Does Not Compute
I like George Bush. I really do. But then I also like bunnies and and big fluffy clouds and and trees and kittens and asbestos: things that are harmless and adorable. Don't think asbestos can be adorable? Fill up your pillow case with the stuff and tell me if you don't sleep like you've never slept before. I find such properties to be quite endearing.

Sure, he's got sort of a jackboot-y type of security/personality-cult apparatus around him who protect him from disagreement of any kind, but I even think that's kind of adorable. Not the anti-free-speech stuff so much as the motivation behind it, to keep the fuzzy-wuzzy President of the United States hermetically sealed off from even the potential of uncomfortable exchanges of words/thoughts/voodoo/psychic vibrations. To me, that just makes him all the more adorable. Kind of like cage-raised veal, except with nuclear-first-strike capability.

Say what you want about the policies of his administration (like, for instance, how much they suck), but you can't say that it's all our George's fault. I mean, just watch him talk. Can a guy who can't manage three-syllable words REALLY be the architect of a long-range plan to rebuild the Middle East on the democratic model after first blowing it to smithereens? Come on. That's like blaming the clouds for the hurricane. It's not their fault your house has no roof. They're just up there, floating, holding moisture, looking vaguely like elephants or Abe Lincoln, getting swept along with the catastrophic low-pressure vortex just like the rest of us. It's just clouds being clouds.

That's why I don't like seeing George out there, where he doesn't belong: in front of non-screened audiences, being asked questions he hasn't been given in advance to which he can give benign, non-committal, scripted answers in exchange for wild, unthinking applause.

It just isn't him.

The veal doesn't pull the plow. The veal stays in the cage so its flesh stays milky, supple and white. Otherwise, what's the point of keeping the broken down, cantankerous Ole Bessy around at all? Nobody wants to eat Ole Bessy. She's there to swat flies with her tail and bite the neighbor kids.

Apparently, this is part of a new "George Bush: I'm Not Retarded" campaign. This isn't the first time they've run one of these things, but so long as their isn't an election at the end of them, they always, always fail. And even in the elections, he's only 50-50.

It's not that I don't understand the thinking. This is a critical time in American history now, in the run-up to the Iran War. Also, with poll-numbers as low as any since polls for presidents have been recorded, it would normally be a good idea to get the man's face out there talking to American voters, pretending to lead, just as his predecessors did.

But this isn't any normal president. This is the Punch-card President. He was built in the mid/late 1940s when machines like himself were primitive, crude, built before the Japanese had had enough time to recover from WWII and develop the kind of technology we could steal and claim as our own. The number of programmed responses he is designed to hold is extremely, extremely limited. Even moreso if you consider the further restriction of trying to integrate his responses to refer to each other. This isn't the wide-ranging, all-encompassing, frequently upgraded, suck-started, bio-fueled* Clinton model. This is the West Texas version. Conservatism means never having your vacuum tubes swapped out for integrated circuits. Pretzels and football and beer are his fuel, the last one having been cut-off altogether, rendering him even less useful.

To the Handlers and Operators of President Bush, I say: shame. In front of non-cooperative hostiles wielding words of scorn is no place for our butch C3PO-in-Chief. Sure, he traded in the protocol droid's base-model gay and its associated vocabulary for a big, fat helping of manly charm and that folksy twang, but at least you let him keep the walk.

Now put him back in the box where he belongs. Every time you take him out, he loses a little of his value, you know.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.7


Pops


* = lots and lots of pot


ADDENDUM

Because someone asked:


- posted by Pops @ 10:20 AM