The Speech

* laura has a rundown of The Speech. Larisa's version.

* digby on The Speech:

"we'll start a pool on when the Iran action is going to officially begin, ok?'

* tpm:

"President Bush has seen the Saddam execution video (not clear which one) and said today that it ranks just behind Abu Ghraib as the most damaging mistakes the U.S. has made in Iraq"

* Fineman via tpm:

"George W. Bush spoke with all the confidence of a perp in a police lineup. I first interviewed the guy in 1987 and began covering his political rise in 1993, and I have never seen him, in public or private, look less convincing, less sure of himself, less cocky. With his knitted brow and stricken features, he looked, well, scared. Not surprising since what he was doing in the White House library was announcing the escalation of an unpopular war."

* rudepundit:

"Tomorrow night, when the Commander-in-Chief reveals his great and mighty, brand spankin' new, shiny plan o' war, with its splendiferous promises of killing more troops (aka "sacrifice"), Bush may as well just show up and burp, fart, smirk, and wave. And scratch his ass as he walks off. Because that's how much of a difference it'll make, except, you know, to the lives of the additional troops. 20,000 is a real big number. Higher than he can count, no doubt.

And now that hideous, depraved fucker Saddam Hussein has been turned into a martyr, his final smile of "I won, George" the last living image of him, damn, Osama bin Laden's gotta be thinkin' about turnin' himself in, wondering how bad America (however much it wants to protest that it was the Iraqis who decided when Saddam would swing) will fuck up his trial and execution, making suicide bombers pop like birds on an ungrounded wire around the world.

Conservatives like to talk about the concept of "shame," when they themselves are shameless. George Bush has turned this superpower into a gigantic laughing stock. And the laughs just keep on coming."

* rudepundit:

"Senator Lindsey Graham, a man whose dubious sexuality fills the word "surge" with more repressed electricity than the battery of a jet fighter plane, remorsefully took the President's penis out of his mouth long enough to talk: "'It seems clear to me that the president has taken more positive control of this strategy,' said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of those pushing for more troops. 'He understands that the safety of the nation and his legacy is all on the line here.'"

How are those two things even remotely equal in significance? No, really, in what realms of cynical political gamesmanship can one even compare the "safety of the nation" with the "legacy" of a man? It's like saying, "He understands the severity of the Holocaust and how it hurts when you stub your toe." It ain't comparing apples and oranges. It's comparing apples and dust. Do Republicans actually realize that this is not about their Q rating - it's about blood and ripped and burned flesh? The horrible answer is that yes, they probably do, and they just don't care.

The Rude Pundit doesn't want his goddamn President to give a fuck about his legacy. He doesn't want anyone who supports him to give a fuck about his legacy. According to their Bible and their god, both of which they are so anxious to invoke, vanity, or "pride," is a fucking sin, and before it goeth the fall, motherfuckers."