During his State of the Union, President Obama issued a call to action, looking to the nation's past for lessons on facing the challenges of the future:

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable -- that America was always destined to succeed. But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday, and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were the times that tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people...

The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.

But while Obama called for decisive action and national unity, Sarah Palin instead looked to her hand - and the hand of God:

Responding to questions pre-screened by Tea Party Convention organizers, Palin Saturday told an audience already preached to by the likes of Pastor Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore (starting around the 3:50 mark in the video above):

"And then I think kind of tougher to, kind of tougher to put our arms around but, allowing America's spirit to rise again by not being afraid, not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a god fearing nation where we're not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, we're not afraid to say, you know, we don't have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again."

Of course, in Sarah Palin's telling, the Lord is going rogue with her.

As the Washington Post summed it up in its review of book, Palin's worldview is "an Alaskan frontierswoman's trinity" of "God, Todd and dominion over animals." And to be sure, the Quitta from Wasilla sees the hand of God everywhere in her life:

Right away, Palin posits her faith as the pillar of her career, as if her successes have unfolded according to a grand divine plan. Her selection as McCain's running mate was a "natural progression," she writes in one section. "I don't believe in coincidences," she writes in another.

But as it turns out, Sarah Palin doesn't just have the Lord in her corner, she's also His spokesman.

The war in Iraq, as then Governor Palin told students at the School of Ministry at the Wasilla Assembly of God, is "a task that is from God." And when it came to the multibillion natural gas pipeline she hoped would span her state, Palin lectured, "I can do my job there in developing our natural resources...But really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God," adding:

"God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."

A jaw-dropping expose in Vanity Fair revealed the shocking extent of Palin's divine narcissism:

When [her son] Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig's condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God's, and signed it "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father."

Of course, Sarah Palin apparently has long believed she was touched by both the voice - and hand - of God. In May 2005 process complete with a laying on of hands, Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee prayed over Palin, imploring Jesus to protect her from "the spirit of witchcraft." As Election Day approached last fall, the GOP vice presidential claimed to be unconcerned by her ticket's dismal poll numbers. Victory, she insisted, was in God's hands:

"To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder. And it also strengthens my faith, because I'm going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4. So I'm not discouraged at all."

God, it seems, wanted Barack Obama in the White House.

Nonetheless, when it comes to God's chosen Republicans, Sarah Palin is the merely the natural successor to George W. Bush. (So much for the admonition from the first Republican, Abrahan Lincoln, that ,"My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.")

Bush's amen corner was quite clear in the belief that he had been tapped by the Almighty. The portrait of Bush as Savior was painted in books like Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Michael Lind's Made in Texas. Phillips concludes that George W. Bush is convinced that "God wanted him to be president", a view backed by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who reported, "Among the things he said to us was: I believe that God wants me to be president." As White House official Tim Goeglein once put it, "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility."

But if anything, Palin's followers are even more convinced that He is on their team. Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher also has a direct line to the Almighty as well. Asked about running for office, the McCain-Palin campaign prop replied:

"You know, I talked to God about that and he was like, 'No.'"

Then there's Sarah Palin's mini-me, Carrie Prejean. As the beauty pageant contestant turned anti-gay crusader told the adoring crowd at last year's Values Voters Summit:

"God chose me for that moment. He knew I was strong enough to get through all the junk that I have been through."

Sadly for Carrie Prejean, all of America soon learned that she had been touched not by God's hand, but her own.

And so it goes. While President Obama told Americans on January 27, "we don't quit," Sarah Palin told her adoring Tea Baggers this weekend:

"You don't need an office or a title to make a difference, and you don't need a proclaimed leader, as if we are all a bunch of sheep and looking for a leader to progress this movement."

Of course, she didn't mean it. By advising Americans to passively grovel for "divine intervention" to bring them prosperity and peace, Sarah Palin is indeed calling them sheep. And doubtless she believes it is God's will that Shepherd Sarah be the leader of the flock.

On that point, Pastor Scarborough is unapologetic. The Vision America founder and face of the "War on Christians" conference, Scarborough told MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell Friday that he considered the event his organization sponsored "a good investment."

And Michelle Goldberg wrote in the American Prospect, what Rick Scarborough is investing in is new adherents to his particularly draconian right-wing vision:

In 2002, he left his post as pastor of Pearland First Baptist Church to form Vision America, a group dedicated to organizing "patriot pastors" for political action. That year, Falwell identified him as one of the new leaders of the Christian right. The author of books like In Defense of ... Mixing Church and State and the pithier Liberalism Kills Kids, Scarborough spent the Bush years organizing conferences that brought together conservative Republicans with preachers and activists working for the imposition of biblical law.

Among Pastor Scarborough's closest allies has been the disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay. At his 2006 War on Christians conference, Scarborough defended His Hammer:

"I believe the most damaging thing that Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously into public office, which made him a target for all those who despise the cause of Christ."

As the indicted Delay left the stage, Scarborough urged him to "keep your eyes on Jesus" and informed the audience that "God always does his best work after a crucifixion."

Then there's Republican candidate for governor and former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore.

Former that is, because an Alabama ethics panel removed Moore from his position in November 2003 after he refused a mandate to remove a 10 Commandments display from his courthouse rotunda. In response, as the New York Times recalled, Moore was unrepentant:

Moreover, Judge Thompson said, ''the chief justice showed no signs of contrition for his actions.''

Indeed, just minutes later, Mr. Moore strode out of the courthouse into a crush of his supporters and announced, ''I have absolutely no regrets.''

''We fought a good fight,'' he said. ''We kept the faith. But the battle is not over. The battle to acknowledge God is about to rage across the country.''

And to be sure, Moore continues to wage that battle. In addition to his campaigns for office, Judge Moore is an outspoken supporter of Senator Richard Shelby's jaw-dropping "Constitution Restoration Act," which:

"...aims to reinforce states rights by clarifying that the Supreme Court and district courts do not have jurisdiction to hear cases brought against a federal, state or local government or officer for acknowledging God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

And so it goes. Echoing Republican talking points from the 2008 campaign, failed GOP White House hopeful Tom Tancredo told the Tea Party faithful gathered in Nashville that Barack Obama is a "socialist." Tancredo also fired up the crowd, "You have launched the counter-revolution." Of course, the extremist right-wing counter-revolution urged by reactionaries like Rick Scarborough and Roy Moore has been underway for years. The Lord's Tea Baggers may now have a bigger stage, but they are delighting the same eager faces.

UPDATE: While Rick Scarborough was scheduled to host a Friday session titled, "Why Christians Must Engage," at Thursday evening's Tea Party kick-off he conducted the "Organized Prayer Session for the convention & our nation." As Time described it:

By the end of the night, much of the room knelt in prayer - one of the pastors, Rick Scarborough, went after homosexuals several times to choruses of amens -- before watching a Tea Party video.

Last year, 137 House Republicans voted to convert the Medicare program that provides 46 million Americans with health insurance into a system of vouchers. (In September, Sarah Palin penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed which similarly called for "providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage.") Now, as Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and TPM all noted, the GOP's Paul Ryan is making the privatization of Medicare the centerpiece of a new Republican deficit reduction gambit.

Of course, because the value of Ryan's vouchers fails to keep up with the out-of-control rise in premiums in the private health insurance market, America's elderly would be forced to pay more out of pocket or accept less coverage. The Washington Post's Klein described the inexorable Republican rationing of Medicare which would then ensue:

The proposal would shift risk from the federal government to seniors themselves. The money seniors would get to buy their own policies would grow more slowly than their health-care costs, and more slowly than their expected Medicare benefits, which means that they'd need to either cut back on how comprehensive their insurance is or how much health-care they purchase. Exacerbating the situation -- and this is important -- Medicare currently pays providers less and works more efficiently than private insurers, so seniors trying to purchase a plan equivalent to Medicare would pay more for it on the private market.

On Tuesday, Ryan acknowledged as much. Sadly for the Republican brain trust, he failed to follow the script that only Democratic reforms lead to "health care denied, delayed and rationed."

"Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?"

Of course, Ryan left out the real culprit - the private insurance market. But with 50 million uninsured, another 25 million underinsured, one in five American postponing needed care and medical costs driving over 60% of personal bankruptcies, Congressman Ryan is surely right that "rationing happens today."

But the Republican plan to "slash and privatize" hardly ends there. Despite insistence by the Republican leadership that the party is not officially advocating it, the Ryan alternative budget follows Rep. Jeb Hensarling's announced desire to privatize Medicare. As TPM documented:

Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI) the ranking Republican on the budget committee, recently detailed the Republican plan for Social Security that preserves the existing program for those 55 or older. For younger people the plan "offers the option of investing over one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees."

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should. After all, George W. Bush's disastrous drive to privatize Social Security helped undermine his presidency. Now, in the wake of a Wall Street meltdown that evaporated the retirement savings for countless thousands of Americans, the Republican wunderkind Ryan is calling for an encore.

In Paul Ryan's defense, his so-called "A Roadmap for America's Future" was scored by the Congressional Budget Office as erasing the long-term deficit entirely, and produce surpluses by 2080 (!). While the Post's Klein stated, "I wouldn't balance the budget in anything like the way Ryan proposes," he also admitted:

"The audacity is breathtaking. But it is also impressive."

Audacious, indeed. After months of scaring the American people into believing that President Obama and the Democrats would ration health care and gut Medicare, Paul Ryan's Republican Party now proposes to do both.

For a look back at the hilarious April Fool's Day unveiling of Ryan's 2009 budget "marketing document," visit here.

UPDATE: In the latest pathetic twist in the Republican budget saga, House Minority Leader John Boehner is now trying to distance himself from Paul Ryan's document. Claiming "it's his," Boehner nevertheless replied "Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you" when asked what in it he disagrees with.

If this storyline sounds familiar, it should. Boehner did the same thing last year after presenting Ryan's "The Republican Road to Recovery" with great fanfare:

"Two nights ago, the president said we haven't seen a budget yet of the Republicans. Well, it's not true, because here it is Mr. President."

For more, visit the American Road Map web site at http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

One day after Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen embarrassed John McCain and other fear mongering Republicans, the man who doomed the 1993 effort to end discrimination in the armed forces reversed course. Mullen's predecessor Powell announced:

"In the almost 17 years since the 'don't ask, don't tell' legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed. I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen."

The significance of Colin Powell's belated change of heart can't be understated.

In 1966, Professor Charles Moskos, among the nation's foremost authorities on racial integration in the U.S. military, documented the rapid progress since Truman's order, progress which he suggested spoke well not just of the armed forces as an institution but for the future prospect of American society overall:

By the middle 1950's this policy was an accomplished fact...Within a remarkably short period the makeup of a major American institution underwent a far-reaching transformation.

Thirty one years later in 1997, Moskos told David Gergen that the military was at the forefront of racial progress in the United States, and not merely because Colin Powell had risen to the rank of Joint Chiefs Chairman:

"It's the only institution in American society where white people are routinely bossed around by blacks and where black leadership is very, very evident and well regarded. I mean, obviously, Colin Powell comes to mind, but I might add that 9 percent of all army generals today are black, as are approximately 1/3 of all first sergeants and sergeant majors. It's not utopia by any means. There are problems in the military. It's got racist in it, but in terms of any other institution one wants to compare it with, black leadership is far and away superior."

Sadly for both the nation and his own reputation, Charles Moskos could not overcome his own biases when it came to openly gay Americans serving in the U.S. military. Before his death in 2008, Moskos authored the DADT policy in 1993, arguing "To me, the issue comes down to privacy. Prudes have rights too."

Now, with President Obama, Secretary Gates and Chairman Mullen pushing for the repeal of the DADT policy which shames the United States even as it undermines its national security, many of the same specious arguments and none-too-subtle code words are once again being deployed.

John McCain, for example, declared himself "disappointed" in the testimony from Gates and Mullen, arguing "At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." His Republican colleague Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) fretted that "the presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would very likely create an unacceptable risk to those high standards" of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion. And while Chambliss worried about an explosion of "alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art" in the U.S. military, fellow Republican Duncan Hunter was concerned about something else: hermaphrodites:

"I think it's bad for the cohesiveness and the unity in the military especially those that are in close combat, close quarters in country right now, it's not the time to do it. I think the military is not civilian and I think the folks that have been in the military in very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there and I think that bond is broken, if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites to gays and lesbians."

Of course, the United States has been here before. As the Center for American Progress documented last year, 62 years ago the target color of bigotry was black and not rainbow. And yet Harry Truman pressed ahead in a much less friendly political environment, despite the same hatemongering from both parties and even Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley:

Truman's effort to desegregate the armed forces also faced strong opposition from members of both parties in Congress. Sen. Richard Russell (D-GA), the then-ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, claimed that desegregation would lead to a weaker force because it would be "sure to increase the number of men who [would] be disabled through communicable diseases and the crime rate among servicemen [would] soar." Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft (R-OH) called Truman's executive order a cheap political ploy. Some of Obama's opponents in Congress will likely employ similar arguments against DADT, and the president must be prepared to display the same strong leadership Truman exhibited.

President Truman also faced significant opposition from the country. Only 13 percent of Americans supported "having negro and white troops throughout the U.S. armed services live and work together" when he issued his executive order to end segregation in the armed forces. Obama's potential support is much greater. A 2009 Washington Post-ABC News poll from July 2008 showed that 75 percent of Americans now believe that gay people should be allowed to serve openly.

Mercifully, much has changed in the United States. In the 1960's, conservative southern Democrats bolted the party for the open arms of the GOP in order to perpetuate the final vestiges of the Jin Crow system. And since then, Colin Powell didn't just reach the pinnacle of American military leadership. Unlike his champion Charles Moskos, he saw the light.

UPDATE: As ThinkProgress and TPM among others have noted, John McCain now has some serious explaining to do. For years, he has cited Colin Powell to back his refusal to oppose DADT. This includes his June 2009 claim that "The reason why I supported the policy to start with is because General Colin Powell, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration," adding, "I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position."

When the House Republican leadership with great fanfare initially released the GOP budget proposal in late March, it was greeted with guffaws. The 19 page outline was detail-free, failing even George W. Bush's test ("It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."). And while Rep. Ryan boasted "while we criticize, we propose," Minority Leader John Boehner went much further:

"Two nights ago, the president said we haven't seen a budget yet of the Republicans," said House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). "Well, it's not true, because here it is Mr. President." He waved a thin document called "The Republican Road to Recovery" that describes the GOP proposal.

The DNC's National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan summed up the consensus reaction in his response:

"After 27 days, the best House Republicans could come up with is a 19-page pamphlet that does not include a single real budget proposal or estimate. There are more numbers in my last sentence than there are in the entire House GOP 'budget.'"

So the next week on April Fool's Day - you can't make this stuff up - Ryan returned to pronounce that Boehner's was merely a "marketing document." Rep. Ryan clarified further, "The thing you saw last week was not the alternative budget, this is our alternative budget," adding, "'Somewhere along the line there was a misimpression given that that was our budget."

And what a budget it was. For a nation experiencing a catastrophic recession, as the Washington Post reported on April 2, 2009:

After getting blasted last week for presenting a budget plan light on details, House Republicans yesterday unveiled a more complete proposal that would cut taxes for businesses and the wealthy, freeze most government spending for five years, halt spending approved in the economic stimulus package and slash federal health programs for the poor and elderly.

In his successor to the "not a budget" proposal, Ryan offered the same snake oil his party has been selling since the days of Reagan and Bush. The cure for what ailed the U.S. economy, it turns out, is a massive tax windfall for the wealthiest Americans who need it least.

The alternative Republican budget doubled down on the wildly regressive Bush/McCain tax cutting binge American voters rejected at the polls in November. Making the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent, the GOP also proposed an alternative "highly simplified system that fits on a post card, with few deductions and two rates." Taxpayers making over $100,000 would see their rate drop to 25% from its current high of 35%. (Below that level, the rate drops to 10%.) Corporate taxes would also drop to 25%. While the capital gains tax rate would be frozen at its post-2003 level of 15%, the estate tax would be eliminated altogether.

The predictable result is yet another massive redistribution of the tax burden away from the richest Americans even as it produced a torrent of red ink. While the Center for American Progress concluded the Boehner-Ryan giveaway would hand an annual tax bonanza of $1.5 million to the average CEO, a preliminary analysis from the Center for Tax Justice last week concluded that by 2011, the GOP scheme would drain the Treasury to the tune of $300 billion more than the Obama plan. And as is par for the course for the Republicans, the usual upper-income suspects benefit the most:

Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.

The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.

(It should be noted the CTJ model was preliminary and does not necessarily reflect the final details in today's GOP budget document. For example, CTJ assumed a capital gains tax rate of 10% and not 15%.)

But the ironies don't end there. While Republicans all year warned of mythical cuts to Medicare (which, of course, they have opposed from its inception), the Ryan budget proposed privatizing altogether the health insurance program that serves 46 million American seniors. As Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly noted:

In April, 137 Republicans voted in support of a GOP alternative budget. It didn't generate a lot of attention, but the plan, drafted by the House Budget Committee's Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called for "replacing the traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help retirees enroll in private health care plans."

The AP noted at the time that Republican leaders were "clearly nervous that votes in favor of the GOP alternative have exposed their members to political danger."

(In July, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner called their bluff, introducing an amendment that would eliminate "government-run Medicare." No Republicans voted for it.)

Still, Jeb Hensarling on Friday insisted, "since that budget was ignored, what were the old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats. The national debt has increased 30 percent." Before making clear to both Hensarling and Ryan that he was well acquainted with their budget proposal, President Obama offered a response that captured the magnitude of the House Republicans' public relations defeat yesterday:

"Now, look, let's talk about the budget once again, because I'll go through it with you line by line. The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. -- $1.3 [trillion.] So when you say that suddenly I've got a monthly budget that is higher than the -- a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

Just like April Fool's Day, the joke was on the Republican Party.

Perhaps the purest expression of President Bush's "admit no mistakes" mantra came during a press conference in April 2004. A year after his invasion of Iraq produced a growing insurgency, mounting U.S. casualties, no weapons of mass destruction and a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," a stammering President Bush could not think of a single mistake he had made during his tenure in the White House:

"I'm sure something will pop into my head here...maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

But by January 2007, just days after he announced the surge in Iraq, Bush admitted to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes that he had made mistakes, if only semantic ones:

PELLEY: You mention mistakes having been made in your speech. What mistakes are you talking about?

BUSH: You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.

Amazingly, Bush's most profound statement of regret about his tough talk came (despite Dana Perino's claim to the contrary) in June 2008. In London as part of his final swing through Europe before leaving the White House, President Bush told The Times of London that his cowboy rhetoric was perhaps his greatest regret:

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a "guy really anxious for war" in Iraq.

[...] In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."

Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive", he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

To be sure, George W. Bush had a lot to apologize for when it came to his use of phrases like "bring 'em on." As a grieving Mary Kewatt told Minnesota Public Radio in June 2003:

"We have some issues with the fact that President Bush declared combat over on May 1. Combat is not over. We don't even know who's firing at us right now, and all of our soldiers are at great risk of being picked off as Jim was. And that's a shame. And then President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said, 'bring it on.' They brought it on and now my nephew is dead."

Throughout his tenure in the White House, Bush evaded accountability for errors large and small. On no issue was this more on display than on the war in Iraq. After, President Bush's response to collapse of his primary rational for the war against Saddam was to joke about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. David Corn recalled Bush's performance at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, in which the Comic-in-Chief regaled the audience with his White House hijinx:

Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

And to the very end, President Bush (along with his Republican allies) continued to perpetuate the myth of Saddam's link to Al Qaeda and 9/11. During his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

In sharp contrast, President Obama from the very beginning made clear he would uphold a much different - and higher - standard of accountability. In February 2009, Obama acknowledged the vetting problems that led to two of his high profile nominees (Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer) to withdraw over tax problems. As he told NBC's Brian Williams:

"I'm here on television saying I screwed up, and that's part of the era of responsibility. It's not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do." He also offered one more mea culpa: "[S]o, did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely and I'm willing to take my lumps, you know that's part of the job here."

In April, a "furious" President Obama reacted to the Air Force One photo-op fiasco in New York by proclaiming, "It was a mistake, as was stated, and it will not happen again." Days later, Louis Caldera, the official responsible for the episode, resigned. (He did not receive a presidential medal.)

And addressing Congress last night, President Obama recognized the "cynicism" and "disappointment" that the change he promised has not come fast enough:

"Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved. But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year. And what keeps me going -- what keeps me fighting -- is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people, that lives on."

That's a far cry from George W. Bush's near-papal doctrine of infallibility. As for the impact of his unacknowledged mistakes on the American people who elected him, it was his wife First Lady Laura Bush who in 2007 perhaps described it most succinctly:

"No one suffers more than their President and I do."