I’m not a fan of George W. Bush or Michael Gerson (one of his former aides who’s now a columnist), but Gerson rightly points out that Bush deserves credit for devoting resources for fighting AIDS, Malaria and other diseases in Africa. Bush has fought hard and worked with Democrats to dramatically increase spending in this area and the efforts are saving lives.

With President George W. Bush, we had a president who made sweeping promises about the importance of fostering democracy around the world, to the point that many of his speeches reminded listeners to the utopian goals of Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, Bush and his advisors had no clue about the challenges facing those trying to bring democracy to places like the Middle East. Just as in Iraq, lofty goals were not backed up with preparation or hard work. Instead we had utter incompetence.

Joe Klein reports the following from the U.S,-Islamic World Forum in Doha:

The distress was deeper than exhaustion. Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. “Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy,” said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy—a free press, a free economy, the rule of law—did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. “Our indigenous democratic reformers,” Khouri said, “are in retreat across the region.”

This isn’t about conservative or liberal foreign policy. It’s about common sense. Conservatives like George Will and Pat Buchanan saw the folly of Bush’s policies, as did liberals like Ted Kennedy. The greatest tragedy is that real efforts to bring democracy to the world have been set back by this administrations incompetence.

Between 2000 and 2006, earmarks exloded in the federal budget, as the Republican Congress and President Bush made a mockery of their small-government claims. Now that the Democrats are running Congress, Bush has suddenly found religion on earmarks.

This is just cynical politics.

Over the past several years, numerous statement made by President Bush and his administration have proven to be false, including statements about WMD, the Iraq war, the events preceding 9/11 and issues like torture and domestic spying. We can now add another one to the list – the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001.

During last year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and John Kerry argued over whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Kerry charged that Bush let bin Laden get away by not choosing to “use American forces to hunt down and kill” him. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

Now we have the CIA commander on the ground telling his side of the story in a new book to be released. Newsweek breaks the story:

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

I just saw Bernsten interviewed on MSNBC. The man is very credible. Again, we have incompetence from the Bush administration, and then they try to cover it up by denying the truth. Pathetic.

Everyone had the same intelligence. This bogus claim has been repeated over and over again by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the entire GOP spin machine in their defense of pre-war WMD claims by the administration. This is not true. It’s a ridiculous claim, and the fact that they are repeating it cast even more doubt on the administrations credibility about pre-war claims.

Senator Bob Graham had a front-row seat during the runup to the Iraq war given his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Calling Bush’s claims “outrageous,” on Sunday he made it clear that most Democrats did NOT have access to the same intelligence as the administration. This should be obvious to everyone. Legislators NEVER have the same access to information, and the Bush administration is notorious for being one of the most secretive administrations since the Nixon years.

If the administration’s main defense is so patently false, how can we trust them? Do they have any credibility left? Graham says no:

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.