Will Somebody Please Snake My TV?

There are moments of stupidity so great, so enormous, that people circle them, trying to comprehend them, yet can't get a purchase on them. That's how I feel about Joe the War Correspondent. In trying to describe him, I feel like an ant trying to carry home a grape.
That's right, back in the good old WW II days, there were neat movies where people could cheer on the troops. They were called NEWSreels, but no matter. When the Germans marched across Europe, do you suppose they let the media come along and down the troops? Of course not!

Joe's performance as a self-hating war correspondent would be funnier if it weren't that President Bush held his last press conference today and did not do much better. And if Joe made me feel like an ant trying to carry a grape, the President makes me feel like an ant trying to carry a medicine ball.

One pundit/apologist described the President's defiant, arrogant, addled performance as "West Texas". The President may think of himself as the hero of his own Western, but he's really the weak-chinned bullying jealous son of the cattle-baron, the one who drives onto the poor widda's property in his Daddy's convertible and threatens to take Maw's farm.

There was a voice he used today, a voice we have been told of, but that I didn't want to believe. Today, talking of the burdens of the office, which unsurprisingly he maintained rested lightly on him, he mocked the idea: "You know, it's kind of like, `Why me? Oh, the burdens, you know. Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?' It's just pathetic, isn't it, self-pity?"

Leaving aside the obliviousness of not knowing, or admitting, how much his policies had to do with the financial collapse, and the self-centeredness of considering, even to reject, pitying himself in any respect regarding what is to millions of vulnerable Americans a catastrophe, the feigned whine Bush used is no doubt the same whine he used to mock Karla Faye Tucker's plea to him to spare her life. Asked what he thought the born-again condemned killer might be thinking as her execution approached, he said, "Oh, I don't know--(whining, high-pitched tone)please don't kill me!"

This bumbling, unthinking scion of robber barons was the perfect president for the bumbling unthinking sheltered son of the Midwest. The President who didn't believe in government and the war correspondant who doesn't believe in reporting deserve each other. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is suffering the burdens of Bush's office.

And now, an amateurishly literal scrawl, from Snarkopolitan's great store of amateurish scrawls:

now that's a plumber's helper I can believe in.