Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

This reality show has been plummeting in the ratings for about six years, so the finale might not do so well either. President Bush gets on TV tonight (7 p.m. Central) to bid farewell to a grateful nation.

Except the nation is not all that grateful. Yes, terrorists haven't knocked down any skyscrapers since 9/11, but they might as well have: The financial geniuses who worked in those skyscrapers have mostly decamped for the high weeds, taking with them the unearned wealth we'd all hoped to coast on during our golden years. So many of their offices are empty now, it's like a neutron bomb went off on Wall Street. Thanks, Mr. Bush, for keeping the country safe. Turns out the biggest threat to national security was thieves in expensive suits. They didn't even have the decency to send crappy audiotapes warning of their intentions.

I was never a Bush hater. I always thought he was a decent man who had trouble putting sentences together. I was somewhat late in realizing that he's really not very smart, not very interested in being smart, and far more malleable in the hands of scheming advisers than he will ever admit. When you're president, being decent is nice, but it's not quite enough.

He seems more reflective now, but I don't think he's a changed man. The last few years have been a been a time ripe for epiphanies, but I don't think he's partaken. So I won't be watching his address, and my DVR will be otherwise engaged. I'll leave it to The Onion to parse his meaning.

Speaking of the Onion and President Bush, this is one of the best things they've done:


Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

That ship has sunk

Image
After a long career in journalism, I'm back in the job market. For a limited time only. All I require are a company car, a five-figure signing bonus and a six-figure salary. If somebody could swing by and clean the house once a week, that would be great too. Until then, guess who's going to be blogging like there's no tomorrow. I've worked at various newspapers for the better part of three decades. I've been a reporter and an editor and there was a time in the mid '90s when I thought I was being very clever by learning HTML. I was thinking: Job security, baby; every newspaper will be on the Internet in a few years. I was right about the last part. But it turns out most people eventually questioned the wisdom of paying for what they could get free. Who knew? Then circulation and ad revenue headed south, and corporate boards figured they could maintain profits by shrinking the product and letting people go. Now circulation and ad revenue are Thelma and Louise: st
Read more

Back to the keyboard -- but it's a new one

Image
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I'm back to work on what I will refer to as "the book." I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day's output. But since I've had these productive impulses before, and since they tend to expire after about a week, I'm employing a few other strategies. First: A new computer! Yep, I have decided that there are too many games on my desktop machine, it's too noisy, and it confines me to one room of the house. So I ordered a new notebook computer from Dell. It's their new 1420 model. Should be here in a couple more weeks -- although you never know with Dell -- and then the only files I'll transfer from my old computer to the new one are my in-progress writing projects. I know what you're thinking: Basically, I'm offering myself a cheap bribe to a commit to a project that will probably take a year -- long after the shiny new computer cease
Read more