As most of you know, this old essayist and former solder has long believed that George Bush is a vile creature who is attempting to finish what Nixon started, which is to turn the United States into a Fascist theocracy. The litany goes on. A war brought on by Bush’s lying. The squandering of our treasury. The tax give-away to the wealthiest Americans. Running up debts that my grandchildren will have to pay. The attempted dismantling of social programs, such as Social Security, and Medicare. Then there is the Patriot Act under which Bush wants to read our incoming and outgoing mail to say nothing of snooping at libraries to see what books are read. There are also the Gitmo prisoners which a Department of Justice spokesman says we can keep locked up in “perpetuity.”
Simply put, Bush is a vile man who fled duty to his country in the Vietnam era by invoking his parents’ and grandparents’ influence to get him a safe slot in the Texas National Guard. If it had not been for his name, Bush would have been kicked out of the National Guard for dereliction of duty.
Bush’s vileness is exceeded only by Chaney, a loathsome creature. Chaney took five deferments to avoid military service saying that such service did not fit his “priorities.” Loathsome only begins to describe Chaney.
There is one other thought that should cause outrage among those who prize the rule of law. Bush contends that his presidency trumps all other considerations. It trumps, for example, established law. Bush becomes the Fascist dictator who decrees who shall be held in prison perpetually. All of this flows from Bush’s contention that he alone can name a citizen an enemy combatant which means imprisonment, no access to legal assistance with visits from family and friends banished. He has done this to Juan Padilla, an American citizen, for nearly three years now. When the courts, including the Supreme Court, rule against Bush, he stonewalls the rule of law and continues to hold that his bizarre dictatorship should prevail. He is supported by Alberto Gonzales who originated the concept. Bush, Cheney and Gonzales seek a return to the conditions that prevailed during the Middle Ages.
Aside from the myriad of Bush’s failings, there is an overwhelming belief in many American minds that Bush’s intellectual ability is severely limited. It is his paucity of intellectual ability that leads to his bullying. When he can’t do the bullying himself, he leans on gut fighters like Bernard Kerik, John Bolton and the thrice married Guiliani. Bush worships their bullying, mistaking it for toughness. An intellectually limited man such as Bush is unable to call on logic or reason. Perhaps we should feel sorry for dimwits who confuse bullying with reasoned thought. But this dimwit has killed 100,000 Iraqis to say nothing of more than 1700 Americans as well as dead troops from the so called Coalition. Being dumb is one thing. When thousands of people are murdered because of Bush’s ignorance, that is quite another.
As evidence of Bush’s intellectual limitations, you may notice that for every event, Bush has a script that he must read from. When he departs from his script, disaster awaits him. When he complained that the public “misunderestimates” him, he is on familiar ground. Earlier in June when Amnesty International said our prisoner of war facilities were a “gulag,” Bush and his lapel pin wearing flag pals went ballistic. They had a script that said, “Absurd.” Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld and Madame Rice all read the required word, “Absurd.” Chaney adlibbed “Ridiculous.” Way to go, Chaney.
Ah, but soon Bush got tangled up in his jock strap. He attempted to become a lexicographer.
Leaving his script, he was attempting to say that prisoners at Gitmo hated us and would tell all kinds of lies if it hurt the U.S. Bush said about the prisoners, “People that had been trained in some instances to DISASSEMBLE – that means, not to tell the truth.” He got back on script by saying, “And so it was an absurd report. It just is. I mean it really is.”
When my bicycle needs fixing, it is DISASSEMBLED. When water won’t go down the drain, plumbers DISASSEMBLE the sink. When the lawn mower fails, it is DISASSEMBLED. My best guess is that the Yale and Harvard “educated” Bush was trying out a new word that was miles from his vocabulary. Perhaps the word he was groping at was DISSEMBLE, but he missed by a mile. No other public figure has such a desire to exhibit his gross ignorance.
There is no advertising salesman in the world who would ask the public relations authorities at Yale or Harvard to sponsor an ad saying, “We educated George Bush.” My guess is, that if such an ad salesman showed up on their campuses, he would be shot, and no jury outside of Mississippi would even make an attempt to convict them.
There is one other failing which Karl Rove and the White House inner circle must recognize. When Bush went to London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth, he refused an invitation to address the British Parliament. He did so because of heckling remarks coming from the audience. Bush’s brain simply cannot stand interruptions and disagreements. He has no capacity to deal with dissenters as he reads his speech. It is all he can do to pronounce the words that are written for him. And those words are kept small so he can pronounce them. NUC-U-LAR, for example.
Obviously, after a night or so at Buckingham Palace, Bush refrained from walking the streets of London because he knew he would meet a storm of protestors. So the President of the U.S. visiting his ancestral home in England, slipped in and slipped out in a well guarded convoy to his tax supported aircraft. Obviously, he gave no press interviews because British journalists don’t lie down as in the United States. Bush’s trip to see the Queen was a mysterious affair.
Bush’s intellectual shortcomings are reflected in his campaigns and in his drive to upset the Social Security program. Attendance at a Bush rally is a matter that calls for strict controls. The invitees are exclusively Republican. They have been vetted and are prepared to ask Bush during the discussion period, “Mr. President, why are you so nice? And why is your wife so nice? And we love your daughters.” This garbage passes for political discourse. After each meeting, Bush who is preaching exclusively to the choir, pronounces the meeting a great success that will make our democracy stronger.
The simple fact is that Bush’s intellectual ability is so severely limited that he will avoid those who seek to ask him a real question.
Do you remember during the 2004 presidential debates, Bush wore a radio receiver on his body. He was so dumb that he had to have help in spite of the risk that the watching public would know about his ignorance.
Bush’s father was accused of waking up on third base and believing he had hit a triple. His son is quite a bit worse. By holding his “preach to the choir, Republican-only meetings,” Bush is very much like the baseball player who hits line drives and home runs in BATTING PRACTICE. Batting practice pitchers are always instructed to throw pitches down the middle of the plate so that the hitter can practice hitting to right, pulling the ball or he may want to improve his bunting. These are medium fastballs that are in baseball terminology, “grooved.” Curve balls, sliders and fade-away pitches are banished during batting practice.
Bush is like a batting practice hitter. Line drives to all fields off batting practice pitchers make Bush feel superior. Who said that a “C” minus student couldn’t be as good as the Phi Beta Kappa toadies. If Bush has trouble handling the medium speed fast balls, the pitcher slows it down. Bush hits to all fields. Bush says that he is better than anyone else. Ah, but when Bush goes up to the plate in a real game, he says “NUC-U-LAR” and “DISASSEMBLE” and “MISUNDERESTIMATE.” He strikes out!
The bottom line is that the current president of this country is a wealthy moron. Intellectually, he might be equipped to be a bullying patrolman in a rural town in Texas. Ah, but his gutlessness might even get in the way on such an assignment. Maybe he could qualify as a guard at a jail in the environs of Waxahachie, Texas, but no one can be sure. All we know is that Bush has no intellectual capacity to be the Chief Executive and the Commander in Chief of the American military. And that is the world’s hard luck.
That loathsome SOB Chaney is here to save the day. In the midst of all the bombings and deaths in Iraq, old loathsome has said, “The insurgency is in its last throes.” Bush never disagreed. There is one oversight in that the insurgents seem to have a dramatically opposite view. Perhaps if the insurgents could say “DISASSEMBLE” in Arabic, they might agree with Chaney. But the insurgents have a better grasp of their language than Bush and Chaney have of English.
Calvin Trillin, who writes poetry about current events had this to say about Chaney and the “last throes” in the July 4, issue of The Nation.

CHENEY SAYS
IRAQ INSURGENTS ARE IN ‘LAST THROES’
When rockets fly and battle smoke is thick
It’s good to hear from “Five Deferments Dick.”
He’s always sure. He knows what warfare is –
Enough to know it’s not for him or his.
Insurgents somehow, though they’re in the throes,
Kill more GIs – but no one Cheney knows.

Bush and Chaney who predicted that the Iraqis would welcome us with roses and chocolates, are now reduced to lamely contending that the insurgency is in its last throes. They might wish to tell a mother or a father or a wife or a sweetheart, that if we had avoided this ill conceived war, their soldier boy would not have died an agonizing death. As the born-again Bush would say, “We need to disassemble the last throes of this Holy war. Let us pray.”
E. E. CARR
June 20, 2005
~~~
Pop can always be counted on to put together a solid metaphor. I like the idea of a batting practice slugger. And yet, I’m compelled to extend it to our current Republican overlord. He shows up to batting practice (when he’s not at his country club in Florida), drops the bat on his own foot, blames the media, then storms off back to Florida. This most recent thing is a good example, where he wanted to distract the country from his administration’s increasingly obvious ties to Russia, so he accused Obama of wiretapping him. When no evidence could be found for this claim, the best he can do is to say that by “wiretapping” he didn’t mean “wiretapping.” Nobody made him tweet those tweets, just like nobody made him brag about sexual assault. He does these things unprompted but somehow continues to get away with them, usually by distracting everyone with yet another scandal. I wonder if that cycle is sustainable.