Brent Bozell's on a mission: to give the Bush administration's legacy a facelift.

Every Friday the Media Research Center president appears on Fox & Friends to whine about how awful and terrible the biased liberal media are, and his complaints almost invariably revolve around how unfairly the media treated former president Bush. This morning, Bozell attacked the press for not giving Bush enough credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, even giving the 43rd president a “hip hip hooray!”

Bush-era policies have had a lasting impact and deserve credit for this successful counterterrorism operation, argues Bozell. And that's funny, because in December 2009, Brent Bozell wrote this:

The economy can no longer be blamed on Bush. Obama has shaped it with his fiscal policies. He owns it. So when wil his allies in the press ever acknowledge that the “jobs program” is a fiasco, and that Team Obama failed to match its own hyperbole on what the “stimulus” would accomplish?

So, in Bozell's reckoning, eight years of Bush economic policies had only a fleeting carry-over effect and could not be “blamed” in any way for the poor state of the economy less than a year after Obama took office. (For a rational, less-hackish analysis of the impacts of Bush's and Obama's economic policies, see last week's Washington Post.) But at the same time, argues Bozell, Bush's counterterrorism policies have had lasting benefits and were clearly responsible for Bin Laden's death more than two years after Bush left office. (For a rational, less-hackish analysis of the impacts of Bush's and Obama's counterterrorism policies, see today's National Journal.)

Bozell is arguing that the media should credit Bush for all the good stuff that happened after he left office, but not blame him for the bad. That's called having it both ways, and you can't do that.