A 2-Gun Farewell Salute To The Dubster

This blog has given The Dubster more whacks than a rental piñata. ¡Basta ya! This farewell to The Dubster is inspired by a pair of essays that contemplate different aspects of the transition out of the White House on January 20, 2009. Goodbye Dubster, we hardly knew ye (and we're rotten glad of that). If this is (fair & balanced) good riddance, so be it.

[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] The Faux Redneck: The Naming Dilemma
[2] The Pitts: Sympathy For The Dubster? Not!

[1]—Back To Directory
[x Austin Fishwrap]
Want To Name Something After Bush? How 'Bout My Plummeting 401(k)?
By John Kelso

A story in the newspaper the other day about how President George W. Bush won't have doodley named after him reminded me of the yarn about the guy who goes up and knocks on the White House door in 2009.

"Is George W. Bush here?" the guy asks. "George W. Bush is no longer here," the man who answers the White House door says. "Thanks," the guy says, turning on his heels and leaving.

The next day, same thing. The same guy knocks and the same guy answers.

"Is George W. Bush here?" the knocker asks. "Look," says the doorman. "I told you yesterday that George W. Bush is no longer here. Don't you understand?"

"Oh yeah, I understand," the guy says. "I just like hearing it."

So is it any wonder that the smart money says George W. Bush won't get major buildings or much of anything else named after him? Hoover got the vacuum cleaner. Grant's got the lock on the tomb thing. I think it's Kinky Friedman who jokes about "taking a Nixon." Even Stalin and Lenin got stuff named after them, though not around these parts.

George W. Bush may not be so lucky. When a proposal to name a sewage plant after Bush got on the ballot in California , voters even turned that down. You know you're not running real popular when you can't get your name on a poop processor.

I think Austin should step in here and lead the charge to get something named after Bush. Oh, there are institutions we could rename that aren't necessarily local, like the George W. Bush Guantanamo Bay House of Corrections . Or, instead of Wall Street, how 'bout Bush Boulevard? Don't drive there though because there's a crash every day.

But I think we need to name something around these parts after the man — although I don't think he deserves his name on a school, a jogging trail, a creek, a baggage carousel out at the airport or even a toll road rest stop.

That's why I'm proposing to name my 401(k) after him.

Why? Consider the similarities between Bush and my 401(k). They're both leaving. Just thinking about both of them keeps me awake at night. And they're both hard to look at without screaming.

It's not that I hold Bush personally responsible for the disappearance of my retirement stash. But it might have been better for Americans if he'd paid attention to business. You know a guy who didn't notice when gas went up to $4 a gallon ain't exactly minding the store.

So from now on, I'm no longer going to check on my 401(k). Instead, I'm going to check my George W. Bush Memorial 401(k). As long as there's something left to check.

I'll order the plaque.

[Downeaster (Maine-native) John Kelso has worked for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as a humor columnist since 1977. Before coming to Austin, Kelso worked at several newspapers: The Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader; The Boonville (Mo.) Daily News; The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, and the Racine (Wis.) Journal Times. Kelso has been a general assignment reporter, a copy editor, a sports editor, and an outdoor writer. As a pretend-redneck, Kelso is all gimme cap and no double-wide. His redneck-shtik appears thrice weekly: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays in the Austin Fishwrap.]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman
________________________________________________________
[2]—Back To Directory
[x Miami Fishwrap]
"Novel Take" On Tenure Of President Bush
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

We should be ashamed of how poorly we have treated President George W. Bush.
That, believe it or not, is the thesis of a bizarre opinion published the day after the election in The Wall Street Journal by one Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, described as an investigative reporter, a lawyer and a former intern for, of all people, John Kerry. It's one of two rather eye-opening Journal pieces, actually; the second, following just days later, was by a former presidential aide named Jim Towey. Under the headline Why I'll Miss President Bush, he sang hosannas to the decency and compassion of W., even going so far as to invoke Mother Teresa.

Which is, shall we say, a rather novel take. But it is Shapiro's piece that will give you whiplash. In his view, Bush has struggled manfully in the service of an ungrateful nation, reached out in a spirit of true bipartisanship and received for his efforts nothing but "crushing resistance" and constant scorn.

Shapiro writes: "The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time."

And reading that, you wonder... well, you wonder a few things.

• First, you wonder how old Shapiro is. Because he sounds very young. I'm talking smudge-of-acne-cream-on-the-cheek, fake-ID-at-the-club young. Which, presumably, he is not, given his pedigree.

• Then you wonder — fear, might be the better word — if this is but the vanguard of a new wave of revisionism, a preemptive strike against history, if you will, to impose a sunnier, more forgiving view on the last eight years than the facts will support. If so, we should gird for a very long rest of our lives.

• Finally, you wonder, wearily, if it is really necessary to tally yet again the sins of this president. If Bush's approval ratings sink any lower, they will emerge in China. That's not accidental. And when his reign of error ends on Jan. 20, it will come eight years too late and not a millisecond too soon.

For my money, of all the things he has done that have damaged this nation — we're talking lies and alibis, torture, the loss of American prestige, watching passively as New Orleans drowned, censoring science, politicizing the Justice Department, a ruinous war of choice in Iraq, spending with all the discipline of an 8-year-old in a candy store — arguably the most damaging legacy this president leaves is that he has undermined truth itself. After eight years of Bush/Rove politics, we live now in a nation where fact doesn't mean a whole lot, where it is OK to believe the "truth" that serves your political ends and jettison any that does not.

Because these days, truth comes in two flavors. We have red truth and blue truth, but we are fresh out of the truth, the facts, unimpeachable and inarguable. Instead, Bush has overseen a government of legendary intellectual incoherence, where ideology is valued above competence, accountability is valued not at all and one is daily dared to believe the evidence of one's lying eyes. Bush seems to agree with Stephen Colbert: Reality has a liberal bias.

Now, we are offered one last single-digit salute to our collective intelligence in the form of this grotesque suggestion that we should be ashamed of how we have treated Bush. If anyone should feel shame, it is Bush and the cadre of sycophants that has enabled him for eight long years.

Of course, as young Mr. Shapiro so vividly reminds us, they don't know the meaning of the word.

[Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004. He is the author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. His column runs every Sunday and Wednesday in the Miami Fishwrap. Pitts graduated from the University of Southern California with a BA, summa cum laude, in English.]

Copyright © 2008 Miami Herald Media Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.