and in case we needed reminding...

...The Daily Beast has a handy-dandy list of 20 forgotten Bush scandals here. Examples:

4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

Don't forget, fellow Coloradoans, that was happening at the Lakewood office. (Dammit! See, that's a government job I am uniquely qualified for...) On the other hand, if this is the guy you gotta bang and do blow with, then maybe not so much...

Here's another:

11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.”

This one is definitely lesser-known, but keep in mind that Gerson is now a Terribly Smart Person writing op-eds for the Washington Post, with titles like today's: 'The Risks in Obama's Ambitions,' containing Terribly Smart criticisms of an administration that has been in power for exactly zero days:

Barack Obama was elected, in part, as the antidote to ambition. Unlike John F. Kennedy, who campaigned against the golf-playing complacency of the Eisenhower era, Obama appealed to a nation weary of large national exertions -- a nation longing for a normality beyond the wars, hurricanes, floods and assorted plagues of the Bush years.

Yet headed toward the inauguration, the scale of Obama's ambition is becoming evident.

Thanks, Mike. Notice how he, too, manages to treat the Bush years as something foreign and alien from himself, despite the fact that he was on their payroll and put many of those odious words in the preznitt's mouth over the years. And not incidentally, he is currently cashing on that former position.

Now, have you got a pen I could borrow, Mike? I need to write something longhand. About your mother.