Bush won't go to Ground Zero with Obama today because his feelings are hurt. Well our feelings are hurt that Bush lost Osama when he had the chance.

NY Daily News via Steve Benen:

George W. Bush won't be at Ground Zero with President Obama Thursday in part because he feels his team is getting short shrift in the decade-long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden.

"[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap," a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.

Bush's visit to the rubble after the 9/11 attacks was the emotional high point of his presidency, but associates say the invitation to return with his successor was a non-starter. "He doesn't feel personally snubbed and appreciates the invitation, but Obama's claiming all the credit and a lot of other people deserve some of it," the source added.

If Bush wants to talk about it, then let's talk about it. Let's talk about how much George Bush did to catch bin Laden during the eight years Bush didn't catch bin Laden. Answer: Not so much.

First let's talk about how George Bush dismantled the lead office in charge of catching bin Laden - only 5 months after September 11 - because Bush wanted the bin Laden hunters to help him start a war in Iraq instead. From the Washington Post:

That was December 2001. Only two months later, Bush decided to pull out most of the special operations troops and their CIA counterparts in the paramilitary division that were leading the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for war in Iraq, said Flynt L. Leverett, then an expert on the Middle East at the National Security Council.

"I was appalled when I learned about it," said Leverett, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration's counterterrorism policy. "I don't know of anyone who thought it was a good idea. It's very likely that bin Laden would be dead or in American custody if we hadn't done that."

Several officers confirmed that the number of special operations troops was reduced in March 2002.

They were leading the hunt for bin Laden, less than half a year after September 11, and Bush was already more interested in taking down Saddam Hussein than capturing the man who just murdered 3,000 Americans.

Then there's the time Bush let bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, just two months before he dismantled the lead team in charge of going after bin Laden. You remember Tora Bora. John Kerry mentioned it during the 2004 campaign, and the Bush people made fun of him. They said our commanders on the ground had no idea that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. It turns out, John Kerry was right, Bush lied, our commanders knew, and the Bush administration wouldn't give them the resources they needed to catch the bastard. Newsweek:

[T]he CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp."

Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was. "In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."

So, considering the fact that George Bush let bin Laden get away only three months after September 11, and then, two months later, dismantled the lead team going after bin Laden, because Bush was more interested in starting a war of convenience in Iraq, I think President Obama was being pretty generous offering him a chance to show up at Ground Zero with him.

Piqued that Obama won't give him credit.  That's choice.  It's not the first time Obama refused to give Bush credit.  You'll note that Obama never mentions giving Bush credit for letting Osama get away.  He also never gives Bush credit for plunging the country into a massive deficit.  Or credit for plunging the country into a massive recession.  Or credit for plunging the country into two endless wars.  Or passing trillion dollar tax cuts the country can't afford (you'll note that Obama didn't even mention that it was Bush who did this, when Obama gave his famous budget speech recently).  So yes, Bush really isn't getting the credit he deserves.

Bush is right about one thing. He is partly responsible for Obama catching Osama bin Laden. After all, the only reason Obama was able to catch Osama in 2011 is because Bush didn't catch him earlier.