Well, it hasn't taken the Bush blog long to start distorting.

On just Day Two, they are citing a David Brooks column in The New York Times as showing "Progress Toward a Free Iraq."

Brooks does argue that the Iraqis are making progress on a constitution, but the blog conveniently ignores the fact that Brooks also:

• Devotes half the column to a list of daunting bullet points under the heading: "Still, gigantic issues remain:"
• He concludes that gigantic list with this harsh indictiment of the Bush plan: "There's no way the Iraqis can resolve these issues within six months, the deadline Colin Powell once set."

The latter is crucial, because in essense it says: Yes, the Iraqis are doing as well as can be expected, but the Bush plan for them has proven preposterous. Brooks is patting the Iraqis on the back, but ripping Bush a new one (in an admittedly subtle way, as expected for a hardcore conservative).

All recent entries from the Bush Blogwatch here.

I realize that any blog is going to have a point of view, and a presidential blog will be particularly propogandistic, but the new Bush blog is just too much.

Titles of the last two entries:

• Progress Toward a Free Iraq
• Afghan children are laughing and learning just two years after beginning of war

The first one is laughable, the second obscene.

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I got some great comments from some of you guys on my post last night about the horrifying arrival of the Bush blog (first powerful contender for the jump-the-shark moment in the history of blogging). (And here's an ominous omen--if you click on the link and glance up at the url, you'll find that was my post #666.)

This response from Ben was particularly insightful:

Yup. Web log > blog > politblog > e-newsletter with bulletin board posting available with real-time updating 24/7.

The Blog as a media form is still in a state of evolution. Unfortunately, the Bush blog represents a species that doesn't fit Darwinian standards, let alone what the rest of the world thinks a blog should be. If Bush's intent was to be the first President to have a blog site, well, let's go call the Smithsonian. History will probably still show how Dean's use of the blog revolutionized the election process.

My response: Agreed on both. The personal voice on Dean's blog is not Dean's, but it is personal.

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(And I'm instituting a new feature here, which you'll find a link to in the left-hand sidebar: Bush Blogwatch. I'm not sure how often I'll update it. Depends how interesting and/or appalling the Bush blog becomes.)

Ugh. George Bush got a blog today. I hate to even link to it, but here it is.

I guess that makes blogs completely passe. The dork factor just soared through the roof.

So far, all they've got is Bush's schedule for today, and links to three news stories.

The real howler is that they brag about "offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” "--complete with annoying gratuitous quotes around beltway--and then follow immediately with stories/op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and W Post. So they're stretching all the way out to the heartland of NY?  To Washington correspondents for rabid-right publications in NY? Wow. No beltway mentality there.

And they start off with two pieces grasping to make their case on WMD. Pitiful.

The initial response on the Dean blog.