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In June, President Barack Obama sent a letter to Congress asking for help to address the surge of illegal crossings at the Texas-Mexico border. Among other items, Obama asked Congress to grant him the legal authority "to exercise discretion in processing the return and removal of unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador." The administration blamed a 2008 anti-human-trafficking law signed by President George W. Bush for preventing officials from promptly deporting minors not eligible for asylum. House Republicans were happy to oblige. Speaker John Boehner maintained that voters would not accept spending more money...

Beau Bergdahl has been returned to “active duty.” Apparently, that means a desk job while the Army considers what should be done with this young enlisted soldier. Bergdahl was held for five years by the Taliban since walking away from his post one night in 2009. President Obama greeted Bergdahl’s relieved parents in Rose Garden at the White House in a move widely criticized. And that was even before Americans learned that the Obama administration had traded young Bergdahl for five of the most murderous Taliban detainees from our facility at Guantanamo Bay. Duty. There seems to be much confusion...

Wow. A reputable poll shows that the public believes Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II. Worse than Richard M. Nixon, driven from the presidency by Watergate? Much. Worse than Jimmy Carter, for decades the very symbol of the feckless chief executive? Loads. Worse than George W. Bush, still a lightning rod on the left and a symbol of disappointment on the right? Definitely. These startling poll results set loose the predictable reaction: A flurry of told-you-so nods on the right and a fusillade of this-tells-us-nothing assertions on the left. For once, they're both right. Obama is...

Robert Redford has signed on to play Dan Rather in Truth, a film based on the 2005 memoir Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power. The book, written by Rather's producer Mary Mapes, centers on the firestorm that erupted in September of 2004 after Rather reported that George W. Bush had received special treatment while serving in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, a report that was based on documents that turned out to be forgeries. - See more at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/robert-redford-play-dan-rather-717476#sthash.Y0QB620e.dpuf

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama was named the worst president since World War II, according to a survey of the American people who were asked to rate the nation's chief executives over the past 69 years. The Quinnipiac University Poll released last week found that one third of its respondents picked Obama as the all-time worst, ahead of George W. Bush in its disapproval. Obama's unpopularity will come as no surprise to those who've been closely following his big spending presidency. But the really big news was the man who topped the best presidency list: Ronald Reagan. Reagan championed entrepreneurial...

Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail. - George W. Bush Sept. 20, 2001. Today is George W. Bush's 68th birthday. A man who, according to his father, "faced the greatest challenge of any president since Abraham Lincoln.” Happy Birthday, President George W. Bush. Great to visit the @GWBLibrary earlier this year! pic.twitter.com/6u3f12FF1T — Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) July 6, 2014 His presidency will...

George W. Bush’s 68th birthday is today. In honor of the 43rd President of the United States, here are fifteen of his most classic and classiest moments:

In the George W. Bush years, liberals were routinely shocked and awed that the Bush administration would obliterate their sacred wall of separation between church and state. They frowned on federal faith-based initiatives and worried about the bureaucracy being invaded by frightening people with college degrees from Christian schools like Liberty University, Regent University or Catholic University. Government was no place to be spreading a dangerous Christian majoritarianism with a swaggering certitude that wouldn't tolerate opposing views and respect minority opinions. The media presented the Bushies as -- to quote a slur from NBC anchor Brian Williams -- "anti-gay, pro-Jesus...

Everyone believes in "standards" don't they? So what could possibly be wrong with "Common Core" (the US education system's "Common Core State Standards Initiative")? After all, is it not "a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English... created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live"?* Not according to Dr. Duke Pesta, professor of English at The University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, who joins us for an extended and detailed interview on the genesis, content and ideology of Common Core...

President George W. Bush predicted the current meltdown in Iraq – back in 2007. Bush vetoed a Democratic bill to withdraw troops from Iraq. Via Truth Revolt: I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven...

Former President George W. Bush spent his Memorial Day weekend laid up in Chicago undergoing knee replacement surgery, according to reports. Bush, 67, underwent the outpatient procedure at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center on Saturday, NBC Chicago reported. Doctors allowed Bush to stay at a nearby hotel after the operation, before he flew home to Dallas Monday afternoon. Bush was accompanied during the medical trip by wife Laura and a Secret Service detail, NBC Chicago reported. The former President has kept a relatively low profile in recent months, even declining to attend the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum dedication ceremony...

It is actually very easy. (Photo essay at source link.)

During the George W. Bush Administration, progressives were hailing the Veterans Affairs health system as a model health organization. Now that it's come out that the VA suffers from the same bureaucratic nightmares that all socialized-style systems do, progressives want to roll back the clock on their rhetoric. Luckily, Nancy Pelosi has found the real person whose fault it is: George W. Bush. As Joel Gehrke reports: Pelosi took a shot at Bush while saying that the scandal is a high priority for Obama. "He sees the ramifications of some seeds that were sown a long time ago, when you...

Mike Pence spoke at AEI yesterday in defense of his Medicaid expansion in Indiana. His position has been roundly denounced by most conservative and libertarian policy analysts – for a rare defense, read Grace-Marie Turner here, but even her praise is qualified the deeper you go. Most of the critiques of Pence have focused on the politics of the issue assuming the waiver moves forward, but after seeing his presentation yesterday and talking to him at a session following the event, I have my doubts that this waiver will even go through. The request comes following a year of...

If you've just crash-landed from the planet known as Kepler-186f and have no experience with the human life form or its recent history, let me just clarify something for you: George W. Bush was a divisive and unsuccessful president. Economically, internationally, culturally — you name the category of leadership, and the results pretty much range from disappointment to disaster. A CBS News/New York Times poll clocked Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent, which is about as low as you can go in politics without needing a parole officer. You may get confused about this, because lately Bush is enjoying...

On Meet the Press Sunday morning, host David Gregory challenged former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to defend his and former President George W Bush’s decision to switch focus from the war in Afghanistan to the one in Iraq, asking if that simultaneously diverted resources from fighting the Taliban while radicalizing terrorist groups in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. “Isn’t the legacy of your leadership and that of President Bush in part responsible for the reality today?” Gregory asked. “Did the west fail to deal with the extremism you talk about today appropriately in Afghanistan in a...

Republicans must stop putting moneyed interests ahead of the American family.Now taking his third shot at the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, Jeffrey Bell has spent his career warning of the risks of kicking the cultural leg out from under Ronald Reagan’s coalition of defense, economic, and social conservatives. Indeed, his 2012 magnum opus, The Case for Polarized Politics, argues that social conservatism, rooted in the moderate Enlightenment that informed the Founders, is indispensable to American exceptionalism and to any Republican resurgence in our time. But the political theorist overstates the ability of even the most...

The greatest work of art George W. Bush ever took part in was in 2008, when an Iraqi journalist threw two shoes at his head. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” screamed the journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who had been arrested twice by U.S. forces during the occupation.Bush dodged the shoes with the same ease with which he’d had dodged consequences all his life; those for drunk driving, for ruined companies, stolen elections, war crimes, the destruction of Zaidi’s country.After he dodged the shoes, Bush joked about free countries. Meanwhile, guards beat Zaidi bloody. Police tortured him...

AUSTIN, Tex. — Former President George W. Bush called the achievement gap between white and black children “a national scandal” on Thursday and urged both parties to come together to address it as the central civil rights issue of the modern era. Paying tribute to President Lyndon B. Johnson at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Bush said the real test of the nation’s commitment to equality would be to fix an educational system that has tolerated low standards for too long. “There’s a growing temptation among public officials in both political parties at...

Excerpted from "Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Culture" One of the odder phenomena of the last decade is hearing national security elites, terrorism experts, and career diplomats discuss the finer points of “flow,” “bling,” and the “politics of cool.” American and European terrorism experts have increasingly expressed concerns over “anti-American hip-hop,” accenting the radicalizing influence of the genre. Noting that Al-Shabaab, the Somali-based Islamist group, uses “jihad rap” in its recruitment videos, Harvard scholar Jessica Stern wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in...