Saturday, December 31, 2005

365 Days of Clearing Brush

Here's a nice throwaway line for you:

On most of the 365 days he has enjoyed at his secluded ranch here, President Bush's idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground.

365 days? George W. Bush has been president for five years. And in that time he has spent the equivalent of an entire year vacationing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, whacking underbrush.

Perhaps this is what conservative Republicans mean when they say that the purpose of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's anything-goes surveillance and interrogation programs is to protect the "American way of life." It's the right to disconnect yourself from all the death, destruction, pain, and misery that happens in your name and as a result of your actions; the right not even to know, much less think about, families torn apart by war, bodies and minds opened up and emptied out by the uncountable, unknown Torquemadas following your orders in secret prisons all over the globe; the "right," ultimately, to cut down trees and bushes for "recreational enjoyment," and to do that as often and as much as you wish, even though you are wealthy enough to hire a dozen people to do it for you and there are so many other things you should be and could be doing that no one else can do except you.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If YOU were elected president of the United States is it even remotely conceivable that you would take so much time off doing something usless and stupid like clearing brush?

What makes me wonder is how sane the moron's handlers really are. All these absurd photo ops, some of them truly obscene, like the time in New Orleans when he seized two little black girls and hugged them, to show how compassionate he was.

What's disturbing is that this bizarre behavior--both by the moron and his handler, Karl Rove--is given a veneer of normality by how he's covered in the MSM. The subtext always is that what we're talking about is within the bounds of normal. A story about the president these days makes the implicit assumption that he's normal.

When in fact what you're seeing--what everyone is seeing--is twisted pathology, mental illness. Either that or the slow rise of a Fascist state.

And yet where are the crowds in the street, demanding things be set right?

Ain't gonna happen. The public has gone to sleep. All together now. Nine-eleven. Nine-eleven. Nine-eleven.