The shortest list: the accomplishments of George W Bush got an entry...finally. The stupid daughter got married.

I am bothered enough by the prospect of a presidential candidate rising to prominence based almost entirely on his/her family connections. Of course this has happened before, although an argument could be made that a parent may pass on leadership qualities genetically. This is not so between spouses.

Can political affiliations also be genetic? It is more likely that the generational propogation of a certain type of religion is more analagous.

With this is mind, can we draw any suppositions about how Jenna Bush came to marry the son of a well-connected Republican politician?

FOR PREVENTING U.S. ALLIES IN IRAQ FROM BECOMING A BURDEN TO THEIR NEIGHBORS AND FOR MAKING THEM BENEFICIAL TO THE PRESIDENT AND THE GOOD PEOPLE OF CRAWFORD, TEXAS

(with apologies to Messrs Swift and Olbermann)

IT IS a melancholy object to think this weekend about the President and his family celebrating his daughter’s wedding in Crawford, Texas, when close to 5 million Iraqis have been displaced by violence in their country, thanks to his invasion and occupation of Iraq.

More than 2.4 million Iraqis have been forced to vacate their homes, and approximately 2.5 million have fled to Syria, Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Gulf States, unable to enter the countries of their liberators in Europe and America.  Thus, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, these Iraqis are forced to leave their homes and country, and beg for sustenance for their helpless families.  

Meanwhile, Crawford, Texas, in the present deplorable state of our kingdom, fights for its own survival as "the Home of George W. Bush."

Not everything is the Bush White House's fault.

Not everything.  

In this case, not fully their fault, but the contrast is too striking to go without comment.

The White House sent Laura Bush out to speak on the disastrous cyclone in Myanmar. She gave a prepared statement. And, then she took questions. And, the press had their chance to ask questions. Some were quite serious, quite on target.

But, toward the end the questions strayed to issues closer to Laura's heart. MSNBC, however, took a little time to pick up the shift of subject as you can see over at Huffington Post.  One side of the screen, disaster scenes from Myanmar/Burma, the other a laughing Laura chatting about Jenna's wedding.

Sigh ...

Another stain on America's image?

Yesterday Laura Bush was at the White House giving a press conference on the tragedy in Myanmar. Everything appears on the level until the very end when the focus shifts to the details of Jenna's upcoming wedding plans.

The first lady appears to totally lose focus on the crisis at hand and is all smiles about the blooming flowers and limestone etc. and to be fair its also the fault of the press for allowing this highly insensitive shift to occur.

The question is - is this something similar to when she said "nobody suffers from the war more than we do (she and her husband)" and a window into the psyche of the Bush's? Or is this just a mental lapse? Was it the fault of the Press?

Sometimes we have to give credit where credit is due and the Bush girls deserve some love from progressive bloggers despite their father. For the Clinton girl, you be the judge.

Jenna on McCain: I may not support McCain
Watching Larry King the other night had been diaried here, I was amazed to see Jenna Bush hedge her support for John McCain with her mother, the wife of the leader of the Republican Party on her side.

In Republican circles, this could constitute a form of sacrilege.

Speaking on Larry King Live last night, first daughter Jenna Bush, who appeared alongside first lady Laura Bush, confessed that she's not sure if she'll vote for the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, and even left open the possibility that she'd support either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton

I was listening to Green 960 this morning and heard audio of Jenna flashing her independence from the family loyality lock step. She didn't state that she is supporting McCain when asked about her position in the upcoming general election. Say What?

King asked Jenna Bush and her mother, Laura Bush, who appeared with her, whether they had a favorite between Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"My favorite is the Republican," said Laura Bush.

Her daughter wasn't as sure.

"I don't know," Jenna Bush said. "I mean, who isn't open to learning about the candidates? But, I mean, and I'm sure everybody is like that. But I really — I honestly have been too busy with books to really pay that much attention."

If you didn't see it last night Larry asked both who they are pulling for. I think Jenna's answer knocked her mom for a loop. Below is an excerpt from the shows transcript. If I can find the video I'll post it for those who may have missed it.

With her presidential wedding just weeks away, First Daughter Jenna Bush will once again be the subject of celebrity and political gossip alike.  Just a few years ago, the bar-hopping the Bush twin seemed destined to follow in her father's footsteps as a Republican Party Animal.  As it turns out, on abstinence policy and the election of John McCain - two issues near and dear to her GOP father's heart - Jenna Bush may not be much of a Republican at all.

During today's episode of NBC's 'The Today Show', Laura and Jenna Bush were guest co-hosts, probably to plug their new book.  I didn't care enough to watch it, but it occurred to me that serious journalists like Tim Russert might seize the opportunity to ask them serious questions.  (Ha ha!  I crack myself up sometimes.)  In that spirit, here are some questions that the Today show won't ask Laura and Jenna Bush.  

Last week,  Michael Mukasey was on a fear tour during Congressional recess, and gave a much publicized and tearful speech that seemed to boil down to "we owe it to the people who died on 9/11 to give the telecoms who spied on you retroactive amnesty."

He also dropped a bit of a bombshell in that speech, that Greenwald picked up on immediately. Here's the full Mukasey quote:

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."

Setting aside the outright lie Mukasey tells, that a warrant would have been required for that target outside the United States, there's the "startling new revelation", as Glenn says, about this pre-9/11 intelligence failure that as of yet has gone unreported. It wasn't included in testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Glenn:

Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.

Olbermann has picked up on the story, questioning whether Mukasey is confused about details, and making this story up out of whole cloth, or whether this is yet more indication of the incompetence of the Bush administration, or whether it is actual willful negligence on the part of the administration.

I tend to lean toward incompetence, but I wholeheartedly agree with Olbermann and Greenwald and others who have called attention to this assertion by Mukasey that Congress needs to get his ass in a chair before a committee or two to testify about this. And that should happen before any legislation regarding intelligence, particularly FISA, is acted upon.

As a bit of an aside, let's go back to what was happening prior to the attacks on 9/11, presumably when the intelligence community was somehow grappling with a phone call--that most certainly could have been legally monitored--from Afghanistan. We know Bush was in Crawford, and we know that's where he received the infamous August 6 PDB: "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.", the PDB that was ignored. But what else was the administration grappling with that summer? Here's one small thing that we now know was occupying the administration, thanks to Eric Lichblau's newly released book, Bush's Law.

A Washington reporter for another major newspaper drafted a story that was set to run on September 12, 2001, disclosing the unusual arrangements that the Secret Service had made allowing one of President Bush's underage daughters--Jenna Bush, then nineteen--to make a bar-hopping trip south of the border.... The timing of the south-of-the-border drinking jaunt was particularly rich because it came less than a week before Jenna Bush was to appear in court in Austin, Texas, on a charge of underage drinking; in Mexico, the drinking age was only eighteen. As drafted, teh story detailed how American and Mexican government agents, working together in a remarkable diplomatic collaboration, managed to pull off the trip from a base at a Mexican Best Western, with the security and logistics for Jenna Bush and her friends arranged at high levels of each government. (p. 13)

That's what at least part of our government was focused on, "security and logistics for Jenna Bush and her friends" on a drinking binge. Which leads us back to both incompetence and negligence.

*Note: Eric Lichtblau will be liveblogging about his new book here, on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. EDT.

So, I'll be heading out to San Jose tomorrow for the California Democratic Party Convention, the largest gathering of uncommitted superdelegates outside the US Capitol.  Bill Clinton will be there on Sunday pitching woo and it should be interesting seeing the establishment and grassroots politicos in the context of the primary pie fight.

But before that, I wanted to highlight this incredible excerpt from Eric Lichtblau's upcoming book Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice.  Lichtblau and his partner James Risen won a Pulitzer for breaking the illegal warrantless wiretapping story in late 2005.  But they had the story over a year earlier, and were rebuffed from going to print due to the Administration's intimidation of New York Times editors.  In this excerpt Lichtblau recounts the story when Bush sends in the big guns to try and kill the story once and for all.  You really sense how they work as a kind of loanshark operation rather than an executive branch:

I might take a lot of heat for this but here goes....

I like Ellen DeGenneres.  I think she is extremely funny, engaging and intelligent.  I like her show (except for the annoying dancing segment every day).  But she has not had a good few months.  First there was the incident with the adopted dog.  True, the whole incident was blown way out of proportion, and for the most part I feel Ellen got a raw deal.  The hysterics on her show were a tad over-the-top and when it was all said and done, both she and the agency did not come out looking all that good.   Then around Thanksgiving, Ellen was going to cross the writer's strike picket line to do her show in New York.  She backed off when the press, blogs, writers and the like tore her apart.  Finally there was her show that aired today.

I just took a national poll from Rasmussen that was commissioned by some branch of the Republican party.  It was, not to exaggerate, ridiculous.

How did I know it was Republican commissioned?

For one, there was this question:

What do you think we should do in Iraq?

1.  Withdraw all combat troops now

2.  Withdraw all combat troops in one year

3.  Keep combat troops in Iraq until the mission is completed.

The Conservaspeak comes through loud and clear in the question phrasing.

The only other issue addressed?  Illegal immigration.  And yeah, equally bald-faced framing there, too.  

But why was it ridiculous?  Below the fold.

So Time Magazine Online has decided to field ten questions about the infamous Jenna Bush, that kooky daughter of our current president who just recently got engaged.  Well, kooky doesn't describe her that well if you google image "jenna bush" with the safe search off.  You'll be pleasantly surprised. hehehehehehehehehe...err...ummm...anyways...

At first glance, if you read her answers, she seems, well, nothing like her father.  She actually has some intellect and one can assume that she is in tune with reality...Well...sometimes.

Huh, what are you saying? This is part of the answer provided by First Twin Jenna during a question and answer session that she participated in, apparently regarding the book she just wrote.  But someone asked a question on a different subject - Iraq.

There are no coincidences with the criminals running our government.

I'm convinced this Jenna (my dad loves babies) Bullshit Bush Book Tour Fiasco was conceived in a crass attempt to deflect attention from the SCHIP veto.

Mr. Bush and his handlers are hoping to hide behind Jenna's blond hair and toned arms. If you have any doubts about the media's love affair with blond white chicks in this country, I suggest you read clammyc's recent diary.

Surely you must know that the Jenna Bush Book Tour was scheduled to coincide with her dad's SCHIP veto.

"And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy/walks to the funeral of the whole human race." - D.H. Lawrence.

So... Jenna Bush has written a book.