Republican politicians, former Bush administration officials, and conservative corporate media have all joined in a chorus in the past 24 hours or so to claim kudos for George W. Bush for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Capturing or killing OBL was Bush's top priority, they have insisted repeatedly. Yesterday we posted links to the memory hole showing that indeed Bush viewed OBL as a distraction. Last night on MNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell replayed footage from 2002 in which Bush told the media he wasn't concerned about OBL:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It seems that there may have been a small six months window in which the Bush administration actually saw capturing or killing OBL as a priority.

Also from the memory hole is this once-famous document produced for the presidential daily briefing on August 6, 2001 (original date at the bottom; released publicly in 2004) [see it at The National Security Archive]:

Readers might recall that a small uproar arose after the release of this document in 2004. It seemed evident that Bush had not taken this briefing very seriously, and after it came out, he again had to deny that OBL was much of an issue for his administration.

Apparently OBL concerned Bush from about Sept. 12th, 2001 to the late spring of 2002.

It is worth recalling also that Bush's former treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill told journalist Ron Suskind that at the Bush administration's very first cabinet level foreign policy meeting, Bush made going after Saddam Hussein – yeah right? Saddam Hussein – the administration's top priority.

Also significant was the fact that the Bush reelection campaign and the corporate media focused on right-wing "swift boating" of John Kerry's service record in Vietnam rather than Bush's real life foreign policy failures in the 2004 election campaign season – a phenomenon we see at play today with Andrew Breitbart's continued "swift boating" with doctored video footage of organizations like Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and others.