Bill Maher’s New Rules rant after mentioning Jimmy Carter’s passing on the “Worst President Ever” title to George W. Bush:

I mean, who would you rank lower than George W. Bush? Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover sat on his ass through four years of calamity, but he was an actual engineer. If someone told him about global warming, he would have understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses Grant was a miserable drunk, but at least he didn’t trade booze for Jesus and embolden the snake handlers — he did the honorable thing and stayed a miserable drunk. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war.

For some inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman — a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II. Harding sucked, but he once said, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.” So at least he knew he sucked.

Tags: worst, president, ever, bush, carter, bill maher, real time

Tags: bush, 9/11, terrorism

Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder — who may or may not be his generation’s Jim Morrison (only, you know, still very much alive) — walked onto the sparsely set Verizon Center stage Tuesday, clutching a bottle of wine and a notebook. He sat down before a microphone and sang, in that sonorous baritone, of fathers and sons, in a moving, almost meditative piece called “Man of the Hour.”

“Now the man of the hour is taking his final bow,” Vedder sang, his hunched frame bathed, for the moment, in red light. “As the curtain comes down/I feel that this is just g’bye for now.”

(From The Washington Post.)

Tags: pearl jam, world wide suicide, the washington post, eddie vedder, war, iraq, bush