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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Rick Perry was Bush's lieutenant governor. Whether the two men personally like each other is totally unknown (politicians don't like other humans anyway; that is why they go into politics), but Perry is "signaling" that he is very different from Bush because Bush was a terrible president who left office hated by everyone and Rick Perry would maybe like to be the next president (or he is at least surrounded by people who think he could be the next president).

Perry is distancing himself from Bush mostly by hating immigrants and healthcare for poor people and by basically announcing that he is against the small number of things Bush did to convince people that the Republican Party had grown a heart.

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• Writing in response to the deadly blasts on the London Underground in July 2005, Cole criticized "Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror." he wrote, "If Americans look closer... they will realize that Bush's incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous, not less."
• Similarly, Cole skewered the Bush administration when newly elected Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari seemed to be developing close ties with Iran. "All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east," Cole noted at the time.
• Then in March 2006, as violence in Iraq was peaking, Cole wrote that "bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally."
• He was also fiercely critical of Bush's rhetoric on Iraq. When the president avoided describing the situation there as a "civil war," (a term the Iraqi prime minister employed), Cole emphasized how wrong Bush was.
• Similarly, Cole noted that Saddam Hussein's execution, decreed through what he described as "the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime," was little more than an act of revenge that turned the dictator into a martyr.
• And Cole broadened his sights beyond Iraq. He wrote scathingly about Bush's approach to Israel and Palestine and was quick to point to the problems with how the then-President responded to Hamas' victory in legislative elections in Gaza in 2006. "How do you like your democracy now, Mr Bush?" Cole wrote.

Evidently, with a voice as influential as Cole's, calling the focal point of an administration's foreign policy "a colossal misadventure" makes waves; the White House and the CIA may not have taken heed of his writing, but -- if recent reports are to be believed -- it certainly caught their attention.

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From James Risen's Thursday morning Times piece:

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on [Professor Cole]. ...

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

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Over the course of the past few months and even years, God has sent signs and direct messages to each of these candidates encouraging them to run, presumably without telling them that he supports other candidates as well.

God may have further hedged his bets too. According to BuzzFlash, "Tim Pawlenty's 28-year-old wunderkind of a campaign manager, acknowledged that before he joined Team Pawlenty, he "prayed deeply" over his future path. Ayers concluded that God had "called" him "to a higher purpose," and that higher purpose is leading Pawlenty to victory in November 2012.

Meanwhile, God reportedly made it very clear that he didn't want Mike Huckabee to be president, "lest he take his focus off the much more important task of producing a series of conservative American history DVDs," reports Amira.

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The former president, according to ABC News, called bin Laden's death a "great victory in the war on terror" but said he personally was "not overjoyed" when he heard the news, since the pursuit of bin Laden was born from a desire to "exact judgment" -- not "hatred" for the terrorist himself.

The former president told an audience of hedge fund managers that he was "eating soufflé at Rise Restaurant with Laura and two buddies" when President Obama called to tell him the news. Bush left the restaurant and went home to speak with the president, who told him simply: "Osama bin Laden is dead."

When Obama offered more details of the raid, Bush's response was similarly succinct: "Good call."

Finally, although Bush didn't discuss intelligence-gathering techniques (which have proved something of a thorny issue with commentators this week), he added: "The intelligence services deserve a lot of credit. They built a mosaic of information, piece by piece."

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Bolton is, of course, a single-issue guy. His issue is bombing Iran. That is the only reason why anyone has expressed any interest in him as a candidate: He is the man who promises to bomb Iran. Every foreign policy issue of our time looks like a nail to John Bolton, and his hammer is bombing Iran.

Some Republican political appointees are representatives of the interests of various GOP-supporting major industries. Others, like Bolton or Michael Brown, are just hacks who are brought in to demonstrate the unimportance and uselessness of whatever position they are supposed to be filling. The message is, a trained chimp -- or a right-wing ideologue -- could do this government job.

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"[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap," a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.
[...]
"He doesn't feel personally snubbed and appreciates the invitation, but Obama's claiming all the credit and a lot of other people deserve some of it," the source added.
[...]
"Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way."

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