Since, over the past few months, President Bush has finally capitulated - admitting that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and that al Qaeda wasn't present in Iraq before we invaded - maybe it's time to pry loose a few more admissions from this most mendacious of Presidents, institute a kind of "truth and reconciliation" exchange that would clear up some of his administration's other thoroughly discredited narrative.

He could, maybe, sit at a picnic table in a suburban ballpark, surrounded by dog-walkers and mommies with strollers as early-morning bird chirps fill the air. (And, no, there'll be no shoe-hurling allowed.) The President could just... kinda... level with us. What went wrong. Why it went wrong. Who was pressing all the wrong stuff. 

That last one, of course, is a little tricky, since it entails spilling the beans about just why his biggest single catastrophe - the Iraq War - was launched in the first place. We know who pushed for it: Vice President Dick Cheney and neoconservatives in the Pentagon, as well as all neoconservatives with newspaper columns or magazine contracts, or chairs in universities or think tanks. That drags into the picture most of the American media, as well as all those stridently forward-thinking but unfortunately agenda-driven foundations like Ford and Carnegie; these estates turned, in the blink of an eye, from the blinkered good intentions of genteel soiree socialism to rabid, "f*ck the bitches" war-mongering. Seems 9/11 malignantly realigned more than the landscape of lower Manhattan and the architecture of the Pentagon's rings.

With a leak last week of the White House's hysterically funny revision of recent history, a two-page memo putting the best possible spin on everything Bush did or even thought of doing in the past eight years ("Hey, look, since 2001 - no more planes landed in buildings!"), it's obvious Bush wants to dress up his dreary era. What better way to stitch a Gucci tag in this particular sow's ear than by squaring with us once and for all?

Bush started crawling from under the "Iraq Connection Fable" as early as 2003, when he disavowed blurry doubletalk from Vice President Dick Cheney that such a tie existed. In September of that year, months after the American invasion of Iraq, Cheney told a stunned nation on "Meet the Press" that the link was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying, "We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know." By this time, another sorry excuse for the war - Iraq's elusive "WMD" - had been flushed down the White House memory hole.

Finally, in a speech a few days ago to the Saban Forum, Bush dispensed with the "we have no evidence" qualifier and flatly admitted Saddam didn't "do it". This must have come as an enormous shock to that blinkered 30 percent of the population who believe wholeheartedly that Bush is the best thing that ever happened to this country, Christ is crouching to leapfrog back to earth and the Chargers have a shot in the post-season.

Well, sir! That'll just about do it for Bush's excuses to invade Iraq and topple Saddam. There never was a chance of the Scourge of the Fertile Crescent sending WMD drones to churn up mushroom clouds over American cities. He never sought Nigerian pastries much less yellow-cake uranium. For everyone cheerleading all this phony, cherry-picked "intelligence", there were confident expectations something would be found - even a test-tube of anthrax somewhere in Saddam's dark arsenals. That would provide at least some viability for a war that has snuffed thousands of lives - American and Iraqi - and reduced that counrty's infrastructure and collective spirit to almost paleolithic levels. But... nothing.

Of course, Bush would also have to explain his shredding of the Constitution, chucking habeas corpus, pulling torture out of the Dark Ages and making it a practical interrogation tool once again, setting up farflung dungeons into which hapless political Monte Christos are tossed and forgotten, spying on Americans without hint of warrants, politicizing the nation's chief prosecutorial office, and on and on and on.

But Iraq really emerges as the landmark atrocity of his atrocious two terms. 'Splain that and the rest of the disgusting handiwork will fall into place. Of course, we shouldn't hold our breaths. Bishop Tutu's brave, imminently inspired Truth and Reconciliation project helped heal South Africa after decades of apartheid abuses ended in the mid-'90s. It was a brilliant response to an impossibly complex, inconceivably tragic situation.

Does any of that foresight and compassion sound like George Bush?

Here's the deal: Tutu cared for his country, and its future. George Bush doesn't give a damn about America or what happens to it. After all we've been through because of this absentee asshole, we know that now.

One of the most engaging journalists to emerge lately is veteran Newsweek correspondent Howard Fineman, simply because now he's letting all the pent-up rage and frustration of covering President Bush for eight long years slowly seep out in his reporting and on interview shows like "Countdown With Keith Olbermann."

In a conversation about Bush's brush-off to ABC reporter Katy Raddatz, telling her "so what" if al Qaeda established itself in Iraq because of our invasion - not before it... and not in spite of it - Fineman noted Bush's "studied indifference" to what the rest of us think, feel... want.

"The key to George Bush is he doesn't really care, he doesn't care what you think, or I think, or what most of the rest of the world thinks about the level of sophisticated knowledge he does or doesn't have."

"...The phrase 'so what' really sums up what his legacy is all about."

And for the past eight years, we've been peasants without any cake to eat.