Worst. President. Ever.

So I wasn't invited to Bush's speech here at GW yesterday, but now I wish I'd been able to go. Seems it was a classic piece of Bush administration speechwriting, that is to say, full of blatant disingenuousness and falsehood. This bit proved to be especially vile:

Earlier this year, a newspaper published details of a new anti-IED technology that was being developed. Within five days of the publication -- using details from that article -- the enemy had posted instructions for defeating this new technology on the Internet. We cannot let the enemy know how we're working to defeat him.

Greg Sargent over at TAPPED does a great job in calling the president out on that attack:

Bush didn't name the newspaper. But his aides subsequently leaked confirmation to the press that he was talking about the Los Angeles Times. And guess what: It turns out that Bush left out a small detail about the offending article in question. Turns out it was about the fact that some military officials were angry that this potentially life saving technology still hasn't been shipped to Iraq, ten months after Pentagon officials recommended investing in research and sending prototypes to Iraq for testing. Says the piece:

10 months later -- and after a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests -- not a single JIN has been shipped to Iraq.

To many in the military, the delay in deploying the vehicles, which resemble souped-up, armor-plated golf carts, is a case study in the Pentagon's inability to bypass cumbersome peacetime procedures to meet the urgent demands of troops in the field. More than half of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have been caused by roadside bombs, and the number of such attacks nearly doubled last year compared with 2004.

A friend once said to me that the way that Bush gets away with lying is that he does it so obviously and unapologetically. Since it's no secret, there's no fun work for the press to do uncovering his mistruths. To take a page from Kuhn, it isn't a puzzle worth solving.

For the rest of us, though, Bush's behavior should be maddening. Here we have the President of the United States, ostensible leader of the free world, blaming the press for deaths he had a hand in through negligent bureaucratic mishandling of necessary technology, all in the name of roundaboutly defending his own lawbreaking through warrantless domestic spying.

It's no wonder the man is at 34 percent; what should surprise us is that so few Senators are willing to stand behind the motion to censure him.