The king is dead, long live the king

I know, our capacity for outrage at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration is used up, they're out of here in 14 days and counting, a New Day of Hope is Dawning, all that.

You should still read Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum's "Oral History of the Bush White House," though, because:

a) a remarkable number of insiders were willing to testify to them, and the competing memories, interpretations, and agendas of those surrounding the 43rd President are fascinating

b) it's a well-organized retrospective of the tumultuous Bush near-decade, including the outrages you haven't even thought to think about in years (the 2001 stem-cell address, anyone?), and a sobering reminder that turning a new page won't be nearly as easy as it sounds.

c) wow, so it turns out that the most left-wing, wild-eyed, mouth-foaming conspiracy theorists were, uh, right:

"(Richard Clark:) That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least. "