But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon “Karl Rove politics” in the strictest sense, and nobody would confuse David Axelrod with Rove. But Obama’s reelection route and rhetoric may bear more than a few Rovian hallmarks.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

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Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

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Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of "natural causes." This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman's breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, "This one's for you, Walt!" There were DUI arrests. Also, his manufacturing company declared bankruptcy two years ago, and former franchisees of the once-ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries won settlements against him for fraud.

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The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA’s use of “waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement.” Zelikow further wrote in the memo that “we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.” According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience.”

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The former president hasn't really said or done much in terms of "politics" since he left office the day before Barack Obama made all the jobs disappear and gas prices rise. He hasn't weighed in at all on the election that is going on right now, even as his former president father and former governor brother have done the responsible Republican thing and endorsed Mitt Romney. (George H.W. Bush even went to the trouble of endorsing him twice, because no one noticed the first time.)

Why is that? Well, for one thing, Bush knows that his endorsement wouldn't really help anyone, because no one likes George W. Bush. But he also seems to have the idea that a former president should elevate himself above partisan squabbling and spend his days making a fortune on the speaking circuit and raising money for his library instead of still being active in electoral politics.

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Sources interviewed for this article said that Mr. Bush spends at least eight hours of each day at the Preston Hollow Shopping Center, a popular retail destination near his home in suburban Dallas. “Other than that chimichanga lunch he doesn’t really have a set routine,” said one source. “Sometimes he’ll hang around Lenscrafters trying on glasses or head over to Abercrombie & Fitch and watch the girls fold pants. Last week I saw him inside Pottery Barn sleeping in a leather recliner.”

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In this memorable quote -- which was one of many similar statements --George W. Bush gave us probably history's most explicit example of how the "sunk cost" argument suffuses today's national security politics.

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A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," Eric Margolis writes. "'Bleeding the U.S.,' in his words." The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden's trap... Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction... may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States" -- particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with the collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

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Which on the surface makes it hard to understand why U.S. and foreign firms continue to seek the services of Neil Bush. The son of one president and brother of another, Neil's political clout has declined since Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in 2009, and neither brains nor wiles is Neil's strong suit. Two decades ago, the Washington Post observed that his business ventures had "a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion," and time, alas, seems not to have improved his record.

Neil claims to have 30 years in the energy industry, though at least 10 people from the Texas oil patch I spoke with said they had never heard of him playing any notable role in the energy business. Of the former first sibling, one international oil executive and consultant said, "I can't imagine anything he could bring to the table."

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Salon.com's War Room Secret Vice Presidential Correspondence Recovery Team tracked down the letter by following an elaborate series of clues Cheney placed around Washington, D.C. We reveal the contents of Cheney's secret letter of resignation below:

The Office of the Vice President
March 15, 2001

Dear Mr. President:

If you're reading this, it means one of the following things has happened:

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Partisan wrangling over presidential vacation time is as old as the Republic itself. The Salon.com War Room Historical Fun Fact Team did some research, and found out what sort of grief past presidents got when they wanted to recharge their batteries:

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The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of "force projection" in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of "state secrets" to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.

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Democrats have been chortling about running against yet another swaggering Texas governor. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum explains why Perry can’t win:

"He's too Texan...Even in the Republican Party, not everyone is from the South and not everyone is bowled over by a Texas drawl. Perry is, by a fair amount, more Texan than George W. Bush, and an awful lot of people are still suffering from Bush fatigue."

I think this is wrong. The cowboy archetype runs so deep in American culture that even George W. Bush couldn’t ruin it. Besides, the Connecticut rancher was a trust fund poser who rode bicycles, not horses. Deep down, everybody knew that. Now that he’s no longer president, Republicans no longer have to pretend they believe the brush-cutting charade.

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But there's one potential problem here. To many people, Perry's Texas twang sounds eerily like Bush's. Indeed, Perry's hometown of Paint Creek is not so far from Bush's childhood home of Midland. But, unlike Bush, who left the state for Andover and Yale and Harvard, Perry never left Texas.

Here's a taste of Perry's speaking style:

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Thanks partly to his skill at "triangulation" -- seeking middle ground between left and right -- President Clinton left a legacy of prosperity and balanced budgets. Republicans impeached him anyway.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Clinton's spectacular folly gave GOP hard-liners the excuse they'd spent his entire presidency looking for. That's not the point. To the Limbaugh-led, Confederate-accented Republican right, all Democrats are illegitimate. President Barack Obama often acts as if he doesn't understand that.

Anyway, let's stick to what's relevant today: taxes, spending and the U.S. economy. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, had the nation maintained the fiscal course the Clinton administration laid out, the national debt everybody rants about would have been retired by 2009.

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Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the obvious big-ticket items. The tax cuts, in particular, are the structural-deficit-gift that keeps on giving. As the New York Times observes, if all of the Bush tax cuts "expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels."

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71 percent of respondents said they believe the country is in a recession, which is factually incorrect: The U.S. recession, which began in December 2007, technically ended in June 2009, not that it feels that way to most people. And to be sure, the economy would bottom out again in the unlikely event that the U.S. actually default on its debt.

Among those who do believe we're in a recession, 54 percent said it's primarily Bush's fault, compared to only 27 percent who blamed Obama.

Quinnipiac also found that 67 – 25 percent of respondents think that an agreement to raise the debt ceiling should include tax hikes for the wealthy and corporations, not just spending cuts.

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And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren't they wrong about?

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