Nine days remaining

... to remind Republicans just what they hath wrought upon the Earth:

Asked by People magazine what moments from the last eight years he revisited most often, W. talked passionately about the pitch he threw out at the World Series in 2001: “I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough.”

Asked by Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard if he had made progress in some areas for which he hasn’t gotten credit, the president put trying to privatize Social Security at the top of his list. It’s frightening to think where a lot of people would be now if that effort had succeeded.

A complete lack of guilt, much less empathy. That's typically how sociopaths are clinically described. Some think Bush is simply too brain-damaged or retarded or autistic or something-else-impaired to get it. I'm not one of those, however. He's quite obviously not the only one, nor even the worst, for that matter ...

Asked last week by Mark Knoller of CBS Radio in one of his exit interviews to name the “biggest mis-impression” people had about him, Cheney replied with a laugh, “That I’m actually a warm, lovable sort.” He went on to seriously assert that his image as “a private, Darth Vader-type personality” has been “pretty dramatically overdone.”

“I think we made good decisions,” he told Knoller, adding with even grander delusion, “I think we knew what we were doing.”

He protested “the notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not. There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”

This is the most obvious reason why Cheney should simply be turned over to extra-national authorities for prosecution; so that someone can finally impress upon him the seriousness of his crimes. It's not like a Democratic Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid -- or a president hungry for bipartisanship -- is going to concern itself with administering some justice in this area.

On the other hand, Donald Rumsfeld should just be taken out and summarily executed by firing squad:

“My conscience is clear,” Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he’s interviewing people for his memoir.

Woodward was stunned. “I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was ‘by indirection, two or three steps removed,’ ” Woodward told me afterward.

What about Herr General Rove? He's still working a few "problems":

What was considered a smooth path to confirmation has recently been complicated as signs of hostility toward (Attorney-General-designate Eric) Holder have increased over the past month. Political operative Karl Rove and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for example, singled out the longtime Washington lawyer as the candidate who would face bruising questions.

And Beto Gonzales? Stupid, malicious, or maliciously stupid? You decide:

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that "for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."