I oft enjoy Scott Sullivan’s op-ed pieces that appear in the Benton County Daily Record…here’s a dandy about Bush’s choices and reactions to the Iraqi Study Groups recommendations, it’s brutal and deservedly so.

The press conference that morning could have been a good time for W. to tuck tail and accept Daddy Bush’s helping hand one more time; he could have stepped up like a grown man who failed but learned invaluable lessons. It would have been a propitious time for a reckless American president to stand behind the podium in full view of the world press to admit the impossibility of remaking any nation in the image of peace, freedom, and democracy through bombing, military overthrow, occupation, and negligence. It could have been an honorable time to confess that his actual intentions for redirecting forces from Afghanistan to Iraq had nothing to do with freedom or democracy. No such catharsis came.