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Bush is at it again, giving himself great little nicknames that I think are meant to assuage our fears that he makes extremely important decisions without paying mind to Congress, the military, or the American people. Yesterday, Bush, in his explanation as to why he vetoed the $124 billion war spending bill that passed in both the House and the Senate last week, which would have set a timeline for withdrawal, designated himself "the Commander Guy." It's priceless:

The question is, 'Who ought to make that decision, the Congress or the commanders?' As you know, my position is clear Im the commander guy.

Thanks t o Think Progress, you can watch it here.

Alex Blagg: Other Ways To Describe the Role of the President
Now that George W. Bush has officially changed his self-administered title from "The Decider" to "The Commander Guy", I thought I might take this as an opportunity to suggest a few other euphemisms the president might use to describe his duties with a little bit more panache. Big Chief Captain America Leadership Jones Suit and Tie Serious Guy The Nuclear Beholder The Man With the Plan, But Not Really Charles In Charge Lord of War Gozer The Dude Whose Finger Is On the Button John Wayne Misslefist, The Thunder Warrior Old Speechmaker Big Boss Man The Man Upstairs He Whose Nam e Shall Not Be Remembered Very Fondly more

WSJ Lead With This?">Marty Kaplan: Would Rupert Murdoch Have Let the WSJ Lead With This?
The lead story in Thursday's Wall Street Journal is reporter Greg Jaffe's 3000-word obituary for the war in Iraq. Titled "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay as Hope Fades: U.S. Soldiers Persevere Despite Snipers, Ambush; Fighting for Each Other," the story is a portrait of 50 American troops hunkered down in Tarmiyah, a city of 30,000 Sunnis 30 miles north of Baghdad. (The article is behind a subscription wall, but if you go here, after enduring a Microsoft ad, you can watch a three-minute video narrated by Jaffe that conveys the heartbreaking gist of his piece.) The news in the Jaffe article will come as new to no one except Bush, Cheney and the dead-enders who write for and relish the Wall Street Journal's editorial and opinion pages -- people like Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, whose WSJ ode to the imperial presidency, an attack on the rule of law, marks a new low in neocon apologetics. But the Journal's news division employs some of the best reporters in the business. I wonder how the paper's Republican readers -- two-thirds of whom say they support remaining in Iraq, if they match the national numbers -- will react to reading that the "'surge strategy'...does little more than chase insurgents from one part of the country to another," that American troops are battling on not because they believe in Bush's futile delusion of "victory," but because they have bonded with one another, and they are fighting to save the lives of their comrades-in-arms. The only mission Bush has any chance to accomplish is handing the Iraq war to his successor. Every single life lost in pursuit of this mission -- like the ones lost by Demon Company, the U .S. soldiers of the Army's First Calvary Division stationed ! in the h ellhole of Tarmiyah -- is a life sacrificed not to protect America from terrorists, but to protect George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from accountability. Rupert Murdoch is notorious for his hands-on involvement with his media properties, and for putting his thumb on the right side of the scales. If he owned Dow Jones, how likely is it that a piece like Greg Jaffe's would get the kind of play it gets today, or that it would be assigned in the first place? more