Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 6:59 am:

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On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 7:09 am:

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George W Bush will embark next month on an international speaking tour aimed at making him hundreds of thousands of dollars and reshaping his battered image abroad.

The former president plans to make about ten speeches over the next year — the first of what he hopes will be many more — at various venues in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Mr Bush promised at his final news conference that he would keep busy as soon as he left office. He is also working on a book about his eight tumultuous years in the White House and his presidential institute. Its central theme will be liberty.