I often feel as if we’re led by a 12-year-old, but apparently we’re led by a Deliverance-style 12-year-old. Ted Haggard ain’t got nothing on Brokeback Bush, it seems.
From a Ha’aretz review of a Sharon biography:
Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"
I apologize for the terrifying image that may conjure, but the Boy Wonder said it, not me. I bet the fundamentalists are proud of the Boy! Maybe Bush and bin Laden can go to New Jersey to have this thing officialized?
Happy Dia de los Preznits
Here on this Preznits Day, I’d like to ask a bothersome question. Everybody goes on about the usual suspects– George Washington and his weird wooden teeth, Abraham Lincoln and his proto-Amish facial hair, maybe a little Jefferson or FDR thrown in. But where are the celebrations of the lightweights? Who sings the ballads of James K. Polk or Millard Fillmore? When did you last read an ode to Martin van Buren?
Someone must stand up for these grayer men, these unsung wielders of the veto pen who, it seems, spent a lot more time carving their initials under the big presidential desk than in sparring with Congress. Someone must call up for examination these men who thought up new ways of feeling executive before the Sharper Image sold its first washroom Sit ‘n’ Putt.
And why? Well, because nothing succeeds like success, to quote our current Dear Leader, and nothing, then, fails like failure. In order to understand how a man who frittered away his youth on vices and general gadding about and oversaw a string of failed businesses falls upward into our most exalted office, should we not look to his predecessors?
Shouldn’t we be asking how Rutherford B. Hayes became the first president to lose the popular vote and still inhabit the White House, setting the stage for the current clown? Shouldn’t we be asking how Mrs. Hayes banned alcohol from the premises successfully, laying the groundwork for today’s fundamentalist tendencies in the West Wing? Since he’s emulated Hayes so well already, why didn’t W take Hayes’ path and pack it in after one term?
But most importantly, what cabalistic tome did William McKinley, whose adviser Mark Hanna was the behind-the-scenes Rasputin prefiguring that bloodless wonder of an amoral salesman Karl Rove, leave behind for George W to read, thus insuring his abysmal failure?
There must be some fascinating tales from the cabinet discussions of ol’ Chester Arthur. Time to unearth the history of mediocrity, oh great preznit pundits.
