According to an LP press release, President Bush has begun a five week — five week — vacation at his Crawford Ranch in Texas.
This is our Commander-in-Chief, the War President, frolicking in the meadows while the flesh of people who serve him is ripped apart by shrapnel and flung onto the streets and sidewalks in foreign lands. According to the LP, 14 Marines from Ohio were blown to smithereens by a roadside bomb on the day Bush began his rest and relaxation, the longest such vacation since Richard Nixon 36 years ago. In the article, you can see Bush’s vacations in the context of time served by people in his command.
It is no wonder the son of a bitch is tanking in the polls. He has just concluded fighting for an extension on the abridgment of our liberties, and now is enjoying five weeks of leisure time while American boys and girls endure minute-by-minute risk of death and disability. Why the hell doesn’t he fly in his fucking fighter jet to Iraq and relieve a pilot so he can have a vacation? I swear, this fucker is on the fast track to becoming the second worst president, after Jackson, that we’ve ever had — a war-mongering, draft-dodging, pansy-ass hypocrite and liar who has made us the enemy of the whole world, spent our treasury like Paris Hilton in Milan, turned “freedom” into a meaningless buzzword, and turned back social progess a half a century.
And all with a fucking perma-smirk. Damn. Just plain damn.
Well, Yes, Liberal, damn indeed — but whether the President is in the backwoods of Texas or in D.C. doesn’t really make much difference. Bad policy remains bad policy no matter where the erstwhile commander in chief is making his headquarters. One might as well condemn FDR for spending so much time at Campabello or Warm Springs. The casualties in the Marine Reserve battalion from Ohio, however, dramatizes much of what has gone wrong, and has predictably gone wrong, with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The problem is not where the President is located, it is with an ill conceived and ill advised policy.
I realize that it is Liberal’s intention to pit the President in this Thread, but I would rather discuss the entertainment aspects of the President’s vacation and perhaps critique the proficiency of his fiddle playing.
Could we please have this Thread moved to Cafe Society???
The UK Parliament have just started an 11 week holiday. Recently our Prime Minister assured us that a) he had no reason to apologise for taking the UK into Iraq and b) there was simply no connection between Iraq and the London bombings.
On behalf of the UK, can I assure you that we still like Americans in general. We just despise Bush.
What I meant in my posting above, Liberal, is that the president’s vacation is always a working vacation. It’s not time away from all the cares and tasks of his day job.
Hey, a lot of brush must have accumulated that he needs to clear in front of a camera. The more he’s seen doing stuff like that, the more the “good 'ole boy I’d like to have a beer with” image is portrayed that got his previous high approval numbers. I’m sure that is exactly his plan to try and reverse his recent low poll numbers.
How much damn brush can one ranch have on it? I’m convinced that they go down there between Bush’s visits and cultivate more brush.
It’s not quite fair to compare Bush’s vacation and everybody else’s, but if the WH doesn’t want the press to do so, they shouldn’t refer to it as a “vacation”. It just breeds resentment in the vast majority of Americans who will never take a five-week vacation in their entire lives.
That would make sense if he were running for re-election. He isn’t. I don’t think the poll numbers matter to him much these days. His legacy is being written in that he’ll start bring the troops back home in the last year of his presidency to give the illusion that he started, won and ended the war, all within his term. Consequences be damned.
Besides, the barn could really use painting, the fences need mending, the roof thatching and the fields tending. A cowboy’s work is never done.
How critical is it that the President be in Washington, anyway? If Congress is out of session, there won’t be any bills for him to sign or veto, and naturally his home is loaded up with so much comm equipment that he can be talking to any member of the Cabinet or the Chairman of the the Joint Chiefs within minutes.
What kills me is that even if the guy owned a fucking brush farm he has more then enough money to buy a big ag tractor with one of those 20’+ batwing mowers and knock it all down in like… a day.
As to whether or not Bush works when he’s in Crawford, I think everyone knows he does. Politics aside, a leader should be mindful of the symbolism of his actions. I’m sure my manager can work from home, but if he left every day at 4 while asking everyone else to stay at work until 6, we would all rightly conclude that he was an asshole.
