By: Mary Lyon

Go ahead, Georgie-boy. Make my day. Throw all that money around. Roll up those sleeves. Sit in some of those meetings you’ve never really cared much about. Inspect those facilities and point at all those papers on the table with your aides and assorted underlings to whom you “delegated authority” clustered around you and all the cameras pointed at you. Break a sweat. Go ahead. Try to convince me you’re suddenly a hands-on, involved, compassionate conservative leader. Tempt me to think you’ve had an epiphany about government – as something that helps people in need rather than something to be shrunk so puny that it can drown in a bathtub (like New Orleans). Convince me that your name is now “Johnnie-on-the-spot” instead of “where’s George.”

And by all means, do keep working at it. Working hard. Because I’m just not convinced yet. The back-to-back monster hurricanes rampaging across the Gulf Coast have left our fearless “leader” looking like he needs a vacation. OOPS! Almost forgot. He just got back from one, didn’t he? Did cutting back his month-off by two days leave him looking this bad? This overworked? Looking at the photo of him sitting in one of those meetings, you get a very different picture of Junior than the one his minions have tried for years to burn into our psyches.

http://dissent.blogspot.com/2005/09/poor-george.html

As Newsweek’s Evan Thomas put it:
The president didn't look all that relieved or happy, however. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep (he had been awakened all through the night with bulletins), and he seemed cranky and fidgety. A group of reporters and photographers had been summoned by White House handlers to capture a photo op of the commander in chief at his post. Bush stared at them balefully. He rocked back and forth in his chair, furiously at times, asked no questions and took no notes. It almost seemed as though he resented having to strike a pose for the press.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9470154/site/newsweek/

Okay, I’ve put in my share of duty dragging unruly and unwilling pre-schoolers to church on Sunday when they’d rather be home watching Nickelodeon or out in the backyard climbing trees, so I’m familiar with cranky and fidgety. I’ve also sat through morning classes with a group of wasted fellow students after an all-night dorm party or fraternity kegger, so I also can recognize bleary-eyed and out-of-it when I spot it. That general look and feel is the same that I now see in “my president.” The picture begs the caption: “Aw, MAAAAAAAAAAANNNN… I don’t wanna be here. Can I go home yet? Do I HAVE TO do this?”

Unfortunately for George, the answer as much of a rude awakening as he himself resembles: YES. You DO. You HAVE TO do this. This is called “work.” This is part of the “hard work” you say you do as President of the United States. THIS is some of what that is, and as hard as you’ve worked to avoid it, it comes with the job. From the looks of it (and the looks of HIM), it’s clear that dear George isn’t at all accustomed to such labors. Does he ever look like this after a more conventional day at the White House, or at the photo-op-du-jour? Did he look like this during that well-lit and carefully staged speech the other night in the one small island in New Orleans that wasn’t a soggy, ravaged, reeking, roiling, germ-infested wreck? No?

So Newsweek says he, and his warts ‘n’ all, are out there on public display – bleary-eyed, cranky, fidgety, rocking back and forth in his chair, sometimes furiously. When the photographers arrive to capture this moment for the masses (See George. See George have to look like he’s actually working. See George pout. Pout, George, pout) he gawks at them “balefully,” as though he’s, um, not exactly ecstatic about being their subject yet again, while they dutifully document his marvelous life. The bags under his eyes seem large enough to be packed for another five weeks at the ranch, minus two days or so – for effect. As I cruise around the net, I can’t help noting the many suspicions being voiced that he’s been drinking, looks like he’s hung over, looks like he’s on something – or at least spent the last 24 to 36 solid hours that way. What a mess.

See George flounder. It’s too bad, really, because I think he honestly did want the photo-ops. At least, at first. That’s probably why he’s in this game to begin with: high-end ego-massage. He wanted all the photographers clamoring for shots of him. He wanted the balloon drops, the confetti, the adoring crowds, the banners and flags and hand-painted signs bearing his name, the Marine Corps Band playing “Hail to the Chief” – for him, the big, impressive mansion with a lawn large enough for his own helicopter (that whisks him away, out of mundane traffic gridlock to his own jumbo jet), and all the handlers, lackeys, gofers, and flatterers a would-be emperor could eat. He wanted all of that and more. He wanted the right to have the best seat in the house always reserved for him, the spot at the top of the marquee, the front and center of the stage, the biggest car in the biggest motorcade, the world-class security detail making sure his every step is as protected as though it were one of the Crown Jewels, and the biggest microphones with the biggest crowds of sycophantic media people eagerly awaiting his every syllable (and equally eager to clean up every one of his many verbal gaffes). And then, having spun off all of his own actual work to selected underlings as the bigshot MBA/CEO president and First Delegater he is, he wanted lots of free time to pursue those tasks closest to his own heart: long bike rides –sometimes with other celebrities, naps, clearing a little brush, and having lunch with one or more of his girls – Laura, Jenna, Barbara, and Contradicta, before going to bed nice ‘n’ early. Sure beats workin’.

But it isn’t. All those thousands of words that are being written about how hands-on Bush is about Hurricane Rita don’t make up for everything he failed to do after Hurricane Katrina. Even Fox “news” pundit Juan Williams, and David Gergen – a longtime (mostly Republican) presidential advisor have both now declared that Bush is “not going to come up in the polls. He’s got a long, long way out of this.”

http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=4873

That’s because NO amount of posturing, NO amount of flying around to different storm sites, NO amount of money he throws at the problem, NO nights of sleep interrupted by bulletins from his servants, NO amount of lighting, makeup, stagecraft and speeches filled with religious buzz-phrases will help much. Dubya’s image as a decisive “leader” is what the hurricanes left a soggy, splintered, bacteria-infested wreck. And if he somehow did “get it together” to respond to Hurricane Rita, it won’t erase his negligence after Hurricane Katrina because people can’t help but make comparisons.

It’s starting to sink in that the REAL Bush is what we’re seeing in the fidgeting and crankiness after he actually did have to work all weekend. The REAL Bush is the one whose instincts guided him during the Katrina fiasco while he was AWOL, not in the labors of his handlers and spinners and diaper-changers who tidied him up and gave him new game plans and fresh scripts to read and led him around to manipulative photo-ops as Rita was approaching. The REAL Bush is the guy the storm survivors will remember as being able to hustle up some action for a threat to Texas, but could barely pry himself out of his vacation for Armageddon in New Orleans. The REAL Bush isn’t the guy making the speech on the perfectly-manicured lawn with the stately, well-lit Louisiana landmark behind him, but the guy fiddling with a guitar while New Orleans drowned. THAT photo, too, will stick in the mind with as much Superglue as any shots of Georgie-on-the-spot with his shirtsleeves perfectly rolled-up. As surely as the picture of the puffy-eyed, aged-ten-years-in-two-weeks, executive on overwhelm will linger in Americans’ minds. In fact, I daresay that’s how many Americans will look, to themselves, as though they’re just coming to with a hangover following a long and wasteful bender with their favorite slacker. It’s probably exactly what they’ll see in the mirror every morning, when they wake up to the realization that we have three more years of this to endure.

Assuming we survive them.

Visualize IMPEACHMENT.
Then go DO something about it.

Mary Lyon spent the first 25 years of her adult life as a broadcast journalist, at Los Angeles radio stations KRTH-FM, KFWB-AM, KHJ-AM and KLOS-FM, the NBC, ABC, and RKO Radio Networks, plus KTLA-TV. She retired from day-to-day broadcasting in 1996, after covering Hollywood for nine years in radio, TV, and print, for the Associated Press. She wrote and illustrated "The Frazzled Working Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood," and is presently at work on a new craft book for kids and friends. A lifelong Democrat who began her political involvement in the Student Coalition for Humphrey-Muskie, and Tom Bradley's first L.A. Mayoral campaign, Mary currently is a weekly columnist for www.democrats.us - from the Left.