Tonight, during an exclusive interview with Sean Hannity, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) promised to campaign for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “to make sure we have conservative leadership running our country.”

How quickly things change. A little more than a month ago, Romney attacked McCain’s conservative credentials. In the lead-up to Super Duper Tuesday, Romney claimed that McCain’s immigration policies, “and his support for a cap-and-trade program” demonstrated that McCain would follow a “liberal Democratic” course if elected. “I don’t think those liberal answers are the ones Americans are looking for,” Romney said at a Fort Meyers event in late January.

Days later, during a contentious debate at the Reagan Library, Romney said that McCain’s policies “are outside the view of mainstream Republican thought.”

And I guess I’d also note that, if you get endorsed by the New York Times, you’re probably not a conservative.

Even after ending his bid for the White House, Romney remains, as McCain once described him, the candidate of change.

According to an advanced manuscript of former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith’s upcoming book, War and Decision, President Bush decided that war with Iraq was “inevitable” on December 18, 2002,”weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.”

Feith’s revelation contradicts the president’s public statements. Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Bush repeatedly claimed that “every measure has been taken to avoid war” and that by disarming and complying with UN Resolution 1441, Saddam Hussein can avoid war.

December 31, 2002: “I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work to deal with these situations in a way so that they’re resolved peacefully….I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you. I hope this can be done peacefully.”

January 2, 2003: “First of all, you know, I’m hopeful we won’t have to go war, and let’s leave it at that.”

February 10, 2003: “But Saddam Hussein is—he’s treated the demands of the world as a joke up to now, and it was his choice to make…He’s the person who gets to decide war and peace.”

March 6, 2003: “Hopefully, this can be done peacefully…I want to remind you that it’s his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It’s Saddam’s choice. He’s the person that can make the choice of war and peace.”

March 8, 2003: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.”

March 17, 2003: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.”

Feith’s claim also supports earlier press reports and accounts which dated Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to early 2003. In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward claims that in January 2003 Bush told then Secretary of State Colin Powell that “The inspections are not getting us there…. I really think I’m going to have to do this.” Similarly, on February 23, 2003, Bush reportedly told Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar that “we have to get rid of Saddam.”

Earlier today, during a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that he would not consider Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) for the VP slot, despite being offered the position on Kerry’s ticket in 2004.

After the event, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller confronted McCain with a May 2004 New York Times story in which McCain denied ever meeting with Kerry to discuss a joint ticket.

In a testy exchange, McCain questioned Bumiller’s source and denied ever considering Kerry’s offer.

Everybody knows that I had a private conversation. Everybody knows that, that I had a conversation….And you know it, too. No. You know it, too. No. You do know. You do know…John Kerry asked if I would consider being his running mate and I said categorically no, under no circumstances. That’s all very well known.”

Watch it:

But in March 2004, McCain seemed to ‘entertain’ the possibility of running on the Democratic ticket. Speaking with ABC’s Charles Gibson McCain said, “John Kerry is a very close friend of mine, and we’ve been friends for years. Obviously I would entertain it…”Watch it:

Moreover, on at least two occasions, in May and July of 2004, McCain denied discussing a possible VP run with Kerry.

- “Asked if Senator Kerry had made such an offer, Mr. McCain said no without hesitation. But asked if the two men had ever discussed it, even casually, he paused for a moment.” ”No,” he said finally. ”We really haven’t.” [NYT, May 15, 2004].

- During an interview with Fox News Radio’s The Tony Snow Show, McCain claimed that Kerry “never offered” him the VP slot. [Fox News, July 8, 2004]

The media’s constructed image of McCain as a straight talkin’ maverick is looking thinner than ever.

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush falsely suggested that the Iraq war has made America safer.

My fellow Americans: We will not rest either. We will not rest until this enemy has been defeated. We must do the difficult work today, so that years from now people will look back and say that this generation rose to the moment, prevailed in a tough fight, and left behind a more hopeful region and a safer America.

In reality, “the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” According to the National Intelligence Estimate:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

During his last State of the Union address tonight, President Bush proclaimed that he trusts the choices of the Iraqi people.

We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace. In the last seven years, we have witnessed stirring moments in the history of liberty and these images of liberty have inspired us…In the long run, men and women who are free to determine their own destinies will reject terror and refuse to live in tyranny. That is why the terrorists are fighting to deny this choice to people in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Territories

But a majority of the Iraqi people have chosen to oppose a prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq. According to the latest opinion polls, a majority of Iraqis have little confidence in American and coalition forces and 79 percent oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

In his State of the Union address President Bush said that “we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers.”

To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow.

But as ThinkProgress has pointed out, the Bush administration has regularly undermined independent scientific research, shaping government science around administration ideology. According to the government’s top global warming researcher, James Hansen, who has previously revealed “the government’s efforts to muzzle him from speaking out about climate change,” the White House Office of Management and Budget censors “all government scientists…to make sure that it’s consistent with the President’s budget.”

Do you know that before a government scientist testifies to Congress his/her testimony is typically reviewed and edited by the White House Office of Management and Budget? When I asked for a justification, I was told that a government scientist’s testimony “needs to be consistent with the President’s budget”.

In his second inauguration address, President Bush committed the United States to spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world.

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture…Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world: All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

And while Bush spoke of the importance of freedom in the Middle East during his recent eight-day tour of the region, he nevertheless excused political “oppressors” in a failed attempt to win greater backing for a Middle East peace deal and convince America’s Persian Gulf allies to isolate Iran. The president even awarded Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all of which received a “not free” or “partly free” rating from a recently released Freedom House report, with a $20 billion arms deal and avoided publicly criticizing the regimes’ poor political rights and civil liberties records.

But Bush saved the bulk of his admiration for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, “an autocratic leader in power since late 1981.”

President Bush lavished praise on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on Wednesday, emphasizing the country’s role in regional security and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while publicly avoiding mention of the government’s actions in jailing or exiling opposition leaders and its severe restrictions on opposition political activities.

Bush’s praise, like the arms deal, undermines his lofty inaugural rhetoric. According to the Freedom in the World 2008 Report, “Egypt received a downward trend arrow due to the security forces’ ruthless suppression of political dissent.”

President Hosni Mubarak postponed municipal elections, fearing a large showing by the Muslim Brotherhood, and extended the 25-year-old Emergency Law despite earlier pledges that it would be replaced with specific antiterrorism legislation. Security services ruthlessly suppressed dissent by political activists who protested the government’s reversals. Extremely limited reforms related to judicial independence and press freedom were enacted for the sole purpose of deflecting criticism and consolidating state control.

As Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh wrote of Bush’s rhetoric,  “Don’t plan a major democracy speech when you know you’re not going to act on it, with not even a symbolic move of any kind to accompany it. There’s a word for this kind of thing. It’s called hypocrisy.”

On November 3rd, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who last year admitted that “the idea of trying to cast blame on Clinton [for the 9/11 attacks] is just wrong,” suggested that President Bill Clinton’s cuts to military and intelligence budgets during the 1990s left the country unprepared for a terror attack.

“And now as I said, I don’t pretend that he (Clinton) could predict September the 11th. People are not prophets, even presidents,” said Giuliani. “But he did have his head in the sand. He was cutting those military budgets and intelligence budgets while Islamic terrorists were killing Americans.”

In reality, “the Clinton administration poured more than a billion dollars into counterterrorism activities across the entire spectrum of the intelligence community, into the protection of critical infrastructure, into massive federal stockpiling of antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a possible bioterror attack, into a reorganization of the intelligence community itself.” Here is more:

- From 1993 to 2001, the proposed budget of the National Foreign Intelligence Program – which funds the departments and agencies that make up the national intelligence community – rose by 20 percent.”

- Between 1996 and 2000, “the budget of the Counter-Terrorism Center – which seeks to anticipate and prevent terrorist attacks – doubled.”

- According to the New York Times, “the FBI’s counterterrorism budget increased annually between 1999 and 2001 by an average of 14.5 percent.”

- In 1997, former CIA Director George Tenet said: “We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As Director of Central Intelligence, this has been my highest priority.”

Moreover, as the Body Politik’s Jordan Grossman pointed out in June, “a June 1995 Presidential Decision Directive issued by Clinton for the first time emphasized concern about terrorism “as a national security issue,” not just a matter of law enforcement.”

Clinton’s directive declared that the United States saw “terrorism as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act and will apply all appropriate means to combat it.” For the last three years of his presidency, Clinton “raised the issue of terrorism in virtually every important speech he gave.”

Ironically, Giuliani admitted that it was he who had “his head in the sand” about the threat of terrorism before 9/11. According to Wayne Barrett, a reporter for New York’s Village Voice and author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, leaked memos describing Giuliani’s private testimony before the 9/11 Commission suggest that he knew nothing about Al Qaeda.

Giuliani acknowledged that even though he had received information on threats between 1998 and 2001, “At the time I had no idea it was al Qaeda.” He further told the commission that after 9/11, “we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda. … We had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake.”

ABC News is reporting that former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) is backing off his Nixon era critique of executive power. Back in 1974, when he was “chief GOP council on the Senate Watergate Committee,” Thompson predicted that “in the future the president is not going to be the sole individual to determine what is a matter of national security” and “suggested the possibility of an executive and legislative committee to take on the task.”

But in tonight’s interview with Nightline, Thompson suggests that while President Nixon “used the umbrella of national security to do some things that were not in fact in the interest of national security,” President Bush has not.

“Thompson said he sides with the Bush administration in its struggle with Congress over “issues of surveillance” and believes that the Bush must “stand firm in executive authority.”

In reality, President Bush has also “used the umbrella of national security” to expand the powers of the executive branch and squash political criticism and protest.

- In December 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft “authorized federal agents to monitor political and religious groups without evidence of criminal activity.”

- In 2003, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was using the FBI to collect “extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators.”

- In 2005, an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the FBI “has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups.”

- According to “a secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News” in December 2005, the Pentagon has monitored nearly 1,500 different protest events in a 10-month period, including nearly four dozen anti-war meetings “that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center.”

- Documents exposed during litigation in January 2006 revealed that “the National Security Agency has been spying” on a Quaker-linked peace group in Baltimore “going so far as to document the inflating of protesters’ balloons, and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction.”

- Pentagon documents released by the ACLU in November 2006 “show the Department of Defense monitoring the activities of a wide swath of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and United for Peace and Justice.”

Ironically, Thompson’s 1974 approach to limiting executive authority over national security issues may be more necessary now than it was then. Unfortunately, Thompson is too aloof to notice.

According to Norman Podhoretz, a senior adviser on Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy team and a strong advocate of military action against Iran, the former mayor from New York City has privately conceded that a military campaign against Iran is the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Podhoretz has previously advised President Bush “that anything short of military action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear capabilities would fail, and that American needs to strike to prevent another Holocaust.” After his meeting with Giuliani, Podhoretz observed that “my view has been, and I very much doubt that Giuliani would disagree with what I am about to say, what we are doing is to try and clear the ground that has been covered over at least since WWI.”

Draining the swamps is the beginning of the process of clearing the ground, and planting the seeds from which institutions can grow the foundations of a free society.

Publicly, Giuliani has adopted a more moderate stance on Iran. During Sunday’s GOP Debate in Florida, Giuliani argued that “there’s no question that the idea of going to war with Iran, or even taking military action against Iran would be very dangerous. It would be something you would not want to do. It would be a last resort.”