Does Bush even want the job anymore?

You have to wonder. After using variants on the phrase "hard work" no fewer than 9 times in Thursday night's debate, it seemed that George W. Bush, lifetime slacker and chronic fuckup, who went AWOL from the National Guard because it was hard work, who lost other people's money in his many failed businesses because it was hard work, may have had enough of the "hard work" of being president:

In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard.



There's a lot of good people working hard



I work with Director Mueller of the FBI; comes in my office when I'm in Washington every morning, talking about how to protect us. There's a lot of really good people working hard to do so.



It's hard work. But, again, I want to tell the American people, we're doing everything we can at home, but you better have a president who chases these terrorists down and bring them to justice before they hurt us again.



...because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't. And now we're fighting them now. And it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work.



It is hard work. It is hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy. It's hard work to go from a place where people get their hands cut off, or executed, to a place where people are free.



I think about Missy Johnson. She's a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her son Bryan, they came to see me. Her husband PJ got killed. He'd been in Afghanistan, went to Iraq. You know, it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm's way.



There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year. Yes, we're getting the job done. It's hard work.



We've done a lot of hard work together over the last three and a half years.

Does he really think being President shouldn't be hard work?



John Nichols at The Nation has more.