Just what Bush needs: advice from ExxonMobil.

Oh, Lordie.

JOSH MANCHESTER WRITES on why intellectuals love defeat. He also offers some excellent advice for President Bush. I hope that someone in the White House reads it.

Josh Manchester writes for the ExxonMobil-funded right wing propaganda rag, TCS Daily. Putz apparently thinks that Bush heed his sage advice, including:

It is difficult not to conclude that there is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the United States ... who don't merely feel as they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way all the time. Like it or not, this mentality of permanent defeat plays a large part in the Democratic Party.

Uh, Josh? You may have missed this, but the American people just smacked Bush and fired the Republican Congress for their failed Iraq policy by giving control of both houses to the Democrats. Not a single incumbent Democrat was defeated. You just called the majority of your fellow citizens "defeatists." I'm not sure this will help us win, but I do know, however, that supporting a failed policy sure as hell doesn't, as the American people clearly saw.

And this is so touching.

Why not invite both Pelosi and Reid to the White House every morning until the new Congress is sworn in - and ask them to listen with the President to his Presidential Daily Brief, describing what Al Qaeda has cooked up of late? Or, why not invite them along with the President to one of his private sessions with the families of those who have paid the ultimate price overseas? Speaking of those overseas whose lives hang upon American policy, Pelosi and Reid could be participants in the next conference call that Bush has with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki.

The point of all of this would be to create a true bipartisan consensus on Iraq that does not leave the Iraqis and US credibility to disaster.

Yeah, the problem is not that Pelosi and Reid don't understand, Josh. The problem is Bush and the neocons and the Republicans don't. That's what the elections were about.

And I've got another newsflash for you, Josh. Because of Bush's disaster in Iraq, rubberstamped by the GOP congress, US credibility is already a disaster. Powell's UN speech? Gitmo? Eastern European CIA prisons? The SecDef being charged with war crimes by Germany? Abu Ghraib? Half a million dead Iraqis? A defiant Iran? A nuclear N. Korea?

The US isn't exactly riding an all-time credibility high.

Also, in terms of what al-Qaeda is "cooking up"...don't you think the bi-partisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Intelligence is on top of this? You may have heard of them. They're the group that concluded that al-Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq.

A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.

...

The newly declassified intelligence report provided administration critics with fresh ammunition, less than two months before midterm elections and in the middle of President Bush's campaign to refocus the public's attention away from Iraq and toward the threat of terrorism. Senior Senate Democrats immediately seized on the findings, using some of their strongest language yet to say the president continues to willfully and falsely connect Hussein to al-Qaeda.

As recently as Aug. 21, Bush suggested a link between Hussein and Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by U.S. forces this summer. But a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein's government "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates," according to the report.

As before we invaded it, Josh, the biggest problem in Iraq right now still isn't al-Qaeda.

Some current and former United States military and intelligence officials who said they believed that Americans were already secretly penetrating Syrian territory question what they see as the Bush administration's excessive focus on the threat posed by foreign Arab fighters going through Syria. They say the vast majority of insurgents battling American forces are Iraqis, not foreign jihadis.

According to a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, intelligence analysis and the pattern of detentions in Iraq show that the number of foreign fighters represents ''well below 10 percent, and may well be closer to 4 percent to 6 percent'' of the total makeup of the insurgency.

One former United States official with access to recent intelligence on the insurgency added that American intelligence reports had concluded that 95 percent of the insurgents were Iraqi.

Putz, what Bush really, really doesn't need is more advice from the side that's been wrong about everything all along. He needs to start listening to the American people, his boss, who just fired his entire party for being so wrong.