Wednesday, July 23, 2008

the curtain's closing, time to ditch the props

Looks like the cowboy manly man president is hocking the ranch. From Huffington Post:
An ABC-TV outlet in Houston, and now the Houston Chronicle, have posted a video taken at a political fundraiser for Pete Olson, featuring George W. Bush last week -- capturing some embarrassing/revealing moments after, he noted, he had asked cameras to be turned off.
...
Then, making light of the foreclosure crisis, he said: "And then we got a housing issue... not in Houston, and evidently not in Dallas, because Laura's over there trying to buy a house. [great laughter] I like Crawford but unfortunately after eight years of sacrifice, I am apparently no longer the decision maker."

Aside from styling himself as "bilingual," Bush making his home at the Prairie Chapel Ranch has been the most absurd act of political theatrics ever uncritically sold to us by our sycophantic press. The "ranch" was a pig farm until 1999, when Karl Rove convinced the Texas governor to buy it. The "ranch house" (actually the mansion) wasn't completed until Election Day 2000. It has no horses, supposedly because the president is afraid of them, and it has some cattle, but they aren't his. The estate includes a helicopter hangar, but no barn. And lo and behold! his presidency isn't even over yet, and he's moving back to the city.

Long after his presidency is over and America has either stood up for change or boarded the Crazy Train, we'll suddenly hear George Stephanopoulos and David Brooks talking matter-of-factly about the obvious phoniness of George W. Bush's cowboy antics, as if they have always spoken openly about the surreality of watching a sitting president, the son of Connecticut yankees who spent his youth at Andover, Yale, and Harvard, dressed up like a 9 year old Will Rogers fan, clearing brush from a ranch that doesn't raise anything and despite having paid staff to maintain the estate. As if anyone in the press scoffed when Bush tried to sell his good ol' boy image with lines like how his best moment as president was "when I caught a 7 ½-pound largemouth bass on my lake," except that by "lake" he means man-made pond he had professionally constructed and stocked with 600 largemouth bass. As if any of the pundits who ridiculed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for feigning a southern drawl ever questioned the authenticity of blue-blooded George W. Bush's exaggerated, mealy-mouthed twang.

Not that anyone else found it a little obvious or anything.

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