The similarities between President Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, it would appear, are seemingly endless.  On Wednesday. Putin followed in Bush's footsteps as the 2007 recipient of the Time Man of the Year.  And now, Putin too has grand plans to reap a financial windfall upon leaving office.  As it turns out, though, the scope and scale of Putin's post-presidential avarice puts George W. Bush to shame.

The 24th annual MBFI, the largest literary event in the world, celebrating authors and readers, kicked off a week ago Sunday with An Evening with Rosie O'Donnell and wound up last evening with a panel featuring Frances FitzGerald, Victor S. Mavasky, David Rieff, George Soros, and Drew Weston.

Sandwiched in between this rich fare was the even richer filling of more political pundits and literary figures.  Presentations, readings, panel discussions, and the street fair are but a few of the events.  Many of them were covered by C-SPAN2 Book TV and can still be viewed at their website.

The nature and purpose of Daily Kos demand that I focus on the political presentations, and tonight's diary will do just that.

Forgive me, this story originally broke last week, but I tend not to link to things that I can only find on Politico. Now that I’ve just heard it confirmed by another source who knows enough to know, here goes:

According to Politico, GQ magazine spiked an upcoming article by Josh Green (staff writer for the Atlantic Monthly) that pulled back the curtain on infighting within the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton. The reason: The Clintons threatened to cut off access to former president Bill—slated to be cover boy for the December issue—if GQ ran the story on Hillary (and her campaign).

I just finished Robert Draper's Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W. Bush. The book has been out for several weeks and has already been reviewed here and here. Draper has been interviewed here and here and here, and the book has been diaried before -- so I'm not pretending to have breaking news. But why let that stop me?

Draper's accumulation of detail gives Bush a new 3-dimensionality that lets you form your own impressions about his character. That's the point of reading it. My conclusions don't always match Draper's, so yours probably won't match either his or mine.  But here's the main stuff I gleaned:

Robert Draper, the author of Dead Certain: the Presidency of George W. Bush, was Jon Stewart's guest on Wednesday's Daily Show. Keith Olbermann's latest "Special Comment" was about a Bush quote from Dead Certain on the subject of the Iraq troop surge: "I'm playing for October-November ... to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."

The economy is great.  George W. Bush tells us so.  And would he lie to us? The protector of 9/11? The savior of Hurricane Katrina?  The arbitrator of peace in Iraq?  Of course not, you say.  Where is all this nonsense about housing foreclosures setting records, runs on banks and borrowing bailouts coming from?  Poverty is down, unemployment is down, crime is down.  We’re a happy, peaceful nation enjoying the fruits of George W. Bush’s government, aren’t we?        Aren’t We?

So while our national debt clock the Iraq war clock, and any clock toting up the cost of our national disasters is rolling over faster than our eyes can adjust to read it, Mr. Bush settles back in Our Oval Office and contemplates retiring to the big city of Dallas to be handed $50,000-$75,000 to continue the same ruminating he now does for free.    

That's the title of Bremer's op-ed  in Thursday's edition of the New York Times. But actually, the op-ed shows that he did. However, it also provides additional details about how and when he briefed or consulted with other members of the Bush Administration about disbanding the Iraqi Army before he issued the disbandment order.

So we've heard about Bush's claim of "memory herpes" (tm-Jon Stewart) with respect to the decision to disband the Iraqi Army following initial phase of the invasion.

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, "The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen."

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, "Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ " But, he added, "Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff," referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Smoldering for months—that’s apparently what our former man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, has been doing. I’m sure you’re thinking, “well, it’s been summer, it’s been hot, not ‘128 degrees in the shade, I’m a soldier on patrol in Diyala in full battle armor’ hot, but perhaps hot enough to be ‘smoldering’ if you chose your vacation home poorly and forgot to pack a swimsuit.” But that’s not what got El Paul muy caliente.

Bremer is steamed at his former dear leader for implying that de-baathification was all Paul. . . or at least so says the New York Times quoting the self-anointed Viceroy of Iraq’s reaction to the new Bush bio Dead Certain.

Judgments on the book (I have not read it) aside, I have several thoughts:

I just caught an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book about W, Dead Certain.  It was... interesting.  It appeared, at least to me, that Draper was trying to be a broker in facts, and those facts were derived from the 6+ hours he spent interviewing W to write the book.  It was difficult, however (at least to me) to keep some of the sheer idiocy from simply slipping out.

A simple Google News Search for reviews of the book turns up some interesting tidbits in the headlines alone:

• Infighting called a hallmark of the Bush presidency
• Book: Rove opposed Cheney for VP
• Roberts Suggested Miers, Book Says

But what I found interesting (and totally alarming) was the interview with Draper itself.  I've transcribed it over the fold.

We've all been there haven't we?
Misplaced the carkeys a time or two.

Happens as we age. Sometimes happens before we are all that old. Its really quite disconcerting.

As I wrote yesterday, Sunday's New York Times offered a dismaying portrait of President Bush obsessed with his legacy - and potential financial windfall - after leaving office.  But even more disturbing was the discussion of the Iraq war and the administration's calamitous 2003 move to disband the Iraqi army.  When it came to perhaps the pivotal decision of the war, America's first MBA President simply acted like an absentee landlord.