Click above to watch Sean Wilentz, the author of our new cover story examining how Bush destroyed the Republican party, lay out exactly how the president did the deed — from transforming himself from a compassionate conservative into a right-winger to Dick Cheney to Hurricane Katrina.

[Video: Eric Helton]

You’d be hard-pressed to find a greater Jon Stewart enthusiast than myself, but last night’s interview with John McCain left me a little disappointed with the convivially caustic pundit.

About halfway through the interview — after signaling the end of “pleasantries” — Stewart invoked the unsinkable “Reverend Wright issue” and its accompanied queasiness among voters.

As Frank Rich wrote in the Sunday Times this week, McCain’s courting of maladjusted televangelist Rev. John Hagee’s endorsement should be no less vexing than Barack Obama’s relationship with Wright. Hagee, who speaks of the Catholic Church as “the Great Whore,” suggested Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for scheduling a gay parade through the streets of New Orleans.

After setting up the Wright segue, it looked like Stewart was going down that trail. “You have your own religious… person endorsing your campaign that Americans have expressed greater concern over,” he told McCain. “Will you take the opportunity right now to repudiate and denounce…

…President Bush?”

The line roused the audience yet proved a wasted opportunity in the end. McCain jokingly walked off the set, but there’s no doubt he was inwardly wiping his brow in relief.

Stewart’s friendship with the candidate is no secret; McCain, after all, has now appeared a whopping 13 times on the Daily Show, more than any other guest since Stewart took the helm in 1999. Though it’s unfair and unwise to expect a Russert-style grilling between buds on a faux news show, Stewart still could have – and should have – asked the Republican nominee about an issue that could potentially plague him as much as his competition.

You be the judge.

The final accounting of the hundreds of false administration statements that led us into war with Iraq has been assembled by the inestimable Center for Public Integrity.

Per their numbers, George Bush made 28 statements falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, inarguably the most explosive — and least defensible — claim in the run up to war.

Bush, Cheney & Co. were not alone in pushing this falsehood. They got an invaluable assist from Senator Hillary Clinton, who echoed their claim in her October 2002 floor speech before her vote “with confidence” to authorize the war:

There was never any proof for this claim of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Indeed, this alleged relationship was explicitly debunked in the National Intelligence Estimate… the one that the New York Senator never bothered to read before she voted:

From the New York Times:

In fact, the classified reports available to all senators at the time found that Iraq was not allied with Al Qaeda, and that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden harbored feelings of deep mistrust and enmity for each other… In an interview, [Former Florida Senator] Bob Graham said: “I don’t think any agency pretended to make a case that there was a strong linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. It wasn’t in the N.I.E.”

Maybe Hillary got snowed on the question of Iraq’s WMD. A lot of decent people did.

But she went out on a limb to promote the non-existent connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda — and in so doing participated in the snowing of America.

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing Iran from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” — George W. Bush, a couple months back

I puzzled for a bit over that distinction between WMD knowledge and actual weapons at the time. In light of the new NIE, it’s no wonder Bush was subtly trying to lower the bar for war.

Seriously. This guy is the best sound-bite politician in the business. Check out his latest gem: blasting Bush for saying president Musharraf hadn’t “crossed the line” and was still committed to democracy.

“What exactly would it take for the president to conclude Musharraf has crossed the line? Suspend the constitution? Impose emergency law? Beat and jail his political opponents and human rights activists? He’s already done all that. If the president sees Musharraf as a democrat, he must be wearing the same glasses he had on when he looked in Vladimir Putin’s soul.”

Delaware doesn’t bring any electoral college bounty, but who better than Biden to play the enforcer role?

Fran Townsend, Bush’s top Homeland Security adviser has resigned. We’ll miss Fran, if only for her doublespeak.

Once asked about the administration’s ‘failure’ to nab Osama bin Laden, Townsend objected to the premise of the question, calling it instead: “A success that hasn’t happened yet.”

From Jim Holt in the LRB (via the Daily Dish)

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. (more…)

This FARK.com poster really nails the news of the day:

Nothing says “suck it” more than a presidential veto on kids’ health care programs