President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser on Thursday offered a pointed critique of several of former President George W. Bush’s catch phrases on terrorism.

Veteran spy John Brennan, once in line to head the Central Intelligence Agency under Obama and apparently no great fan of the Bush White House, gave a lengthy speech outlining Obama’s strategy for fighting terrorism which attempts to go beyond, using military might to include economic and social policies.

Brennan criticized Bush’s moniker “global war on terror” as playing into the “warped narrative that al Qaeda propagates.” He added that it “plays into the misleading and dangerous notion that the U.S. is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world.”

He also had choice words for Bush regularly describing the terrorism battle as one against “jihadists,” saying that the term has a legitimate use (purifying oneself or waging a holy struggle for a moral goal) and using it “risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”

Officials from the Obama and Bush administrations have been trading volleys for months about each other’s policies, though for the most part the two presidents have stayed above the fray.

One other phrase that Bush used two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington was about countries being involved in or distancing themselves from the coalition that went into Afghanistan.

“Over time it’s going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity, that you — either with us or you’re against us in the fight against terror,” Bush said during a news availability with then French President Jacques Chirac.

That drew another rebuke from Brennan, who said that the Obama administration was reaching out instead of issuing sweeping warnings.

“Rather than looking at allies and other nations through the narrow prism of terrorism—whether they are with us or against us—the administration is now engaging other countries and peoples across a broader range of areas,” he said.

Brennan did acknowledge that it was eight years ago this very day that he was reading intelligence that warned Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States, “but our government was unable to prevent the worst terrorist attack in American history that would occur on 9/11.”

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- Photo credit: Jonathan Ernst (Brennan walks outside the White House earlier this year)

It's one thing they can agree on... baseball. 

Major League Baseball is bringing all five living U.S. presidents together at next week's 80th All-Star Game.

President Barack Obama and his predecessors George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter will appear in a 7-minute video presentation as part of the U.S. sports league's all-star festivities on Tuesday in St. Louis. Baseball called it the first time all living U.S. presidents would participate in a ceremony at a sporting event.

The video address will be part of a pre-game ceremony honoring 30 men and women being recognized by MLB and People magazine for acts of giving and service to their communities. Each person represents one of the sport's 30 teams.

President Obama will follow the video presentation by thorwing out the ceremonial first pitch for the game.

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Bush hosted meeting at White House for all presidents after  Obama became president-elect)

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - If you worried U.S. President Barack Obama might not handle diplomacy with the energy-rich Saudi rulers as deftly as Texas oilman George W. Bush, fear no longer.
 
No sooner had Obama landed in Riyadh for a day of meetings with King Abdullah than he was sporting a big gold medal around his neck — the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit.
 
It’s the country’s highest honor — named for the founder of the modern Saudi state.
 
Bush, too, was awarded one on his first visit to the kingdom. It just took the former president seven years — till January 2008 — to visit Saudi Arabia.
 
Obama managed to get his in under five months, at only his second meeting with the king.
 
During the first meeting — in London — the U.S. leader famously greeted the Saudi monarch with something that looked suspiciously like a bow but was hard to tell exactly because a guy was standing in the way.
 
Protocol-wise, heads of state do not generally bow by way of greeting. But then Michelle Obama was busy patting Queen Elizabeth on the back, so protocol was kind of out the window anyway.
 
There were other signs on Wednesday that the U.S. and Saudi leaders were getting along well.
 
The White House says Obama has been consulting with Abdullah regularly by phone about the speech to the Islamic world that he will give from Cairo on Thursday.
 
Their meeting at King Abdullah’s sprawling farm outside Riyadh was scheduled to go for about two hours. Instead it lasted about three.
 
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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama tries on gold medal received from King Abdullah)

Well, that didn’t take long. President Barack Obama is already showing signs that the White House is aging him six weeks after he took office. He is getting gray around the temples.

The New York Times and the Washington Post seem to have discovered this at the same time. The Times had a front-page story about it. The Post ran a story on the front of its Style section.

Time seems to run faster in the White House than everywhere else. A president can enter the place looking youthful and vigorous, and come out four or eight years later looking worn down, hair turned gray or white, back bowed. The job does that to them, all the life-and-death decisions that are made, the long hours, the political battles.

George W. Bush looked boyish when he entered, and came out with a wrinkly face and whiter hair. And look at photos of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War — absolutely exhausted.

As for Obama’s patches of gray, The Post quoted an expert, Karin Schallreuter of the University of Bradford in England, as saying that high stress affects the hair follicle, and that this could explain Obama’s hair.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed

If you want to know if there’s a difference between working for President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush, ask the man who’s worked for both: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates faced that question on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

Gates, a former CIA official, first responded without really responding. “That sounds like the subject of a good book,” Gates said, and declined to say whether he plans to write one.

When pressed, the Pentagon chief said, “I think that probably President Obama is somewhat more analytical and we makes sure he hears from everybody in the room on an issue and if they don’t speak up, he calls on them.”

And how does this differ from Bush, who had a reputation for delegating details and avoiding policy homework?

“President Bush was interested in hearing different points of view but didn’t go out of his way to make sure everybody spoke if they hadn’t spoken up.”

Asked how long he might stay as defense secretary, Gates replied, “Well, I think that’s probably up to the president.” He seemed to tip his hand ever so slightly when asked if he would stay until the end of Obama’s current term.

“That would be a challenge,” the guarded Gates said.

Some things never change. Take, for instance, the fact that a president does not make decisions based upon the polls.

Polling seems to be a flourishing business. Pollsters survey us on just about anything. Click on the Pew Research Center’s website  and you’ll find polls on such issues as our views on torture and warrantless wiretapping, or President Barack Obama’s skills as a communicator.

George W. Bush said over and over again he did not make decisions based on polls. So we wanted to point out that Obama borrowed some of Bush’s phraseology in talking about polls with interviewer Jim Lehrer of PBS’ “Newshour.”

He was talking about his decision to remove most U.S. troops from Iraq over 18 months while leaving up to 50,000 troops there with all to be out by the end of 2011.

Roll the videotape:

MR. LEHRER: You’re not the least bit uneasy over the fact as John McCain and John Boehner, the Republican leader of the House, have praised your plan while the Democrats are criticizing it?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I don’t — I don’t make these decisions based on polls or popularity. I make the decisions based on what I think is best. This is consistent with what I said during the campaign. The fact — if anything I think people should be interested in the fact that there’s been a movement in the direction of what I thought was going to be the right plan in the first place.

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama at Camp Lejeune talking to Marines about Iraq plans)

WASHINGTON - George W. Bush has kept a low profile since leaving the White House on Jan. 20 and moving back to Texas, but we’re starting to hear some bits and pieces of what he has been up to.

For one thing, we know that President Barack Obama phoned him on Friday to tell him most of the U.S. troops that Bush put into Iraq are going to come out over the next 18 months.

“President Bush appreciated the courtesy call from President Obama regarding the administration’s plans for Iraq,” said the former president’s spokesman, Rob Saliterman.

And then we hear Laura Bush gave an interview to ABC News and talked about George thumbing things into his BlackBerry and riding his bicycle around their new Dallas neighborhood.

You’ll recall that Bush gave up email to be president because he didn’t want every idle musing to end up as a presidential document that he would have to sort through once he got his library up and running. Or something like that.

Anyway, he has been in touch with his former staffers via email, the former first lady said.

“George is on the BlackBerry to them now all the time. But, you know, it’s a very, very different life, especially for the president, who had every problem in the world on his desk one day and then an empty desk the next day,” she told ABC News.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Pool (Documents from President Bush’s White House years unloaded in Texas)

CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina - So much for those adoring crowds.

President Barack Obama, who is used to screaming masses and loud applause from his 2008 campaign events, got a more tepid response on Friday from a hall of Marines and sailors who listened to his announcement on pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

Obama, who said U.S. combat forces would be out of Iraq by August 2010, drew polite clapping from the crowd for his policy announcements, but most of his presumed applause lines fell a bit flat.

“We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime - and you got the job done,” he said. Polite applause from the crowd of roughly 2,000.

“We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government - and you got the job done,” Obama continued. Modest clapping. 

“We will raise military pay,” he declared. Whoops, cheers, and very loud clapping. 

“I figured that’d be an applause line,” Obama said. He was right about that.

In contrast, former President George W. Bush typically received thunderous applause when he addressed military crowds.

Military members, who were approved to speak to reporters, played down the crowd’s responsiveness to Obama’s remarks.

Sergeant Adryon Johnson, 22, of Pennsylvania said he was excited to see the president in person.

“I’ve been over there,” he said. “I’m all supportive of whatever the commander-in-chief says.”

As for the tepid applause: “Marines are pretty disciplined so, you know, at times we’re going to do our jobs and maintain a professional appearance,” he said.

“As far as when the president, as you heard him talk about pay and, you know, family benefits and things that really matters to us, applause came.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama addresses Marines in North Carolina)

Any good book needs a villain, and President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget was quick to try to identify one.
 
It was right on the title page above the words 2010 Budget: “A New Era of Responsibility.”
 
Take that, George W. Bush.
 
“For too long our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent,” Obama said in remarks ahead of the release of his $3.55 trillion spending blueprint, which projected a huge $1.17 trillion deficit.
 
“Large sums have been left off the books, including the true cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home. It’s not how your government should run its budgets either,” he said.
 
A senior official at the White House budget office, speaking anonymously, jumped on the bandwagon.
 
“We’ve inherited a real mess, both fiscally — a trillion dollar deficit — as well as an economic issue, which is severe economic downturn,” the official said. “These are the result of a profound irresponsibility, misplaced priorities and mistaken policies.”
 
Hostile fire rarely goes unanswered.
 
“Trying to mask huge spending increases under the cloak of ‘fiscal responsibility’ is the height of audacity,” said Tony Fratto, Bush’s former White House spokesman specializing on economic issues.
 
“Our budgets were honest, open and transparent. Every dime spent was presented, debated, voted on and counted.”
 
“Putting temporary war spending in supplemental budgets was done to avoid permanently baking those appropriations into the Defense Department’s baseline budget,” Fratto added.

“That’s good budgeting, not a  ‘gimmick.’”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner listens to Obama make budget remarks); Reuters/Stelios Varias (OMB employee Dennis Johnson sits behind a stack of copies of Obama’s 2010 budget)

So it has come to this: Dick Cheney is said to be angry at George W. Bush over Bush’s decision not to grant a pardon to Scooter Libby over the Valerie Plame affair.

That is according to long-time Cheney watcher Thomas DeFrank of the New York Daily News. DeFrank reported that former vice president Cheney repeatedly pressed Bush to pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, arguing that Scooter deserved a full exoneration.

Former President Bush had already kept Libby out of jail by commuting his 30-month prison sentence.

“He tried to make it happen right up until the very end,” one Cheney associate told the Daily News.

After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney’s persistence he told aides he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further, DeFrank wrote.

The unsuccessful full-court press left Cheney bitter. “He’s furious with Bush,” a Cheney source told the Daily News. “He’s really angry about it and decided he’s going to say what he believes.”

UPDATE: We’re hearing that while Cheney lobbied for a Scooter pardon and disagreed with the ultimate outcome, it might be exaggerating to describe him as furious with Bush. We’re told the two men remain close and have talked a number of times since Bush left office on Jan. 20.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Cheney leaves White House for inauguration)