Martin and Bush

As is the sometimes case, Weeder Gander returns to embarrass himself. This is his comment re the post showing Hussein speaking into the wrong end of a phone.

Actually, Obama has a way to go before reaching the following heights(or depths, YMMV).

For eight years George W. Bush has been many a comedian and cartoonist's wet dream, an easy target, a sitting duck. You're big if the world knows you by your first name (Elton, Madonna, Osama); bigger still if an initial will suffice. “W”. “Dubya”; from the moment Clinton staffers allegedly removed the letter w from the White House typewriters, Bush was the butt of the joke. He played the part of the imbecile brilliantly: just when you thought it couldn't get any better, it didn't.

As Steve Martin said, some people have a way with words, while others have not way. Bush's pronouncements were an embarrassment of glitches. There were the words - “nucular” instead of “nuclear”, “vulcanise” for “Balkanise” - and the Bush phrases (“I know how hard it is to put food on your family”; and “Our enemies ... never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we”). Others were perhaps apocryphal (“The trouble with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur”). It was an easy style to parody, the set-ups and pay-offs a comedian's stock-in-trade (“I have a message for those suicide bombers: we're gonna find you”).

Visually, he was the full package: the awkward body language, the elbows sticking out as he walked, as if he was carrying two sheep under his arms (“I come from Texas. I'd look stupid carrying one”). There were the features. The simian face, so beautifully caricatured by Gerald Scarfe and The Guardian's Steve Bell - all sticking-out ears, mad eyes and chimpanzee mouth, occasionally extended into a windsock pout. The contrast between a position of global power and the evident confusion behind those eyes gave him an air of permanent irony. Is this guy for real? Where does the original end and the parody begin? That upside-down book, those binoculars with lens-caps on: real or fake?

Then there was his clumsiness - his propensity for embarrassing entanglement with anything from bicycles to pretzels to Middle Eastern countries.

Bush is apparently disarmingly funny: a friend from his oil-trading days told me that he would answer the phone to irate investors wondering where their oil was with a cheery “Dryhole Bush here!” The self-deprecation is appropriate. As Dame Edna said to Jeffrey Archer: “If you can't laugh at yourself, you're missing out on the joke of the century.”

Ah yes, Poor George...

Yale graduate, fighter pilot, Harvard MBA, twice governor of Texas, twice President of the United States...

Yes indeed, poor George.

And who comes to praise this man? Why it is the honorable Steve. A comic of some talent who made us laugh with arrows that didn't go through his head. A movie actor in such memorable films as "The Three Amigos" and "Planes Trains and Automobiles." There is no doubt that such experiences over shadow all else and make him a commentator of such renown that everyone else quakes in his presence.

What made this man so great? Was it his experience working summers at Disneyland? His studies in drama at Santa Anna Junior College? Perhaps it was his days at Long Beach State before he transferred to UCLA and dropping out at the tender age of 21...
Yes. It must have been these experiences, not to mention working at Knots Berry Farm, that made him such a social icon that other mortals wait for his every word.

I mean he has so much experience in the issues of life and death... Just commuting in the LA Basin is in itself worthy of.... well...... worthy of something..

Yes, Dear Steve is such an example of the countless others who, because they play a hero, think they are. Those who pretend to fly a jet fighter criticize someone who did... Yes Gollywood has so many fine examples of manhood for our children to model themselves after. Why, I hardly know where to begin.

So yes, poor George. Speaking in a language that the country understood while doing things that most in Gollywood hated him for he was attacked for 8 years and eventually, if not destroyed, gravely wounded.

History will judge him, how we do not know, but I think it will judge him well. He sought to defend the country and did his duty as he saw it. As for what history will say about those who couldn't carry his briefcase but who thought themselves his betters, we do not know because 20, 30 years from not one in a thousand will even recognize their names.

And that is a sad thing to say about a profession that claims to not care what is said about them.... as long as you spell their name right.