You'd Think This Would Finally Be Enough...

Paul Waldman tells how Richard Clarke has punctured Bush's balloon (snippet):

....As Clarke describes it, when Bush took office in 2001 his national security team was decidedly uninterested in pursuing Al Qaeda, due in large part to their obsession with Iraq. At one point, Clarke told Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with Al Qaeda." Wolfowitz responded, "No, no no. We don't have to deal with Al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States." One would have thought that the shock of September 11 might have led the administration to shift their focus. But again, in the minds of Bush and other senior administration officials, all roads led to Saddam, facts and evidence be damned. Donald Rumsfeld wanted to respond to the attacks by bombing Iraq (Clarke initially assumed Rumsfeld must have been joking; he was not), while Clarke had an exchange with the President that is worth quoting at length (sections of the Clarke interview can be found on the CBS News website: "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. "I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' "He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report." Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. .. Do it again.' "I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer." From the day of 9/11 to the present, the degree to which the Bush administration has stood in the way of any and all investigation into September 11 is nothing less than an insult to the memory of every person who died on that day....

47% of Americans STILL believe Bush is doing a good job. At this point, it looks like the only thing that will stop him is if he is caught, on live national prime-time TV, murdering a sleeping baby with his bare hands.