(CNN) — It appears President Obama has to step up his reading pace if he wants to beat his predecessor in one particular measure: how many books a president can polish off a year.

In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Obama said he is currently reading Joseph O’Neill’s 270-page novel “Netherland,” a book Obama first said he began back in April.

If Obama is close to finishing the novel, that puts him on less than a 10 book-a-year pace, far less than the close to 100 books President Bush was reportedly able to finish in the same amount of time.

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In 2006, Bush read 95 books to Roves 110: a Herculean pace of nearly two books a week — in an election year to boot — for the ex-president. But, according to Rove, Bush’s reading slowed a bit in the final years of his presidency, finishing a not-too-shabby 51 books in 2007 and at least 40 in 2008.

And if that’s not impressive enough, Rove also said Bush found time to read the Bible “from cover to cover” every year.

What can one say, except, Yeah, right!? One hundred books per year my [blip]!

I wish he had read the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief: Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.

A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:

The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.

David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.

ABC News Sunlen Miller reports: Sen. Barack Obama went one step further today in his pushback against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and President Bush on appeasement, suggesting that both Republicans have a problem with presidents past who have engaged in direct diplomacy.

“If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy, led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy because that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, or Ronald Reagan, ’cause that’s what he did with [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev, or Richard Nixon ’cause that’s what they did with [Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung],” Obama said in Roseburg, Ore. “That’s exactly the kind of diplomacy we need to keep us safe.”

Since then, and it should come as no surprise, the networks have refused to come clean on their use of, and participation in the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program during the lead up to the war. And when the subject is finally covered by a minor network, PBS, an apologists of domestic propaganda — with ties to the Pentagon and to corporate media — is prominently featured in the segment.

The take away of the segment for me is that the networks refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for the war, and that they will simply ignore the NY Time’s report all together. Thus, again, the vast majority of the public, which still gets their news from the networks, will remain in the dark about this on going manipulation of the public discourse by the Pentagon and by the Bush administration.

For the record, as Judy Woodruff mentions in the segment:

And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond. [Emphasis added.]

Let’s see how long the networks go on ignoring their complicity in this fiasco that’s the Iraq war. I bet it’ll be a long while before a word is uttered.

These are some of the generals that the Pentagon and Bush administration deployed into our living rooms, courtesy of CNN, ABC, Fox News, NBC, CBS and the other usual suspects that make up our traditional media — yes, that unrepentant bastion of America-hating liberalism.

The New York Times reports on just how well the Pentagon and the Bush administration coordinated their efforts to manipulate the American Public as they duped us into the invasion of Iraq:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.

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Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

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In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

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The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

Of course, as the New York Times goes on to point out, the manipulation of the American public by these very sources and tactics, continues:

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

12. Given your support for virtually the entire Bush foreign and domestic agenda, aren’t the American people correct in viewing a John McCain victory in November as a third term for George W. Bush?
Two weeks ago, you told the American people “I’m not running on the Bush presidency.” But on almost every issue, your positions are identical to those of President Bush. You reversed course to support making permanent the Bush tax cuts you twice opposed. Like President Bush, you opposed the expansion of the SCHIP program for children’s health care, while similarly calling for the wildly unpopular privatization of Social Security. You’ve called for overturning the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights while reaffirming your support for conservative Supreme Court justices like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. You and the President are in lockstep when its comes to Iran and Iraq, so much so that when you were told President Bush wants to stay in Iraq for 50 years, you said, “Make it a hundred.” Isn’t it fair for Americans to ask where Bush ends and you begin? Don’t those who call you “John McSame” have grounds for doing so? When over 80% of the American people think the country is on the wrong track, isn’t it fair for the American people to fear that President John McCain means a third term for George W. Bush?

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14. Don’t you owe Barack Obama an apology for attacking as “confused leadership” his proposal for unilateral strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, a strategy which is now the policy of the Bush administration?
On August 1, 2007, Barack Obama announced that as President, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” On February 19th, you attacked – and misrepresented – his position during a primary night victory speech by asking “will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested invading our ally, Pakistan?” As it turns out, President Bush endorsed the use of unilateral American strikes against Al Qaeda targets within Pakistan, including the January 29 covert Predator drone attack that killed Al Qaeda leader Abu Laith Al-Libi. Do you disagree with President Bush’s new policy of attacking Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan without the permission of the government in Islamabad? If not, don’t you owe Barack Obama an apology?

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17. Given that you’ve reversed yourself on so many long-held positions, why shouldn’t the American people view you as an opportunistic flip-flopper?
You have something of a reputation as a political maverick. Yet in your 2008 quest for the White House, you repeatedly reversed long-held positions and compromised core principles to seemingly curry favor with both the leading lights of the conservative movement and right-wing Republican primary voters. You’ve changed your positions on the Bush tax cuts, Jerry Falwell and the Christian right, immigration reform, overturning Roe v. Wade, whether Justice Samuel Alito is a model for the Supreme Court, France-bashing, just to name a few. What happened to the “courage of our convictions?” Did you read your own book, Why Courage Matters? After what happened to John Kerry in 2004, why shouldn’t the American people view you as an opportunistic flip-flopper?

The judge more than doubled the sentence against al-Lahim’s 19-year-old client because she spoke to the media about the case, a court source told Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.

The woman — who was initially sentenced in October 2006 to 90 lashes — had her sentenced increased to 200 lashes and was ordered to serve six months in prison under Saudi Arabia’s strict Islamic law.

And if that weren’t enough, the victim’s lawyer had his license revoked for doing his job and representing his client to his fullest ability:

The attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, had his license revoked last week by a judge for speaking to the Saudi-controlled media about the case, al-Lahim told CNN.

It seems that Bush & Co. should’ve given democracy and human rights to Saudi Arabia, a staunch Bush ally in the region, rather than wasting such a precious gift on the ingrates of Iraq.