President Bush’s immigration speech in Georgia may have set a record for presidential product placement and plugs for peaches:

• “I remember the peach grower, Saxby, that you sent over to the White House. He’s there saying to me, you’ve got to understand something, Mr. President, my business won’t go forward unless I have some of these good people that are willing to work long hours in my peach orchard helping me harvest the crop.”
• “The peach grower wanted to comply with the law.”
• “You’re going to have a card that you can’t tamper with, that some document forger can’t foist off as a document for somebody to come and pick peaches here in Georgia.”
• “The peach man said to me, he said, I can’t find somebody from my home town who wants to pick peaches.”

If you ask me, the speech was a bunch of crop.

Jimmy Carter calls President Bush’s international relations “the worst in history.”

The White House fires back, calling Carter “increasingly irrelevant.”

Perhaps.  But as you can see in this photo of an Amman bookshop window display featuring Jimmy Carter’s new book and Adolf Hitler’s old book, some still find the former president sufficiently relevant.

From the Washington Post:

President Bush may have been sending a signal about the fate of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday. At a Cinco de Mayo celebration in the Rose Garden, Bush introduced his old friend as “the eternal general of the United States.”

First, the Democrats turned against President Bush on Iraq.  Then, Republicans.  Now, who’s next?  Could it be — yes, it is … it’s the White House press corps that doesn’t care for Bush’s Iraq policy.  At least Bush’s Iraq policy on the White House press corps.
Extreme Mortman has obtained this letter sent this evening:

January 12, 2007
Mr. Dan Bartlett
Counselor to the President,
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Dan,
On behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, and in conjunction with the White House News Photographers Association, we are writing to express our outrage that still pool photographers were denied access to the White House library on Wednesday evening.  As you know, following weeks of preparation and the White House build-up leading up to the presidential address,this was a significant foreign policy speech.  Forcing newspapers and magazines to rely on a screen grab photo from the Fox News network pool feed is simply unacceptable.
In recent months, there has been a growing pattern of restricting pool photographers to White House events, but the situation Wednesday night for this important speech to the nation is the most glaring.
We expressed our concern to Tony Snow and Dana Perino earlier today, and join the WHNPA in asking that this practice end.  These photographers provide a vital service to wires, magazines and newspapers around the world, while also serving as a lasting historical record to the events of our times.  In addition, a White House photo release is never an acceptable substitute for independent news coverage.  Therefore, in our strongest terms possible, we want to express our disappointment that a decision was made to keep even a single pool photographer from the room, and ask that it never happen again.

Regards,

Board of Directors - WHCA
Steven Scully, C-SPAN
Ann Compton, ABC News
Jennifer Loven, Associated Press
Peter Maer, CBS News
Steve Holland, Reuters
Doug Mills, New York Times
Ken Walsh, US News & World Report
Ken Herman, Cox Newspapers
Mike Allen, TIME

President George Bush, 1/3/07:

“I call on Congress to give the President the tool that 43 governors have, a line-item veto.”

President Ronald Reagan, 2/4/86:

“I ask you to give me what 43 Governors have, give me a line-item veto.”

21 years. Great progress.

The Gerald Ford Library reminds us — don’t ask about China!

Today’s Washington Post features yet another glorious ad from the glorious Kazakhstan government — boasting of glorious American-Kazakh relations, glorious Kazakh troops fighting to benefit war on terror, and a photo of one glorious meeting between top U.S. and Kazakh officials.

As President Nazarbayev said when he met President Bush in September:

“Thank you very much, Mr. President, for hospitality and for warm feelings that I feel in this country and for the invitation. This is the third time that I’m in the Oval room since the independence of our country.”

Alas, no word in any of these ads about kazakh’s most gloriously famous emissary, Borat.

But as luck would have it, the D.C. Examiner’s glorious gossip column Yeas and Nays reports this today:

Borat wasn’t on the list, but at least one product of Kazakhstan managed to gain access to Vice President Dick Cheney’s holiday party on Tuesday night at his Massachusetts Avenue residence.  Snow Queen vodka, a product of the central Asian country, was the “official liquor donor” at the 400-strong party of high-powered pols and their staffers.

Anyone know if Snow Queen is any good?

With all the talk about Robert Gates, Jim Baker, and other Bush 41ers coming in to rescue Bush 43, perhaps the timing was a bit off for the White House to announce this today?

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 15, 2006, as America Recycles Day.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and others have been chronicling conservative laments about the onslaught of Bush 41 figures to the Bush 43 presidency.

But honestly, isn’t all that a step forward?  I mean, at the beginning of Bush 43, we were treated to media celebration and obsession over the return of the Ford presidency.

Surely you remember all those glowing tributes and photos of Rumsfeld and Cheney and Ford — all decked out in their ’70s finest?  You want that again?

At least they’ve pressed the fast forward button.

A few weeks back Keith Olbermann did a segment on his MSNBC show about the famous 1987 on-air battle between George H.W. Bush and Dan Rather over Iran Contra.  Olbermann was rather breathless in reporting that Roger Ailes played a big role in prodding Bush to go after Rather  (the Olbermann segment was right after Chris Wallace interviewed Bill Clinton).   Nearly 20 years after the incident, Olbermann gleefully looked like Indiana Jones discovering an antiquity no one knew existed. The folks at olbermannwatch recount the Sept. 29 segement quite nicely here.

I was reminded of that segment while reading the Washington Post story on Doro Bush Koch’s new book on her father, “My father, My President.”  The Post:

While Bush’s live shouting match with Dan Rather on the “CBS Evening News” has not gone underreported, Koch offers a new, colorful version of the story as told by Roger Ailes, then Bush’s media adviser, who was in the room for the interview.

Sure enough, on page 244 of the book, we see a lengthy interview Koch conducts with Roger Ailes — about that incident. The key sentences:

“I grabbed the clipboard out of the bureau chief’s hand and I wrote WALKED OFF THE AIR.  I showed it to him, made a fist, and said, “Go!  Go!  Just kick his ass!”

Hardly a scoop — when Ailes himself talks about it.