"There's just got to be a pony in here somewhere!"
There's no pony; only the gnarled carcass of a very dead elephant.
The headline of the January 13 New York Daily News summed up Monday's final press conference perfectly: "BUSH WACKY". The First Fool was telling the American people that, like Douglas MacArthur's fabled old soldier, he is just going to fade away:
I hope that isn't so. If his public appearances this week are a harbinger of things to come, he should keep us rolling in the aisles for years to come. George W. Bush and the Right Wing crazies who have hijacked the Republican Party in the last three decades are, quite literally, the gift that keeps giving.
Back during the campaign of 2000 ("Ahma YOU-niter, notta DEE-vider") Don Imus told his listeners one morning:
"Please, vote for this guy, I'm begging you!"
What he was saying was that his job of making people laugh would be so much easier with such an idiot sitting in the Oval Office. Over two years ago, a friend of mine was commenting on my output on The Rant. "You're such a prolific writer", she told me. "Are you kidding me???", I said to her, "During the Age of Bush, these things write themselves!" Indeed, I imagine those of us who earn their reputations siphoning humor out of this virtual gold mine of material are going to have a much harder with President Obama in the White House. Please, George, keep in touch, okay?
"The phrase, 'burdens of office' is overstated."
Of every stupid statement this oaf of office has made since he took the oath of office eight, long years ago Tuesday, that one is the most revealing. It proves what I have believed for a long time; the guy is a sociopath. Sending nearly five-thousand American servicemen and women to their deaths wasn't a burden? A million or so dead Iraqi men, women and little children wasn't a burden? Does this hideous little twit even have a pulse?
If there is only one thing that all of the men who have survived that job have agreed on, it is the burdens of that office. Harry Truman once called the White House, "the finest prison money can buy". When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House on March 4, 1933, he was a relatively young and vigorous fifty-one-year-old. When he died in office on April 12, 1945, he seemed to have aged thirty years.
The fact that Bush has taken on a much grayer, pallid look since 2001 means nothing. Not aging too well is a hallmark of the Pierce side of his family. I remember during the campaign of 1988 looking at photographs and videotape of Poppy Bush with his hideous wife Barbara at his side. "Awww!", I remember thinking, "Isn't that sweet? He brought his mom along with him!"
Last night's Good Riddance Address to the nation should have been on the front page of every newspaper in the country this morning. Unfortunately for the First Fool, the thunder was stolen from him by a man named Chesley "Sulley" Sullenberger, the pilot who skillfully and heroically landed a US Airways plane filled with over one-hundred people on the Hudson River just opposite the Island of Manhattan. The speech was highlighted on page nineteen of the Daily News; page fifteen of my local paper, the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, NY. Incredibly, the speech wasn't even mentioned on the New York Times website.
Bush was desperate to put lipstick on this pig of an administration. Instead of making the speech (as presidents always do) from the intimacy of the Oval Office, he did it from the East Room in front of an audience of family, sycophants and human props:
"I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right. There may be legitimate debate about many of these decisions, but there can be little debate about the results."