Torturers find Obama "Ungracious".

The Bush team are letting it be known through the New York Times that they were severely pissed off with the tone of Obama's remarks at the inauguration.

“There were a few sharp elbows that really rankled and I felt were not as magnanimous as the occasion called for,” Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush confidante, said in an interview. “He really missed an opportunity to be as big as the occasion was and, frankly, as gracious as President Bush was as he left office.”

Dan Bartlett, another top adviser, used similar language. “It was a missed opportunity to bring some of the president’s loyal supporters into the fold,” he said. Marc A. Thiessen, the chief White House speechwriter until this week, added: “It was an ungracious inaugural. It was pretty clear he was taking shots.”

This is typical of the mindset which has been in evidence for the past eight years. This gang of torturers, people who have been part of an administration which has confessed to taking part in war crimes, complain that Obama has been "ungracious" towards them.

They appear to have no idea that their behaviour has been so damaging to the US's reputation worldwide that it was imperative that Obama made it as clear as he possibly could that the days of the Bush administration were over and that the tactics which they employed would cease forthwith.

“On both style and substance,” said Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff, the new president is “turning the page.”

Mr. Emanuel mocked Bush advisers for bristling at the message of the Inaugural Address. “If they didn’t know that was the judgment of people, then their subscription to the newspapers were canceled over the last three years,” he said.

And that's the problem, an administration which claimed to pay no attention to polls - indeed, an administration who responded, "So?" when told that the public disagreed with them - appear to neither care nor even know how loathed they have become. Bush left office with record breaking disapproval ratings as did Cheney.

Both men appeared in public and admitted, actually they almost boasted, that they had authorised war crimes, and now they are feeling the pain because Obama has been "ungracious" towards them?

Mr. Obama never directly mentioned Mr. Bush’s name after the ritual thank you at the beginning of his speech, but the context of some of his remarks was lost on no one. He criticized “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” He assured the rest of the world “that we are ready to lead once more.”

Some analysts said it was the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover in 1933 that an incoming president used his Inaugural Address to so evidently repudiate his predecessor as he headed for the door.

I said at the time that I was delighted that he took first a scalpel and then a sledgehammer to the mindset which has ruled Washington for the past eight years. Even now the Bush regime seem utterly unaware of how resoundingly their way of thinking has been rejected by the American electorate.

The world needed to hear that America is back, an America which is ruled by laws and where even the president is subject to those laws, and that is what Obama was making crystal clear.

And if he upset the feelings of torturers as he did so, well that's just too bad.

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Tags: Obama, Bush, inauguration, speech