It must suck to be the Shrub

Last week there was some online video showing George Bush at the end of the G8 meeting being dissed by everyone. Well, that's how it looked. You know, there was that end-of-game handshaking line and everybody shook everybody else's hand except W's. Not one person shook his hand and it seemed to me that no one would even make eye contact. I thought it must be wishful thinking on my part, until I saw this picture of the Shrub at the end of some heavy duty PR tour of Peru, standing alone in his poncho looking forlorn and forgotten. For a moment I felt some sympathy for the little guy, until I remembered just how little sympathy he had/has for me and my kind, the vanishing and vanquished middle class.

Barak Obama talks economic recovery as Dubya pardons a turkey. I suppose it's always the same for a lame duck president, and Georgie boy is the lamest duck ever, but couldn't he have found the time to utter one more of his platitudes about how he's working for our economic relief? We wouldn't have believed him, but it would have sounded as if he knew what was happening and was concerned.

I'm sure that in time the picture of George in a flight suit strutting before a Mission Accomplished banner will be replaced by something more dignified. I mean, he did get some things right, just not during Katrina or in Iraq or during our rapid decline to third world status. He could, I suppose, save his legacy by funding transit projects already approved by Congress. He could release those fund for the green-jobs program to insulate public buildings. But he won't do either I suppose because strutting around in a flight suit is the best George could do as president. I guess we can't expect more of him now.

So while Barak Obama holds press conferences and creates a recovery program for the nation, George, who could stimulate the economy now by providing jobs--and green jobs at that--stands around looking uncomfortably out of place on the world stage and pardons turkeys.

Crocodile tears

George W. Bush wept yesterday at White House ceremonies honoring 22-year-old Marine Jason Dunham who died two years ago in Iraq. I'm not sure I'd call that single tear that dribbled down his mottled left cheek weeping, but Georgie's eyes watered. Could have been emotion. Could have been hay fever.  No word on whether he has wept buckets over the other 3,999 US servicemen who have been killed in Iraq, or the thousands who have been permanently injured, or the hundreds of  thousands of Iraqi's who are living in a war zone. We have been in Iraq for five years, and no one's life is better and no one is safer, and the economy is in the tank, crushed under the weight of an ever escalating, never ending war debt. It's about George Bush shed a tear for something. The invasion was a failure, the occupation is a failure, the surge is a failure, and the government wants to continue. I have no idea where these soldiers are coming from, short of a draft. Bush continues to characterize this debacle as central to the "war on terror," which would be laughable if it were not so tragic. All Bush has managed to do is to turn more people against the United States, make it citizens the focus of Islamic distrust, and make the whole world generally more dangerous for the rest of us. So, why can't we just cut our losses and walk away?