Saturday Morning Coffee

Barack Obama is entering Washington by train this morning sporting a 69% approval rating, while George Bush leaves town with a 22% approval rating, the lowest of any outgoing president. The Bush Magical Mystery tour ended this morning with his Saturday morning radio address, which suspiciously sounded like his farewell speech. The Karl Rove designed legacy tour complete with more interviews than in the whole previous eight years of both Bush and Cheney hasn't panned out very well. 57% of Americans believe George W to be one of the five worst Presidents of the United States. We will have more about how history will judge George later in the week. But even if he halves that number in a few years, it might not be enough to rehabilitate him.

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office, we will finally be rid of the Baby Boomers and that's just terrific with me. I think my generation should retire and debate Nixon and Vietnam in nursing homes and leave governing to another generation--the one we stuck with the bills.

Speaking of a younger generation, kudos go to Cenk at Young Turks for getting the real importance of Bin Laden's tape challenging Obama. The CIA has been focusing on the Bin Laden's wheezing to determine his health. Can you imagine being the guy who does that? Cenk cut to the chase by pointing out that this was the first tape where Bin Laden's asked for money--it was a fund-raising tape, which means the guy is broke. Sorry Osama. But don't worry the Spooks will take another few years to figure it out.

Neil Young, the greatest Canadian, sings "A Fork In The Road" with the relevant line,"There's a bailout comin'.....but it's not for me."

Susan J. Crawford, who is the Pentagon's Commanding Authority in charge of proscuting the prisoners at Gitmo, used the T-word (Torture) in describing the reasons why she was not going to try the 20th Highjacker. She said that because of the treatment the evidence was a "mess".

We will have more on the torture issue this week. The past 14 days have produced the strangest debate in America in a longtime. Both Dick Cheney and George Bush proudly defended and even went on to explain the glories of "enhanced interrogation" as a "tool" to fight terrorism. Even your run-of-the-mill dictator and caudillo never overtly claimed, let alone bragged about practicing torture. This all puts the Obama Administration between a rock and a hard place over whether to pursue charges against Bush officials or to just move on. While Eric Holder denounced waterboarding as torture, the first of the past four attorney generals asked that question to say so, he tried to cloud whether anything would be done about the past actions.

Among the commentariat, there was heated debate pro and anti-torture. Fred Barnes ranked "enhanced interrogation" techniques the second greatest achievement of the Bush Administration. Charles Krauthammer urged Obama to take Cheney's sage advice and not close Gitmo and preserve the current regimen. Conservative TV talking heads seemed to confuse Jack Bauer of 24 as a real life person, who shows torture is great, even heroic. On the left, Bush was likened to Pinochet with these strings of confessions at the end of his term and Paul Krugman urged an investigation of all the Bush misdeeds, a sentiment shared by a number of experts in international law.