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The President's Dangerous Irrelevance

Comedian Sue Murphy has a memorable gag: "Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives." I think that's how George Bush spends his life.

I really need to get off this Bush jag. I know I've said that before. I'm way past having Nixon episodes, so I guess there's hope that I can get beyond this evil president. And I think he's basically irrelevant, but in a dangerous sort of way.

Here's what I mean. Years ago, working my way through college, I happened to labor one summer in a tile factory in Lakeland, Florida. I have some long stories about the Sykes Corporation, but this one is a short version. I was having lunch one day during the half-hour break we enjoyed and I sat next to one of my new co-workers, a black guy from New York City, and we began talking. He was working in the tile factory, he said, because this was the only way he could avoid a jail term. I asked him what he did and he said he "took care of women," meaning, he explained, that he was a pimp. That was one lunch break. During another lunch break, he told me about pickpocketing. He wasn't a pickpocket, he said, but he knew something about it. The key to successful pickpocketing was the distraction. If you could get the victim distracted, you could get their wallet, purse, anything, very easily. He said he had a friend who would pick pockets with a friend who used an organ-grinder monkey act as a distraction. While the organ grinder made his music and the monkey made distractions, the pickpocket would go about his business.

Now this isn't about the organ grinder, or the pimp, or even Sue Murphy's spaced-out dog. My point is that our president is the monkey. He's a known liar,¹ I can't say that he does anything important (except maybe take vacations),² and I think he's not even in charge.³ I think his role as president is to distract people so that the other Busheviks can pick our pockets.

1.  Really, just the other day Huffington Post had a report on yet another lie from the president's lips.
2.  Our president was vacationing and fund raising during the Katrina Hurricane affair, and he was at it again during the recent terror alert and the Israeli-Lebanon assaults. See "Bush BBQs With Donors While America Is Under Terror Threat," Huffington Post, August 11, 2006; see also "While Mideast Burns: Blair Works, Bush Vacations," Truthdig, August 4, 2006. Today it was also Tony Blair's turn to face scrutiny for vacationing at the wrong time: "Blairs: All hands on deck," Daily Mail, August 14, 2006.
3.  Although Field Marshall Rumsfeld makes me nervous, the one who has the little hairs on the back of my neck standing up most of the time is Dick Cheney. What's he up to? For an interesting look at the thick cloud of secrecy that shrouds the vice president's office, read this strange NewsStandard story in which reporter Michelle Chen tries to get some basic information from Cheney's obdurate staff.

Three Days, Two Nights in New Orleans

In preparing to visit my children in New Orleans this coming week, I called a travel-agent friend about some likely accommodations. This was the interchange:

Maybe New Orleans needs all the help it can get. It will be good to see the place again—and to gauge how well the post-Katrina reconstruction is going.