The Escape Artist

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, April 30, 2008; A03

The incredible shrinking presidency of George Walker Bush hit a new milestone yesterday: The commander in chief turned to sorcery.

"You know, if there was a magic wand to wave, I'd be waving it," Bush informed Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times in a Rose Garden news conference. She had asked him about the recession, which everybody seems to be acknowledging but Bush.

Further, the wizard of the West Wing said he would use his supernatural powers, if he had them, to conjure up lower gas prices. "I think that if there was a magic wand and say, 'Okay, drop price,' I'd do that," said the illusionist.

Abracadabra! Watch the president pull a rabbit out of a hat! See his low ratings vanish before your very eyes!

Well, not this time. "There is no magic wand to wave right now," Bush finally confessed to Stolberg.

But the president had something else up his sleeve. He used his appearance before the White House press corps to perform one of the oldest tricks in the book: blaming Congress. He faulted lawmakers 16 times in his opening statement alone.

"Americans are understandably anxious about issues affecting their pocketbook," he began, and "they're looking to their elected leaders in Congress for action." Implicit in his formulation was that Americans no longer look to him for action.

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Gus: on this site the prez has been depicted more like a dangerous dumb fairy — turning a reasonably working world into a crappy pumpkin — than a wizard...

So, please, oh please, should you, Mr Prez, find "a magic wand" don't wave it.. You've done enough damage already. Just go and vanish amongst the water lillies, like lame ducks do. Do not touch anything on your way. 

Sham Inauguration Rocks!
28 April 2008

By Mark H. Teeter

If American voters are discouraged by a seemingly endless and increasingly hyperbolic presidential campaign -- now called "The Campaign That Would Not Die" by some and disparaged last week by The New York Times as "meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering" as it drags on -- they might want to consider what Russian voters have had to put up with after the formidably brief and utterly unhyperbolic presidential campaign here. With only eight days left before the inauguration of the new president, Muscovites are still awaiting answers to some vexing questions that have been hanging in the air ever since Dmitry Medvedev was elected on March 2...

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 see toon on top... and others around here and there... 

Mr. Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word “redneck” to describe himself — protecting simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism. For 30 years he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wing tip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Freemasonry pins.

He liked his art uncomplicated.

“The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies to the arts. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

In the 1980’s he took on the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who explored gay themes in some of his work, and of the artist Andres Serrano, who depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting.

He was also well known for holding up votes on treaties and appointments to win a point. His willingness to block the business of the Senate or the will of Presidents earned him the sobriquet “Senator No” — a label he relished.

In campaigns and in the Senate, Mr. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

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Gus: this supporter of the Nicaragua contra affair — a sordid affair that shamed the US administration (of Ronald Reagan) but did not destroyed it as it should have (most of the participants lied as usual, "North" was the fall-guy) — shows he always wanted to be a crew-cut hairdresser:

“Look carefully into the faces of the people participating,” he said in a 1968 editorial against anti-Vietnam war protests. “What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.”

May he rest in peace in neoconic-paradise for rednecks only.