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region and empowered Iran politically and militarily. And contrary to neo-conservative predictions, Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Contrary to Rice’s assessment of the strategic value of the war in Iraq, a group of the some of the nation’s most celebrated political scientists argued in a paid advertisement in the New York Times on the eve of the Iraq war that the invasion was not in America’s strategic interests and predicted several of the negative effects of the war:

View the full ad here.

Despite her pride, Rice was — and remains — wrong about invading Iraq.

RICE: I think that the United States, under President Bush, has actually used the mechanisms and the councils of the United Nations more than they’ve been used maybe ever, whether it is insisting that Security Council resolutions that have been passed be respected, [or] whether it is seeking to deal with human rights and tyranny cases like Zimbabwe or Burma.

Indeed, the Bush White House has been spending a lot of time lately trying to rewrite the history of the last eight years, mainly due to the fact that President Bush’s failed policies have made him one of the most unpopular outgoing U.S. presidents in modern history.

But Rice has been playing along as well and this latest attempt at legacy building has no basis in reality. The Bush administration’s complete disregard of the U.N.’s will during the run-up to the Iraq war is the obvious example. The administration completely ignored the work of the U.N.’s weapons inspectors (UNMOVIC) at that time and instead attacked Iraq on false WMD pretenses before they could finish the job. Moreover, in 2004, then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the U.S.-led invasion illegal and “not in conformity with the U.N. charter.”

In 2004, the Bush administration also tried (and failed) to remove Mohamed El-Baradei as head of the IAEA — the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog — for being too soft on Iran.

But to top it all off, in 2005, President Bush installed U.N. hater and fervent war hawk John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the world body. Bush wanted Bolton so badly, he “resorted to the 17-month recess appointment to circumvent” opposition to Bolton in the Senate. Bolton famously said “there is no such thing as the United Nations” and if the U.N. building in New York “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Bush even found space to criticize the U.N. in his final address to the general assembly, saying the organization “only pass[es] resolutions decrying terrorist attacks after they occur” instead of doing something to prevent them “in the first place.”

In 2006, Annan’s deputy, Mark Malloch Brown noted that “[i]n recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage” between the U.S. and the U.N. Indeed, new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he looks forward to “a new era of partnership” with Obama.