Bush administration news stories on Newser

Help! We're Being Killed by Cuteness

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 6:17:56 CST

There is an epidemic of cuteness in the country, Jim Windolf writes, symptomatic of our national desire to be loved and taken care of after 8 years of George W. Bush and a much-diminished standing in the world. The signs are everywhere: giggling babies, LOLcats, cupcakes, “cutegasms,” the Mini-Cooper. It...

Cheney: Wilson Mission Was CIA 'Amateur Hour'

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:00:00 CDT

Dick Cheney's memory may have been a little iffy about the Valerie Plame leak, but Politico reports that the former veep left no room for doubt about his opinion of her husband's trip to Niger to investigate an Iraqi purchase of plutonium. "It was amateur hour out at the CIA,...

Cheney on Plame Leak: I Can't Recall

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:02:07 CDT

After years of effort by the Bush and Obama administrations to keep documents related to the CIA leak case secret, redacted portions of the special prosecutor’s 2004 interview with Dick Cheney released today show plenty of nothing. The then-VP apparently suffered acute memory loss: Cheney told Patrick Fitzgerald he couldn't...

Obama Lifts HIV+ Travel Ban

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:25:07 CDT

HIV-positive individuals will no longer be banned from visiting or immigrating to the US, President Obama announced today. The president discussed the revocation of the ban, which has stood since 1987, at today's signing of an extension of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS bill. That bill provides funding for HIV/AIDS testing...

Time to Act Presidential on Afghanistan

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:40:08 CDT

President Obama loves to blame things on George W. Bush, and on Monday he did it again, referring to the “long years of drift in Afghanistan.” He must be trying to “explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan,” writes Charles Krauthammer . In March, Obama solemnly announced a new...

No Clear Way for US to Prosecute Gitmo Prisoners

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:11:11 CDT

President Obama is edging closer to his goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison: Congress has approved detainee trials on US soil and the National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday, attempts to repair the damaged legality of President Bush’s military-commissions system. But hurdles remain, with legal scholars split on using...

Where Bush Was Bashed, Obama Gets Free Pass

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:35:41 CDT

Supporters of George Bush are miffed about the passes the media has given President Obama for trespasses the former president would likely have been excoriated for. “We have a joke about it. We’re going to start a website: IfBushHadDoneThat.com,” former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie tells Politico. Some examples of...

B+ for Obama Foreign Policy, F for Not Owning It

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:17:22 CDT

Despite the howls of protest over President Obama's Nobel Prize and the administration’s "dithering" on Afghanistan , the fact is that the new president’s foreign endeavors deserve good marks, says Juan Cole. Cole gives Obama an A for his Iranian statesmanship, a B for pulling...

It's Not Bush's Mess Anymore

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 5:47:52 CDT

President Obama needs to stop complaining that he inherited a mess and realize that the mess is now all his, writes Peggy Noonan. The White House is once again reminding people what dire straits the country was in when Obama's presidency began, but—as the president's free-falling poll numbers prove—...