It’s like the difference between AIDS and SuperAIDS.

Things got kind of heated the other night at a post-screening discussion of the “Frost/Nixon” movie. Chris Wallace of Fox News reportedly challenged a statement by one of the researchers for the actual Frost/Nixon interview which compared Bush negatively to Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon back in the spotlight

Wallace argued that Nixon’s crimes were in the interest of personal gain, while Bush’s were in the interest of national security.

So this is where the shaping of Bush’s legacy stands? His supporters are just trying to help him jump the “Worse Than Nixon” hurdle?

We’re betting the question of who was the worse president will be debated for years to come, but we’d like to weigh in with our pick right now.

It’s Bush. Bush is a worse president than Richard Nixon.

Chris Wallace made his argument, but we’ve got 10 arguments of our own…

1. Nixon tried to steal an election. Bush succeeded.
2. Nixon never responded to a domestic attack by invading the wrong country.
3. Nixon managed to end his war. Bush is just gonna let someone else figure his out.
4. No major cities were allowed to drown under Nixon’s administration.
5. Nixon had the decency to resign. Bush didn’t.
6. Nixon’s VP also had the decency to resign. Bush’s VP is the worst human being who ever lived.
7. No one ever called Nixon’s economy “the worst since the Great Depression.”
8. Nixon built our relationship with China. Bush destroyed our relationship with everybody.
9. Nixon only wire-tapped the Democratic National Committee. Bush wiretapped everybody.
10. Nixon was intelligent enough to be called “Tricky Dick.” Bush is stupid enough to be called “a fucking imbecile.”

That pretty much clinches it. If we’ve left out any supporting arguments, or if anyone anywhere can think of one reason why the Bush administration wasn’t entirely awful, let us know in the comments section. But our mind is made up, so we’re going to go ahead and give Bush the plaque.

(Source: Anonymous e-mail)

Of course according to the Google alerts, Karl Rove is running all over the country trying to convince people that Bush has a legacy to defend. What legacy? Can anyone suggest one thing he did as president that was good for the country? Just one? Anybody?

President George W. Bush is still intent on rewarding his corporate cronies from the White House as he is on the way out the door. And he is using his power of presidential pardons to let some shaky characters off the hook, including a man who killed three bald eagles, and Robert Earl Mohon Jr. of Grant, Ala., who was convicted of conspiracy to distribute marijuana.

Maybe Mohon was Bush’s drug dealer when he was here in 1972 partying?

AP: Bush Pardon’s Bald Eagle Killer?
AP: Bush Pardons 14, Commutes Two Sentences

But Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) introduced H.Res. 1531 on Friday urging President Bush not to pardon senior administration officials for crimes the president authorized.

Nadler’s resolution urges Congress to investigate those crimes and any pardons relating to them, and urges the Attorney General (current or future) to appoint an independent counsel to prosecute those crimes.

President George W. Bush may have committed crimes involving the mistreatment of detainees, the extraordinary rendition of individuals to countries known to engage in torture, illegal surveillance of United States citizens, unlawful leaks of classified information, obstruction of justice, political interference with the conduct of the Justice Department, and other illegal acts and that Bush has been urged to grant preemptive pardons to senior administration officials who might face criminal prosecution for actions taken in the course of their official duties.

These are major steps towards holding George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other senior officials accountable for their crimes and thereby upholding the rule of law, rather than allowing presidents to become dictators, according to Bob Fertik at Democrats.com.

“Rep. Nadler’s leadership is crucial because he chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties and can use his credibility and clout to move the resolution forward either during the lame duck session in December or when the next Congress convenes on January 6,” he said in a press release.

So the next step is to persuade as many Representatives as possible to co-sponsor H.Res. 1531.

Will members of Congress from Alabama join this effort, including Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham, who is traveling all over the state running for governor in 2010? Stay tuned…

Sign the petition here

Also, call your Representative at 202-224-3121 and speak with the legislative assistant who handles judiciary matters.

If your Representative says he or she will co-sponsor, please let us know by commenting on this whipping page.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I’ve got an idea for a new song for the Dixie Chicks. Maybe they could sweep up the redneck capital of Nashville with it.

After sleeping late this Thursday morning, and after I got the coffee going and the laptop setup to blog, there was the mug of George W. Bush, our lame-duck president, making another one of those misleading morning speeches that define his failed eight years in office.

Then the next face to hit the screen was Sarah Palin, the diva of the so-called “New GOP,” the nitwit governor of Alaska who helped John McCain lose his bid for president, thank Dog.

I’m torn between two competing emotions.

On one hand, I want Bush and Palin off my TV.

Bush needs to go back to Crawford, Texas, and cut himself up into little pieces with his brush-cutting chain saw.

And Sarah Palin just needs to take her new wardrobe and go back to hunting wolves from helicopters in Alaska.

On the other hand, maybe it would be best to just keep these two anti-intellectual losers on the tube every day as a reminder to the independents in this country of how sad and pathetic the Republican Party is now.

If that is going to be the strategy for ratings, however, I’m just going to turn off the TV. I don’t want to see their faces any more or hear their idiocy.

A very smart man has now won the presidency. And he’s assembling a team of smart people to fix our national problems, at least the ones the federal government is best situated to deal with.

Like a majority of Americans, I have confidence that the Obama administration will be able to straighten out our economic issues, which will involve getting the U.S. military out of Iraq. And yes, it will involve helping U.S. automakers to survive.

As Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary Robert Reich has been saying in TV interviews, the federal government is the lender and spender of “last resort.”

And Obama is going to need Detroit to re-tool the American auto industry in the coming Green Revolution. Alabama could have been part of that, but they blew it. McCain won Alabama and managed a higher percentage of the white vote than any other state except maybe Oklahoma.

But now is the time to take the politics out of policy in this country. We’ve had enough after eight years of Karl Rove making all the decisions about what the Bush administration would do in order to try and create a Republican majority for the next generation. He failed in that. And he failed the country.

We now know that Bush was not “the decider” after all. Every decision Bush made was guided by the perceived effect on politics. But that is no way to run the government of the most powerful country in the world, not if your goal is long-term success.

So maybe it’s time for the Dixie Chicks to get in the studio and break out a new record, perhaps with the title song: Get Bush and Palin Off My TV!

The song that is ringing in my head for no apparent reason is Money For Nothing by Dire Straits, maybe because of the line in the song, “I want my MTV.”

[Video link]

I remember distinctly when that song came out and hit number one on the charts in 1985. I recall hearing it up loud in Johnny Wyker’s family hardware store in downtown Decatur, Alabama. I was a political reporter for The Decatur Daily at that time.

Wyker was a member of the one-hit wonder rock group Sailcat, which scored with the song “Motorcycle Mama” in 1972.

Another tragic story of an Alabama native who almost made the big time but blew it. Wyker got too drunk and stoned before a showcase performance in front of a major record label and vomited on stage. So much for Sailcat.

Karl Rove Halloween mask

The Dixie Chicks almost disappeared into obscurity when they became mired in political controversy after comments made by Natalie Maines about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush. Maines told a sold-out crowd in London, England, “We don’t want this war, this violence; and, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

But they made a major comeback in 2007 and won the coveted Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Taking The Long Way.

I have made a point of playing the first and third songs on the record at least once a week on the drums for the past two years, as a way of bashing out my anger on what Bush has done to this country. I have a mask of Karl Rove hanging on the wall of The Bunker right behind the drum set.

But now that Obama has won, I think it is time to retire the practice, burn the mask and bury the hatchet. Now if only Bush and Palin would get off my TV!

by Glynn Wilson

Some critics will dismiss Oliver Stone’s biographical movie “W.” on the life and times of George W. Bush for a lot of reasons, and it may be his worst film to date. In part, that may be because it was rushed together in 46 days to be released before the Nov. 4 presidential election, not so much to influence the election as some critics have suggested, but because it would have little audience interest and thus economic value after the vote to replace Bush.

But what criticism I’ve seen thus far, including from on high in New York, is typical of the limited sort of media criticism by journalists who pander to audiences in the fake attempt at objectivity who don’t understand film as art, or so-called movie reviewers who tend to focus on the technical details rather than the big picture.

Josh Brolin plays Bush being arrested in college…

This is what they don’t get. Stone is America’s Shakespeare in many ways. He is an artist as well as a storyteller. This is art imitating life. And even though he dropped out of Yale after making A’s while Bush finished making C’s, he’s smarter by a long shot than Bush — or any of his critics.

Since I am sort of famous for doing the definitive Bush AWOL story on that controversial time in his life in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1972, and since an editor in New York had tipped me off that part of my story might have been used in the script, I had to see the film on opening night to judge it for myself. And to complete the cultural experience, I went to see the movie in the suburbs east of Birmingham, expecting the action to be interrupted by the banter of suburban Alabama conservatives who still side with Bush politically.

But I guess the economic depression kept them away from paying the $9.50 ticket price, or maybe they just live in a dark cave and didn’t know about it, or wouldn’t support a “liberal” Stone film for any amount of money. Fewer than 10 people showed up.

I expected to laugh out loud throughout the film, based on what I had seen in the advance trailer and my own well-known views of our dufus president-king. Two teenaged girls sitting on the back row laughed a lot. But I only busted out once, when Bush, played by Josh Brolin, is president in the situation room trying to sell the war on Iraq to his cabinet. He can’t even remember the cliché: “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.”

He says, and this is based on real episodes from Bush’s life, I kid you not, “Fool me once shame on you, uh me, er … You can’t be fooled again.”

I wonder how many times the American people feel they have been fooled by Bush and his political guru Karl Rove, the spin master of Rosemary Beach. Shame on you?

This is a non-linear telling, where Stone starts out in a cabinet meeting during the discussion of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, then jumps back to a frat party at Yale in the 1960s. He goes back and forth between the young and older Bush, showing him in the oil business, while he briefly owned part of a Texas baseball team, and at key moments of his presidency, most notably when he has to be “the decider” on torture and spying and whether to invade Iraq based on the intel case for WMDs.

The one jail scene comes early on, but it is for pulling down the goal post after a Princeton football game, not for driving drunk or being busted for cocaine possession.

I did expect Stone to show Bush snorting cocaine and/or smoking pot, perhaps like some of the scenes in “Charlie Wilson’s War.” It is well known that he and Laura Bush smoked marijuana and she is alleged to have sold it in college. Maybe those scenes were left on the cutting-room floor to try to appease the critics and not encourage teenagers to follow in Bush’s footsteps in that regard, or to get that PG-13 rating. Or maybe Stone just didn’t have the time to complete his research as he did for “JFK.”

Either way, Bush is only shown as a pretzel-eating drunk, always downing Jack Daniels at bars and frat parties, when the research clearly shows that Bush’s whiskey of choice was Jim Beam.

Some of the most powerfully accurate material comes during the encounters with “Poppy,” the 41st President George H.W. Bush, who is always disappointed in George Jr.

Stone’s portrayal of Bush’s life makes use of his dreams of baseball in an empty stadium as a literary device, not just to caricature him, as some critics have suggested. And it could be true of many young men of Bush’s generation, so it’s not just about Bush. It’s a timeless statement about America in the second half of the 20th century and the early 21st.

The true story of Bush’s drive to gain the approval of his father is not limited to Bush’s experience, either. It is a real, psychological struggle faced by many young men in all kinds of cultures, as Shakespeare knew and portrayed so accurately and eloquently in Hamlet.

Stone’s “W.,” in other words, is our Hamlet, where the prince and then king is always seeking the favor of his father on one hand and his manly independence on the other.

“To be or not to be. That is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them,” King Hamlet laments, after being visited by the ghost of his father and while trying to decide whether to declare a war he thinks his father would support.

There is little doubt that Bush’s own drive to gain the approval of his father motivated him to run for office and then, once there, to declare war and invade Iraq “to finish the job.” That still gives Bush fans — and baseball fans who treat politics as sport — a line to cheer about.

Of course there were other factors, including the neo-con vision of world empire that required gaining control of Iraq’s oil. In the film, Richard Dreyfus as Vice President Dick Cheney shows us this plan better than any single piece of journalism ever could.

The premiere advice in Hamlet, though, comes in a line from Polonius to his son Laertes.

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Bush pursues the first part and ignores the latter, to his own downfall and ours, just as Polonius and Hamlet did in their time and in the play.

That should underscore the main point viewers should take away from the movie — and readers should take away from the Bush AWOL story.

America is not supposed to be a monarchy. If we continue to elect the flawed sons (or dufus princes) of would-be monarchs like those in the Bush family, we will suffer the same downfall as the kingdoms of Europe.

Oh, but wait. It’s too late. We already did.

And now, as Bush is about to be replaced in the White House, the American empire is over. Caput. Dead and gone.

We are about to be in the full grasp of another Great Depression. We brought this on ourselves by allowing the uneducated masses to elect someone so lacking in intellectual competence and curiosity as to allow a political PR man to run the federal government for eight years by press release.

If only we had listened to the journalists who warned of the dangers of reelecting Bush in 2004. . . .

We might not be in this mess today.

If only we had learned from Shakespeare. . . .