Bush is "Serious" about the Presidency - So am I.

Kay Gardner

What a treat we were given today on the Op-ed page of the NY Times, under the auspicious title of "Between Two Eras".

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/11/opinion/11SUN1.html

Under the assumption they are making reference to the Clinton and Bush eras, one would make note of the fact that we are only kept in the "Clinton Era" at the shrill and partisan insistence of every major media outlet, newspaper and now Dan Burton (again) to examine in excruciating detail even the amount of sidewalk space Clinton occupies when he tries to dine out. The truth about the "Gifts", published in detail at Salon.com, got nary a mention - anywhere.

The obsession with Clinton aside, let's take a closer look at paragraph two.

"But let us give George W. Bush credit for something beyond efficiency, beyond assembling a skilled staff and beyond being smarter than "Saturday Night Live" gives him credit for. Mr. Bush has demonstrated that he takes the presidency seriously. Members of Congress, whether they support him or not, can feel it. The public, no matter how divided on the Florida vote or Attorney General John Ashcroft, seems to sense in this White House a mature insistence on order."

Is this a joke? Can the Times possibly be serious? He takes the presidency "seriously"? So seriously he doesn't give a tinker's damn if he got there legitimately or not -- or by the grace of the "will of the people" ? So seriously that the only time we've seen his smarmy ass outside of the Inaugural has been at rehearsed, staged and carefully crafted photo ops where he is not only insulated from the "real people", but cannot manage to intelligently answer what few scraps of questions are thrown at him by the sychophantic pseudoreporters too busy drooling over their nicknames to actually press him on important issues.

So serious that when a man is shot outside the White House, he just "keeps on working out". When a US Submarine takes lives of Hawaiians he has Colin Powell call with a word of condolence and heads off "to the ranch". So serious and compassionate that when a violent earthquake kills tens of thousands in India, he sends five million dollars (less than the amount of one of his Inaugural Balls). So serious that he doesn't even understand the meaning or potentially disastrous results of the "global gag rule" on poor women and children in third world countries.

Why, W is so serious about the presidency that he's willing to talk the economy into a recession to pave the way for tax-cuts (corporate welfare) to the rich; return to the world of trickle-down economics, abolish the office of Aids and Race Relations (oops, that was a mistake! "We're serious about AIDS inside 'our' White House"); let his buddies at Enron drive up oil prices so we can rape the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge and thereby pad Enron's pockets some more; reinstitute a failed missile defense system while holding back the promised money for the men and women in the military; let Bob Barr introduce a Bill on the floor of the House to repeal the ban on government-sanctioned assassinations - and my personal favorite - the office of "faith-based" charities.

Let everyone who believes in Jesus say "Amen" !

I am, however, quite sure that Bush was serious when he told Dick Gephardt, "'Well, I'm just the president. I don't have that much power to get things done, and you all figure it out."

W's so-called "efficiency" is nothing but a glamorization of the fact that this idiot has no EARTHLY idea what he is doing, has to delegate every decision to Rove, Cheney, Fleischer, Card or Hughes, and is unable to answer even the simplest questions without stumbling all over himself. "We will promote peace by redefining the way wars will be fought." But what about the airline strike? Bush sure hopes everyone can reach an agreement. And as long as he mentions all his right-wing appointees "have a good heart", all will be fine in Wonderland. His compassionate conservatism is slowly but surely losing its luster and being revealed for what it truly is: Self-servatism.

Like a puppet, trotted out on stage at intervals so the world can be sure there IS a "president" in the White House, his only seriousness lies in keeping the absolute truth from the American people and the world. Like all alcoholics, he is crafty and cunning and manipulative. He learned early on to make people laugh to cover for his own inadequacies -- those same inadequacies that probably drove him to drink and drug (and drive) in the first place.

Such inadequacies would have been enough to keep anyone else out of ANY public office at ANY level. As he once so truthfully spoke about himself, "You know, I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office."

A mature insistence on order, you say? Yes, indeed! Gone are the young and energetic Rhodes Scholars, the President who would come out and talk for hours on end to the public and the press; who would stay up late into the night reading, discussing, philosophizing and dreaming of ways to make this country -- and the world -- a better place to live.

Order - more succinctly -- a "New World Order", is exactly what we have here. Suckled at Karl Rove's breast on the philosophies of Myron ('restoring illegitimacy and making it harder for poor people to move into working class neighborhoods') Magnet, the insistence on "order" in the White House is absolutely necessary to ensure the public never sees who is really behind the curtain. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Serious, you say? Oh yes, he certainly is. For the one thing George Bush DOES understand is greed and money -- old money, Nazi money, corporate money -- and the favors and power it can and does buy. It bought him the governorship of Texas and then the White House. And he's serious about keeping it -- dead serious. So are the people "behind" him -- you know, the ones who are pulling his strings and writing all his speeches -- filling his empty head with their Heritage Foundation and right-wing think tank ideas.

So, to the New York Times - when you speak in such generalized terminology about "what the public senses" -- believe me when I tell you, you do not speak for me. Because the only thing I "sense" is evil, greed, theocracy and the most vile abuse of power I have ever seen outside of Nazi Germany in World War II. And we're only in week three...

Bush is "serious" about the Presidency? Well, so am I - serious about seeing him out of it.