I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom

Cheney at the Pentagon: “Nine-eleven is a day of national unity. The memories stay with all of us because the attack was directed at all of us.” Obviously if it had been directed against brown-skinned people somewhere, we... or at least Cheney... would have forgotten all about it by now. “We were meant to take it personally, and we still do take it personally.” Yes, it’s all about us. Everything is always all about us.


“We have learned that there is a certain kind of enemy whose ambitions have no limits, and whose cruelty is only fed by the grief of others.” Cheney has met the enemy, and it is him.

“Yet in the conduct of this war the world has seen the best that is in our country.” I would really like to think that the “best that is in our country” has nothing to do with how we fight wars.


AP looks at the children in that Florida classroom, five years later. “[Bush’s] face just started to turn red,” says Tyler Radkey. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.”

“Not any more ah don’t.”

President Poopy Pants was interviewed by Matt Lauer (no transcript, and the video seems only to be playable in Internet Explorer). Nothing new, although the 11-minute interview was conducted standing, about a foot apart. Lauer asked Bush, who kept talking about fighting terrorism “within the law,” about secret CIA prisons. Bush, in pissed-off mode: “So what? Why is that not within the law?” He also tells us that he’s been “assured by our Justice Department that we were not torturing.”