Bright and windy this afternoon on California’s north coast, and a bit of breeze-driven chill in the air, too — altogether not unpleasant, however.

I saw this story from over the past weekend, the first reaction to the headline at Raw Story was WTF! ‘George W. Bush Gets Intelligence Group Award.’

Yet the stink — former acting CIA director John McLaughlin: ‘“It’s not an intelligence award. It’s an award for ‘service to the nation.’ Henry Kissinger, not an intelligence official, received the award last year.”‘

(Illustration found here).

Odd how nearly a decade of horror has now seemingly vanished from current American events. Bush is way-most-likely the worse president in US history, by just about any standard, from economics and foreign policy to weather, and yet the idiot-boy gets a passing kiss on the cheek. Although they try to hold him at way-arm’s length and treat him like a cancerous uncle, he’s been bypassed by justice, with near-zero accountability.
He did attend the CIA award benefit held earlier this month, supposedly unreported until this past weekend, a big ‘glittering’ dinner, sponsored by the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation. An annual event. However, this year held a telling example of Bush’s weird, public persona — from a good read at Newsweek on the affair:

In past years, the CIA and the White House have helped publicize the dinners.
In 2014 the agency posted a keynote address at the dinner by agency director John Brennan on its website.
This year, however, even though Brennan introduced Bush, the agency was mum on the event, declining to comment and referring an inquiry to the foundation.

Hard to hide an infected asshole.
And especially telling, this from Gerald Komisar, a longtime former CIA veteran, president of the foundation: ‘It hardly needed saying that the agency’s use of torture on terrorist suspects, under White House direction, “never came up” at the dinner, Komisar added with a slight chuckle. “It was a positive evening, and I don’t think anyone wanted to go down that road.”‘

Does ISIS ‘chuckle,’ shithead?
Which does remind one of Bush’s favorite, CIA-related stories — the fabled Aug. 6, 2001, Daily Briefing (transcript via CNN).

Coupled with a Washington Post review of Ron Suskind’s, “The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11,” which is packed with Bush White House/CIA shenanigans, especially this:

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”
Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney.
White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him.
But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”

Not shit, Sherlock — while Osama slipped away, Tommy Franks in December 2001 was meeting with George W. Bush, developing plans for a hard-case run on Baghdad.

We digress, back to that ‘service to the nation’ award…