If you were mounting a conspiracy to shoplift some gum from the 7-11, would you include Bush in the planning?
I wouldn’t even include Bush in the chewing.
Well, not usually, but he DOES have his dad’s car, and we have to have a getaway somehow, right?
(…chomp, chomp, chew, chomp, masticate, chomp faaaaaaart chomp chew…)
“Hey, who cut one?”
“Well, pretty sure it wasn’t George…”
Look, here’s what we’ll do: We’ll send him into the Kwik-E-Mart and tell him that he needs to get some Cokes for us to mix the rum we’re buying. You stay in the car, and tell him to leave the keys in it so that you can listen to the radio while he’s inside. As soon as he goes in, you start the car, pick us up, and we’ll head on over to the Stop-N-Rob to boost the gum. Nah, George won’t call the cops. He’ll just sit there on the curb waiting for us to show up with the rum.
Don’t say this too loudly. Rove or someone like that will hear you, and think “hmm, if a claim that damn libruls are trying to ban Christmas can be used to rally the fundie base, a claim that damn pointy head scientists are trying to cross sheep and humans might work too.”
Somewhere in here there is a joke utilizing “Bush” and “pig-fucker,” but I just can’t get it to gel quite yet. 
Well, Bush is a pig-fucker. No joke required.
ETA: Well, maybe it’s Cheney who’s a pig-fucker.
I have shown some of Olberman’s speeches in my rhetoric class. This is the good old stuff – real live soapbox-type rhetoric. Friends, Romans, countrymen, hipsters and flipsters. These days so-called ‘stump speeches’ are bland and market tested and not even written by the bozos who read them off of the teleprompters. Mind you, I tell my students that if they’re ever in a position to give a speech to shoot for bland and get it market-tested if they can. But it’s great to see that old-fashioned classical rhetoric still finding a place in the age of television.
I tell my students that Rhetoric is the art of statesmen, but modern statesmen are rarely good rhetoricians. There is always something interesting going on in the public discourse, but very few absolutely rip-roaring speeches. Instead, what I end up teaching so that the students get a perspective on the way the world of influence around them works is marketing, message management and in a case as with Libby, I get to teach the always fascinating phenomenon of nakedly opportunist role reversals. In the Libby case, as compared to the Lewinsky affair, two political parties swapped stances on the issues of the rule of law and on outrage over politically motivated witch hunts. Funny, funny stuff. Of course, every time the whitehouse changes hands, people turn around 180 degrees on whether the sitting president can be thanked or blamed for the current state of the economy. And in the cases of Paula Jones and Anita Hill, we may thrill to see a wondrous transmogrification in who thinks its okay to dismiss a victim of sexual harassment as a lying, attention-starved slut.
Olberman can be a bit over-the-top. Witness his rather affected outrage over Bill O’Reiley’s mixup over Malmady:
His face, which has a kind of joviality that serves well for his usual ironic approach to the news, or whatever he does on his show, tends to counterpoint him when he’s trying to be deadly serious and angry – when he gets into one of his ‘how dare you!’ modes:
Are Yours the Actions of a True American?
He does chew the scenery a bit in some of these ‘special comments,’ but again this is that fine old rhetorical tradition, and certainly his occasional excesses of affectation can be forgiven. After all, history has been kind enough to mostly neglect to mention the fact that William Jennings Bryan’s famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech ended with Bryan adding the hilarious flourish of pantomiming a crucifixion to drive home his already egregious metaphor.
Godzilla hasn’t attacked on his watch. Yet.
mm
He did cut taxes. Unfortunately, he increased spending. So, we’re eating less but we’re gaining weight.
Why shouldn’t our presumably soon-to-be lazy and ungrateful grandchildren pony up the money we’ve already spent? They’re lucky we don’t make them work in the salt mines.
Saaaay… Do salt miners have a union?
Here it is.
Bush creates Hawaiian marine sanctuary.
I’m not kidding…this was a notable deed, he shortcut normal procedures to do it, and it is likely to outlast everything else in his legacy.
Credit where credit is due, and all that.
Sailboat
Not since Reagan busted it.
Daniel
I haven’t seen any evidence that Bush was involved at all. Cheney, yes. But Bush? Why? That’s exactly the kind of thing you (Cheney) make sure Bush doesn’t know anything about.
Really? Iraq is now not only worse than Nixon’s expanding the war in Vietnam, but ten times worse?
I believe a case could be made for the contention that kicking over the hornets’ nest of the Middle East (oil resources, Islamic jihadism) will have far greater long-term consequences than a conflict that was pretty much limited to relatively insignificant nations in Indochina.
Well, Bryan, expanding the war in Nam was a dastardly thing to do, but once we pulled out, the consequences of our actions were small compared to what the consequences of the current debacle will be for decades.
ETA: dangit, that’s what I get for not previewing after trying to catchup on the page I’ve missed.
You may well be right–but that doesn’t get him off the hook, IMO. He is, after all, Cheney’s boss, assuming that Cheney is in fact part of the executive branch. Even if Cheney is in the special Undead branch of government or whatever, it was Bush who brought him in.
If my employee uses the job I got for him to commit a crime, it’s absolutely my duty to find that out and make sure he is disciplined for his behavior. Bush is on the hook to do this, at the very least.
If Cheney is hiding criminal behavior from him, all the more reason to bring that information to Congress and request Cheney’s impeachment.
ETA: Also, I’d like a pony.
Daniel
As long as you don’t mind looking for it yourself. There’s plenty of hiding places thanks to six years of Bush…
Hands LHOD a superspecial government-issue shovel