The Contestants in the Sandbox -- George W. Bush
I keep wondering why Bush supporters can't see a glaring disconnect between his behavior when he was in the part-time military and the image he tries to project now as a fulltime military leader, the "War President," as he calls himself. This disconnect is key because it shows that his whole thing is and always has been bogus. But these people are happy to wear wool over their eyes, and they resent those who won't submit to the same impairment.
Bush had such a fun time flying those nice fast noisy jet fighters down in Texas, didn't he, and his daddy didn't even have to pay for them. He enjoyed it. That was how he summed up his military service on "Meet the Press" some months ago . He enjoyed flying the jets. It was a real turn-on. Being in the Guard was like going to a theme park.
But then he found himself drifting farther up the proverbial creek than he ever intended to go with such a short paddle, what with inconvenient drill dates, missed physical exams, and missed kicks, too, having ended up in a unit that didn't even have those nice fast noisy jet airplanes.
And then I'm guessing that his daddy said that since Vietnam was winding down and, unlike John Kerry, G.W. had never intended to go there anyway because the guys serving there weren't his kind of people and also he might have had to deal with real bullets whizzing toward him, and since he hadn't been successful as a campaign worker, what with having to work that in with the inconvenient National Guard nonsense, he might as well go back to school and get some business credentials (which later on he put to typically poor use). So there went his military pledge right out the window, not one or two but seven or eight months early.
Yet years later Bush is still so shameless -- or susceptible to poor advice -- that as supposedly the U.S. President -- a civilian -- he bounds onto the deck of an aircraft carrier in military togs -- something that D. D. Eisenhower, whose military credentials were a billion times more valid, never did during his presidency, to my recollection. And when Eisenhower's immediate predecessor in the office, H. S. Truman, found himself aboard a naval vessel, a cruiser, headed home from a summit meeting with Stalin and Churchill, he made no pretense of swabbing a deck or going up on the bridge to shoot the stars. Instead he took a meal with the sailors while wearing his same old modest business suit, even though he was the commander of the mightiest military machine in history (excluding the Russians and Germans bleeding each other to death in their titanic struggle on the Eastern Front).
Even worse, on the carrier Bush declared that his ill-advised mission in Iraq had been accomplished, and thus he implied that all that remained was to start reaping the benefits.
Instead all that anyone has seen in Iraq in more than a year since then has been the whirlwind.
Bush had such a fun time flying those nice fast noisy jet fighters down in Texas, didn't he, and his daddy didn't even have to pay for them. He enjoyed it. That was how he summed up his military service on "Meet the Press" some months ago . He enjoyed flying the jets. It was a real turn-on. Being in the Guard was like going to a theme park.
But then he found himself drifting farther up the proverbial creek than he ever intended to go with such a short paddle, what with inconvenient drill dates, missed physical exams, and missed kicks, too, having ended up in a unit that didn't even have those nice fast noisy jet airplanes.
And then I'm guessing that his daddy said that since Vietnam was winding down and, unlike John Kerry, G.W. had never intended to go there anyway because the guys serving there weren't his kind of people and also he might have had to deal with real bullets whizzing toward him, and since he hadn't been successful as a campaign worker, what with having to work that in with the inconvenient National Guard nonsense, he might as well go back to school and get some business credentials (which later on he put to typically poor use). So there went his military pledge right out the window, not one or two but seven or eight months early.
Yet years later Bush is still so shameless -- or susceptible to poor advice -- that as supposedly the U.S. President -- a civilian -- he bounds onto the deck of an aircraft carrier in military togs -- something that D. D. Eisenhower, whose military credentials were a billion times more valid, never did during his presidency, to my recollection. And when Eisenhower's immediate predecessor in the office, H. S. Truman, found himself aboard a naval vessel, a cruiser, headed home from a summit meeting with Stalin and Churchill, he made no pretense of swabbing a deck or going up on the bridge to shoot the stars. Instead he took a meal with the sailors while wearing his same old modest business suit, even though he was the commander of the mightiest military machine in history (excluding the Russians and Germans bleeding each other to death in their titanic struggle on the Eastern Front).
Even worse, on the carrier Bush declared that his ill-advised mission in Iraq had been accomplished, and thus he implied that all that remained was to start reaping the benefits.
Instead all that anyone has seen in Iraq in more than a year since then has been the whirlwind.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:44 AM
2 Comments:
If he had been or ever would be a client of mine, look out, because I'd rip his already fragile ego into shreds. There is nothing more enjoyable then confronting a man on his inconsistancies.
Ah, but to dream..........
Thanks, Guy Andrew, for your comment, and also thanks, Michael, for yours. The timing of Truman's trip to Potsdam had eluded my memory, and I was focused instead on the mere mention of the German-Russian struggle, which to my eye was so stupendous in its scale and ferocity that it dwarfed everything else that happened in WW2.
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