Former Vice President Dick Cheney blasted President Obama as a weak president after a foreign policy speech that was an implicit rebuke of the Bush administration, The Hill reports.

Said Cheney: “He is a very, very weak president. Maybe the weakest — certainly in my lifetime.”

“If he doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them 100-plus-odd times.”

— Sen. Angus King (I-ME), in an interview on MSNBC, on Vice President Cheney defending the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA under the Bush administration.

“If I would have to do it all over again, I would. The results speak for themselves.”

— Dick Cheney, quoted by Huffington Post, on the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding.

NBC News: “As Republicans complain about the Obama administration’s latest deadline extension for Americans to purchase health insurance, Democrats are countering with this reminder: The Bush administration did something similar in 2006.”

“Back then, as it was implementing the Medicare prescription-drug benefit Bush had signed into law, the GOP presidential administration announced it was waiving penalties for low-income seniors and those with disabilities who signed up late.”

Kevin Drum: “You’ve probably seen this before from other sources, but the chart… basically shows that for the past 40 years voting patterns haven’t differed much by age. In fact, there’s virtually no difference between generations at all until you get to the George Bush era. At that point, young voters suddenly leave the Republican Party en masse. Millennials may be far less likely than older generations to say there’s a big difference between Republicans and Democrats, but their actual voting record belies that.”

“Whatever it was that Karl Rove and George Bush did–and there are plenty of possibilities, ranging from Iraq to gays to religion–they massively alienated an entire generation of voters. Sure, they managed to squeak out a couple of presidential victories, but they did it at the cost of losing millions of voters who will probably never fully return. This chart is their legacy in a nutshell.”

“Another George Bush scored a statewide victory in Texas on Tuesday, a win that could pave the way for a much bigger career,” Politico reports.

“George P. Bush — the nephew of former President George W. Bush and son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — was running for land commissioner in the Lone Star State and easily defeated little-known Republican primary opponent David Watts, a businessman from East Texas.”

Former President George W. Bush “will be showing off his new painting hobby at his presidential library in Dallas starting in April,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The exhibit is called ‘The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy,’ and the show sounds as if it will feature paintings other than the ones Bush made depicting himself in the bathtub and in the shower, which a hacker obtained and blasted all over the Web last year.”

“I obviously get slightly emotional talking about our vets because I have an emotional — I’m in there with them.”

— Former President George W. Bush, tearing up in an interview with ABC News when speaking about military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“As George W. Bush’s public image improves, more former Bush officials are running for office — and are starting to tout their connections to the former president rather than running from them,” The Hill reports.

“Bush veterans privately admit the president, who left office in 2009 with an approval rating that dipped as low as 25 percent, was an albatross for many years in both primaries and the general election. The Wall Street bailout and other expensive Bush-era programs infuriated the Tea Party base, while Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War tarnished him with independents. But five years later, they say things have changed and that he’s no longer toxic. The former president’s personal approval ratings reached positive territory last year for the first time since early in his second term.”

Jonathan Chait: “The conventional wisdom – propounded by many of the same pundits now equating Obama with Bush – held that Obama’s hardball tactics would backfire. Obama needed to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and didn’t dare change the Senate’s rules… To fail to placate conservatives would only enrage them more. This analysis turned out to have it backward. Congress managed to pass a budget for the first time in three years precisely because Obama
defeated the GOP’s extortion tactics, forcing Republicans to actually trade policy concessions rather than demand a ransom.”

“The prospects for Obama’s second term remain constricted. Not many deals beckon in Congress. The Obamacare rollout was surely a political disaster, but the administration has three more years to get the law up and running. By the end of 2005, George W. Bush had seen the promise of his presidency collapse from justifiably lofty heights. At the end of 2013, Obama stands at just about the same place he began his term.”

The Week looks at the evidence.

Ron Fournier: “Reading Peter Baker’s extraordinary account of the Bush-Cheney era, Days of Fire, I found a striking number of parallels between Bush’s fifth year in office and the atrocious first 12 months of President Obama’s second term. My takeaway: Obama needs to shatter the cycle of dysfunction (his and history’s) or risk leaving office like Bush, unpopular and relatively unaccomplished.”

George P. Bush, “the 37-year-old grandson of one former president and nephew of another, is launching his political career by running for Texas’ little-known but powerful land commissioner post,” the AP reports.

“But rather than campaigning on the mainstream Republicanism embodied by the family name, Bush says he’s ‘a movement conservative’ more in line with the tea party.”

“As if to underscore the point, he says he draws the most inspiration not from the administrations of his grandfather, George H. W. Bush, or his uncle, George W. Bush, but from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who engineered the 1994 Republican takeover of that chamber.”

Vanity Fair says former President George W. Bush “has, quietly and wholly, ingeniously refashioned himself into an Internet-friendly, cat-loving, ironic-hat-wearing painter-cum-Instagram savant. Lately, George W. Bush is a hipster icon, and the Internet, unofficial Fourth Estate of the youth of America, is totally buying it.”

“The artwork of George W. Bush — the painter known as ’43’ — is finally for sale,” the Dallas Morning News reports.

“While the former president’s paintings won’t be found at the National Gallery of Art — or even the Dallas Museum of Art — the George W. Bush Presidential Center is selling a limited-edition Christmas ornament that highlights one of Bush’s pieces.”

“I did the best I could do. I’m also
very comfortable with the fact that it’s going take a while for history
to judge whether the decisions I made are consequential or not. And
therefore, I’m not too worried about it.”

— George W. Bush, quoted by The Wrap, reflecting on his presidency on “The Tonight Show.“

Peter Baker has a must-read look at former President George W. Bush’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“But the story of Bush’s eight-year pas de deux with the master of the Kremlin, reconstructed through interviews with key players and secret notes and memos, offers lessons for President Obama as he struggles to define his own approach to Putin and shape the future of the two nuclear powers. The last few months have become another dramatic juncture in the volatile Russian-American relationship, with Moscow defying Washington by offering shelter to national security leaker Edward Snowden, Obama becoming the first president to cancel a Russian-American meeting in more than 50 years and then, suddenly, improbably, the Kremlin throwing the American leader a lifeline when his confrontation with Syria took a wrong turn.”

“Looked at in the context of time, Obama’s own dashed aspirations to build a new partnership with Moscow seem to echo his predecessor’s experience.”

A Washington Post review of Days of Fire by Peter Baker says the book “should become a standard reference for historians.”

“The book has few groundbreaking revelations or startling judgments. Its virtue lies in the mass of information Baker has collected and the way he has pulled it together, so that the jumble of material on the Bush years is consolidated in one smooth narrative. He has read the memoirs so you don’t have to.”

“The heart of Days of Fire lies in the changing relationship between Bush and Cheney — how Bush in the early years of his administration relied heavily on his vastly more experienced vice president, but during his second term he increasingly operated on his own, relegating Cheney to the margins. Baker draws out each development in this tangled relationship in much the same way that Robert Caro wrote about the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”