Intro note: I wish every American, no matter their political beliefs, could read the links in this post alone. They represent a truly stunning two day harvest that I believe would help our country overcome a host of impediments to a healthy democracy and an ethical nation.

Jim Hoagland at WaPo calls Bush’s Vietnam card what it is: political desperation.

Next comes the $15 million ad campaign to sell the war all over again, which Massimo Calabresi of Time Magazine labels a ‘risky gambit’ before quoting Bush:

“Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price for American credibility, but the terrorists see it differently. We must listen to the words of the enemy.”

So Bush’s new strategy is proven once again to be the same old strategy: listen to Bin Laden or Zawahiri and let that define our response. That’s not militarily wise, as it puts Al Qaida effectively in charge of our war planning. I guess he skipped The Art of War seminar in his National Guard awol days of wine and nose candy.

The man has no shame, lecturing military vets that Vietnam ended too soon. A couple of million Vietnamese died, most before our departure. The post-withdrawal blood pool was smaller than the pre.

If there’s analogies to be drawn, it’s that we’ve only caused several hundred thousand Iraqi deaths. Both wars were begun based on lies. By driving enemy soldiers across national borders, we provoked unintended regional side effects that proved especially bloody in Cambodia and will have to wait and see the impact on Iran, Turkey, Kuwait and elsewhere in the current Bush fiasco.

And what does the long awaited national intel report say? From Warren P. Strobel and Leila Fadel of McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — A new assessment of Iraq by U.S. intelligence agencies provides little evidence that the American troop “surge” has accomplished its goals and predicts that the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki will become “more precarious” in the months ahead.

A declassified summary of the report released Thursday said that violence remains high, warns that U.S. alliances with former Sunni Muslim insurgents could undercut the central government and says that political compromises are “unlikely to emerge” in the next 12 months.

Perhaps most strikingly, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that factions and political players in and outside Iraq already are maneuvering in expectation of a drawdown of U.S. troops — moves that could later heighten sectarian bloodshed.

“The national intelligence assessment confirms what we feared the most: The U.S. has become deeply embroiled in Iraq’s civil war,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

A White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, showed that President Bush’s decision to send an additional 28,000 troops to Iraq is beginning to have an effect.

While it said that the surge has brought “measurable, but uneven improvements in security,” the report didn’t repeat recent military assertions that civilian deaths have decreased by 50 percent. Instead, it said, “the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high.”

It also suggested that while violence is no longer increasing, any progress might be temporary. “The steep escalation of violence has been checked for now,” the report said, noting, “Overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks.” It provided no specific statistics.

The report also said that al Qaida in Iraq “retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks,” and it warned that the current U.S. tactic of recruiting former Sunni Muslim insurgents to defeat al Qaida in Iraq — one of the pillars of Petraeus’ efforts — could backfire.

Nor has the surge brought about Sunni reconciliation with Maliki’s government, the report said. Worse, it said, such “bottom-up” security initiatives could pose risks to the Maliki government by undermining central authority and reinvigorating armed opposition to the government in Baghdad.

But at least we’ll get democracy, right?

RIGHT?!?!!!?

It appears Bush is as good a historian as he’s proven to be as a respectful Constitutional scholar, a war planner, an Air National Guard pilot, a business owner and a respecter of life itself.

And he’ll never take responsibility for any of his multitude of errors. It’ll always be someone else’s fault. This isn’t even politics as usual. This is typical behavior for a spoiled adolescent that’s never been punished for anything.

Yes, it’s nice to see the MSM starting to root out all the big lies and the big crooks whose thefts just add to the insults and injuries to this nation and Iraq by the worst president ever.

It would be nicer, of course, if US broadcast networks would relate ALL the stories mentioned in these links. Then we’d really have a Fourth Estate again, worthy of all the men, women and children whose lives have been sacrificed by Bush, supposedly to fight terrorism.

And as long as the worst President ever is drawing on analogies between Iraq and Vietnam, let’s consider one more.

The number of Vietnamese attacks and Iraqi attacks on our country.

That would be Zero.

This will be the real legacy of George ‘Zero’ Bush: the deaths, the thefts, the lies, the financial costs, the torture, murder and rapes, the Constitution breaking, the attacks on the reputations of good patriotic Americans… all done because of nothing except Bush’s claim that he had to pre-empt the threat of something he imagined and sold as possible.

And he dishonors the victims of 9-11 by continuing to tie one bad man - the late Saddam Hussein - to their deaths, instead of finishing the honest job of taking out the real leaders of that attack.

Update: Will the newly revitalized MSM get the word out in time? If not, as Larisa Alexandrovna
of Raw Story now notes, we’ll have a fun new round of lies and murder and humans sacrificed for the bushit of President Zero and the real instigator, Vice-President Soulless Evil.