Announcing: "Manifestly Unfit: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush"

I thought I'd announce today that I'm beginning a new meta-project that, like "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" before it, will produce a mini-book-sized "Web pamphlet" designed to be a central informational resource for anyone needing facts at their fingertips.

As the title suggests, this project is an attempt to catalog the many disasters that have befallen the United States since George Bush's inauguration in January 2001, as well as to give a thorough assessment of his culpability in them. It will also catalog Bush's biography before the 2000 election and assess it in the light of the "character issue" raised throughout Clinton's presidency by Republicans; and it will compile the facts about Bush's behavior during the 2000 campaign, with an emphasis on the Florida debacle.

Unlike the right-wing counterparts devoted to destroying Bill Clinton, this mini-book will be entirely factual, and will eschew any kind of conspiratorial theorizing or vicious attacks on Bush's character -- in no small part because those are precisely the behavior of the right in the 1990s that opened the door for its alliances with extremist elements. To the extent that Bush's critics indulge in same, they run the same risks, and severely damage their credibility.

On the other hand, it will try to thoroughly examine and weigh the evidence regarding Bush's failures, his known actions and actual statements, as well as those of his surrounding team, led by Karl Rove.

Like "Rush," it will be a reader-participation piece in which Orcinus acts as a sort of central information clearing-house. Some of you may recall that I did a similar reader-participation Web-based data-gathering process at Salon's Table Talk which resulted in a pretty good research-based piece about Ted Olson.

This project will be in that same spirit. I'll be posting requests for information from time to time, and then will intermittently publish chapters of the mini-book here at the blog as they are compiled. I hope anyone who spots a data request that they may know something about feels free to write me at dneiwert@hotmail.com .

Along those lines, let me make a first request:

Just on the eve of the 2000 election, Saturday Night Live ran a skit projecting what the respective presidencies of George W. Bush and Al Gore would bring. Gore, of course, was shown reading boring sermons from a self-help book or something like that on national television; Bush, on the other hand, was shown cowering behind his desk as the Capitol behind him was in flames.

I thought the sketch -- at least its core point -- proved eerily prescient, and I'd like to cite it to open the book. If anyone knows where I could obtain a copy of the script to that skit, please contact me at my e-mail.

Thanks!

[Update: I've already received a terrific link to the transcript, thanks to JP the Great. Kudos, JP. We're off to a great start.]