Junior Eats Shit, Calls Poppy For Help... Again

Huffington Post
Bob Cesca
Junior Eats Shit, Calls Poppy For Help... Again

Cork on the ForkAnyone who continues to live under the delusion that President Bush is a competent, strong leader who stands on his own skill and talent needs to seriously re-evaluate his or her concept of strong leaders who stand on his or her own skill and talent. And for these remaining 31 percent who believe President Bush continues to do a heckuva job, I strongly recommend they carefully place corks on all their forks before hurting themselves... and others. That's not to say they're idiots, but this sort of continued support despite the myriad of facts to the contrary is, at best, dangerous.

Meanwhile, for you and me, it comes as no surprise that President Bush, after -- WHOOPS! -- spazzing his way through a pair of bloody wars, has been left with no other option but to call in Poppy's team of proctors to carefully push corks onto the official White House forks. And it's not the first time for the president. His entire life has been an ongoing saga of either using Poppy's influence to avoid trouble or using Poppy to bail him out after eating shit.

A large part of his education path was modeled after and aided by Poppy. The president attended Phillips Academy, then Yale where he was a member of the fabled Skull & Crossbones Society; all three of which were attended by Poppy and granddad Prescott. In a patrician family like the Bushes, it's not a stretch to say that the family name had something to do with the academically-challenged Junior's admission to these prestigious schools. Had the president been left to his own stubborn devices, I imagine he'd still be wandering the plains of Midland -- 60 years old and carrying a rotting box of Lunchables and a Trapper Keeper, wondering aloud when the short bus will finally arrive.

Then there was the Vietnam draft and the president's golden parachute: the Texas Air National Guard. After scoring just above a passing grade on the entrance exam, President Bush was somehow catapulted to near the top of the admissions list, landing in the privileged Champaign Unit reserved for upper-class citizens and relatives of famous Texans. Poppy and his pals successfully kept the president out of Vietnam.

Then there was his cocaine possession arrest in 1972 which was magically expunged from the president's record. Junior snorted shit this time and Poppy made a call to fix the record.

In 1977, President Bush formed Arbusto Oil and perpetually required Poppy's connections to wealthy investors to stay afloat after hitting oil at fewer than half of his drilling locations. Later, during the controversy surrounding the president's opportunistic sale of Harken Energy stock immediately prior to a crippling loss (Harken had absorbed Spectrum 7 which had previously merged with Bush Exploration/Arbusto), the president's lawyer in the SEC investigation was Robert Jordan who was a partner at James Baker's Baker/Botts firm. Jordan would later become the president's ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The list goes on and horribly on. The 2000 election recount? James Baker front and center again.

This is all well worn territory, but the point is clear: when President Bush goes it alone, he eats shit and needs Poppy to Heimlich said shit from the presidential esophagus. When he plays it safe and employs Poppy's influence, he keeps his nose clean. Um... yeah. So when he set out like a neocon-guided armadilla' hunter destined to change the world with Shock & Awesome bunker busters while refusing to listen to Poppy's seasoned team of foreign policy experts (including the expert who was his first Secretary of State) he was destined for disaster. This time, though, we all were.

Yet scores of true believers, up through and including Katrina, swore by President Bush's competency. By the way, who did the president call to put a kindly face to his heckuva job in the Gulf Coast? Poppy. To this very day, 31 percent of America continues to believe in the president's job performance. This is an astounding testament to blind faith and non-reality based delusion, which isn't surprising considering the sheer multitudes among us who continue to believe Saddam orchestrated 9/11 (85 percent according to Zogby earlier this year). And now with American and Iraqi civilian casualties mounting by the day and the thought of victory appearing almost as quaint as a Lindsay Lohan kids movie, Poppy's Proctors are back. Again.

Tragically, it required nearly four years of quagmire, death and waste before the real adults were called in with a Hummer overflowing with corks. And this begs several key questions. How many lives could've been saved had this happened in the first place? And should we take seriously any right-wing objections to congressional hearings as to why this didn't happen prior to the invasion or in the early days of the occupation (sometime between "major combat operations have ended" and "bring 'em on")? Instead, blind knee-jerk jingoism and cowardice has, all along, enabled the president in his latest failed attempt to handle utensils without proper protection and without the necessary adult supervision.

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ONE FINAL NOTE. Imagine being Vice President Cheney right now. He was supposed to be the mastermind. He was supposed to be the Dad who could do anything. And now it's as if Child Protective Services has been called in by concerned neighbors to haul his kids into protective custody on a live episode of COPS. And he must know that writhing on the front lawn in his boxers and wife-beater is out of the question, so there he's forced to sit. Taking it. On the world stage. With his shotgun tied in a cartoony knot. Couldn't have happened to a better guy. But like I said, it should've happened four years ago before he participated in the abuse and neglect.