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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (441915)	8/12/2003 8:11:13 PM
From: Doug R	Respond to of 769670

The dubyaMD bush Guide for Making Yourself Look Good Even Though You Aren't Really Doing Anything By Lisa Kadonaga [ICH] - During the 2000 election, one of dubyaMD bush's favorite expressions was "the soft bigotry of low expectations". He repeated it often in his stump speeches, and dozens of times since taking office. Why does he have such affection for this phrase? I can only conclude that it's because of the one thing that would catch his narrow range of attention -- it applies directly to him. Low expectations, indeed. He's made a career (literally) out of puffing himself up, simply by making initial predictions of his performance so pathetic that what actually transpires looks good by comparison. We're talking about a man who feigned injury and limped around the White House for weeks before a "fun run" that was intended to encourage people to take up healthy exercise. Apparently he did this so he wouldn't be laughed at if he didn't come in first. One has to wonder about the fragility of the man's ego, if he were that reluctant to be outpaced by Secret Service agents -- the same folks who jog alongside his motorcade -- many of them half his age or younger. Oh, and those election debates. There's dubyaMD, setting the bar so low that he practically needed to dig a hole with a backhoe to accommodate it. His idea of rigorous preparation was to go about acting as if it would be a miracle if he found the right room AND remembered his name. And the press fell for it! Even now, there are pundits who applaud if he doesn't tip over the lectern. Major lapses, such as forgetting to fact-check the State of the Union speech -- or blurting out the plainly-wrong assertion that Saddam Hussein didn't let in weapons inspectors prior to the invasion -- are airly dismissed. If your three-year-old draws a self-portrait that looks like a lollipop with lint stuck to it, by all means put the thing in a fifty-dollar frame and hang it in your living room like it's a Van Gogh. It's cute, and better still it encourages the kid to keep trying. But for crying out loud -- when a fifty-seven-year-old man with two university degrees demands credit for NOT letting the 2001 recession get so bad that the current situation looks like an improvement* -- that's not cute. It's a cop-out, and the American people deserve better. I'm not buying the protestations that we should cut the man some slack because he's not very bright. He's had nothing BUT slack since 1946, and if his defenders suddenly decide he really isn't qualified for the job -- it's kind of late for that now, isn't it! You can't have it both ways, and someone should remind them of this. So we shouldn't feel the least bit guilty for criticizing dubyaMD bush's grammar, memory, accuracy, or ethics. And we shouldn't let anyone equate this with "picking on the handicapped", because anybody holding the office of President should be, as comedian Darrell Hammond once quipped, "smarter than me". Some commentators suggest that dubyaMD bush reassures people because he isn't as smart or competent as they are. I don't find the thought of someone worse than I am being in charge of a superpower very reassuring at all. To think that the citizenry are so insecure that they'd feel threatened by anyone slightly more qualified is, in itself, not expecting very much of them.