Former President George W. Bush appeared on GMA this morning to talk about his 100K mountain bike ride with injured vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s participating in the ride to draw attention to the Wounded Warrior Project.

Take a look at this video of Obama meeting with all the living presidents. It makes for a powerful picture. The only one stinking up the joint is Carter, but I’m willing to overlook that for this occasion. It would be fascinating to sit in a room with all those men and chat. Bush 41, 43, Clinton, and Carter have such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom between them. The kind of wisdom one can only get through having been the president and traveling the world in that capacity.

The brazen shoe throwing journalist in Iraq is now describing the incident as an “ungly act” and asking Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki for a pardon:

The jailed journalist who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush has asked for a pardon for what he described as “an ugly act,” a spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister said Thursday.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for an Iraqi-owned television station based in Cairo, Egypt, could face two years imprisonment for insulting a foreign leader. He remained in custody Thursday night.

“It is too late to now to regret the big and ugly act that I perpetrated,” al-Zeidi wrote in a letter delivered to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to the prime minister’s spokesman.

The spokesman, Yassin Majid, told The Associated Press that al-Zeidi went on in the letter to recall an interview he conducted with the prime minister in 2005 when al-Maliki invited him into his home, saying: “Come in, it is your home too.”

“So I ask for your pardon,” al-Zeidi wrote, Majid said.

The Iraqi PM can’t give al-Zeidi a pardon for something that has become so public, because it would set a terrible example. What that asshole did was a disgrace and an insult to America. No journalist would ever consider doing such a thing in any other country in the Middle East, because they would be killed. Ironically, it’s the very freedom that president Bush brought and al-Zeidi curses that allowed him to throw his shoes in the first place.

I think the guy is a scumbag and I hope the Iraqi police work him over good before they send him to prison.

Notice how the old bag kinda pulls away when the president leans in to whisper something after the kiss. Having to be cordial to one of the biggest left-wing shrews in America has gotta be rough.

(hat tip Hot Air)

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a 400 page book about his time in the Bush inner circle. The book is called What Happened and it chronicles among other things the Valerie Plame leak case.

His publisher released a little taste of what you can expect in the book:

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.

Scott McClellan has been a close friend of the Bush family for around 15 years, so I have my doubts that he’s gonna drop any bombshells. It should still make for an interesting read.

-Samantha Giles

President Bush on Tuesday slammed Congress for not getting its work done and focusing too much on investigating his administration and repeatedly attempting to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq.

“We’re near the end of the year, and there really isn’t much to show for it,” Bush told reporters following a meeting with House GOP leaders.

“The House of Representatives has wasted valuable time on a constant stream of investigations, and the Senate has wasted valuable time on an endless series of failed votes to pull our troops out of Iraq,” the president said.

The president, referencing reports that Democrats could attempt to tie an Iraq supplemental spending bill and the Veterans Affairs funding legislation to the Labor/HHS appropriations bill, said it is “hard to imagine a more cynical political strategy than trying to hold hostage funding for our troops in combat and our wounded warriors in order to extract $11 billion in additional social spending.”

President Bush will ask Congress for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs.

The figure, which Bush was expected to announce later Monday at the White House, brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.

Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $10 billion a month.

After Nancy Pelosi and “dingy” Harry throw a fit and pass a couple of resolutions I’m betting Bush gets the money. While most Americans do want the war to end, they want it to end with a victory.

-Chris Jones

Rep. Pete Stark said this during the House debate on overriding the SCHIP veto:

First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where ya gonna get that money? You going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. [...]

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

Hey! I thought Democrats supported the troops? Making the assertion that our troops are using the war funding to blow up innocent people doesn’t sound very supportive to me.

I have to give Stark credit though, that was a pretty good tantrum for a grown man. If he would’ve stomped his feet and cried at the end, it could have been even better.

-Chris Jones

Dan Bartlett who was until recently President Bush’s closest advisor gave his frank assessment of the current crop of candidates hoping for the Republican nomination.

Bartlett’s opinion is very significant, because he has spent nearly his entire life working for George W. Bush and though he doesn’t work at the White House anymore he’s still considered Bush’s alter ego. So it’s believed that Bartlett’s opinion of the GOP candidates is most likely Bush’s opinion.

Fred Thompson is the campaign’s “biggest dud,” Mitt Romney has “a real problem in the South” because people will not vote for a Mormon, Mike Huckabee’s last name is too hick and John McCain could end up repeating 2000 by winning New Hampshire but losing the nomination.

The only candidate that Bartlett wasn’t critical of was Rudy Giuliani, saying in part that Rudy had the best message. He pointed out that Rudy was also smart for going after Democrats instead of fellow Republicans.

He indicated that he feels like Rudy will get the nomination, but thinks Huckabee is the very best candidate.

By Chris Jones

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) – President George W. Bush on Wednesday tried to reinforce his case for perseverance in Iraq by placing the unpopular war in the historical context of the U.S. experience in Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, but critics said he missed the mark.

Speaking to thousand of veterans, many of whom served in Asia, Bush laid the groundwork for a key mid-September report on Iraq that is expected to show some progress on the security front but little in the way of political reconciliation.

Bush said it was in the U.S. interests to continue to work to stabilize Iraq and held out the modern democracies in Japan and South Korea as potential models. He also raised the example of the emergence the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and violence in Vietnam after U.S. troops pulled out to warn of the consequences of leaving Iraq.

“Despite the mistakes that have been made, despite the problems we have encountered, seeing the Iraqis through as they build their democracy is critical to keeping the American people safe from the terrorists who want to attack us,” he said.

The comparison Bush drew to Vietnam was a risky argument and one his administration has tended to avoid in the past.

Many Democrats have likened Iraq to Vietnam, calling the war a quagmire that has exacted a big toll in American lives and treasure without furthering U.S. interests.

Bush also used his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars to insist that he supported Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, despite comments he made a day earlier highlighting frustration with the Iraqi leader’s inability to reconcile warring factions there.

“Prime Minister Maliki’s a good guy, a good man with a difficult job and I support him,” Bush said. “And it’s not up to the politicians in Washington, D.C., to say whether he will remain in his position. That’s up to the Iraqi people.”

Bush said that like World War Two, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq was an “ideological struggle” as he again depicted the conflict as part of the broader U.S. “war on terror.”

“The militarists of Japan and the communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity,” Bush said.

“Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own: a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance and dissent,” he added.

Pressure is building on Bush over Iraq in the run-up to the release of a report to Congress due by September 15 by U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

That report will evaluate the progress of the troop buildup Bush ordered early this year aimed at reducing the violence there and comes as the Democratic-led Congress steps up its effort to bring about a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada dismissed Bush’s historical comparisons and said the decision to invade Iraq was “one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our history.”

Reid pledged Democrats would seek in coming weeks to force a change in Bush’s “failed strategy in Iraq.”

Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged Bush for the presidency in 2004, said Bush’s comparison to that war was “irresponsible” and “ignorant.”

“It is unfortunate that President Bush would want to invoke a false comparison of Vietnam to Iraq, but not surprising that he would oversimplify the differences and overlook the tragic similarities,” said Kerry, who served in Vietnam.

“If the President wants to heed the lessons of Vietnam, he should change course and change course now,” he added.

[Reuters]