AMUSING MUSINGS OF DUBYA
Kathy Harris sez, “no more”
Fearful of Dem votes galore
Judge Rehnquist presides
Scalia decides
To anoint Bush instead of Gore
A presidential daily brief
Danger of terror bequeath
Condolezza denied
August reports belied
Impending 9/11 grief
Osama Bin Laden attack
Instead, we invade Iraq
Bushies are loyal
But went after the oil
Despite intelligence lack
CIA covert named Plame
That yellow cake threat so lame
The Prince of Darkness outed
Rove’s leaks in turn he spouted
But White House dodges the blame
A search for WMDs
A foil for 9/11 appease
A grab for the oil
And Iraq to despoil
With Halliburton expressing its greed
Geneva designed to protect us
Abu Ghraib revealed as hideous
No concern about torture
Water board subject to cloture
And denial of habeas corpus
A cowboy our prez portrayed
Wanted dead or alive if betrayed
Saddam was his goal
Found deep in a hole
Mission accomplished allayed
Katrina came not too subtly
Destroying New Orleans levees
Snafus abound
Super Dome unsound
But heckuva job Brownee’
An intellect as president we’re yearning
Malapropisms of Bush, stomach turning
No memory by rote
He’d prefer not to quote
Yet warned, “Is our children learning”?
Criminals, the public enemy
Rumsfeld, Gonzalez and Cheyney
Abramoff’s in the slam
Scooter’s involved in a scam
And at the top, et tu Bushee’
Bush is the FISA presider
Domestic spying insider
Constitution no matter
Despite all the clatter
However, “I’M still the decider”
Economy fails and jobs go
Money at Enron, AIG and Citi we throw
Bush claimed it sound
But bailouts abound
For merely a trillion or so
A leader without a solution
Showed nary concern for pollution
Stem cells he’d ignore
Claims science a bore
He’s a product of de-evolution
Filed under: Poetry | Tagged: Add new tag, Dubya, Musings, Poetry, President Bush
Pop quiz -guess who wrote this, a Ph.D. or 5th grader?
Don’t Fear Criticism
The galleries are full of critics
They play no ball
They make no mistakes because they attempt nothing
Down in the arena are the doers
They make mistakes because they try many things
The person who makes no mistakes lacks boldness
And the spirit of adventure
They are the ones who never try anything
They are the brake on the wheel of progress
And yet it cannot be truly said they make no mistakes
Because their biggest mistake is the fact they try nothing
Except criticize those who do things
(General Shoup, USMC)
When I began my college teaching career in 1969, a fellow faculty member anonymously taped this message to my file cabinet. I kept it there until our department was moved into a new building. There, I taped it to my office window for all my students to see. Numerous students read it over those 38 years and upon graduation, sometimes approached me to tell me how much that message meant to their academic and emotional development.
I really didn’t need that prodding when I began my career but nevertheless, I appreciated that a (still-unknown) senior faculty member thought enough of me to provide me that advice.
I only am thankful we don’t have to put up with him much longer.
“I only am thankful we don’t have to put up with him much longer.” Jeez Buckelew, I guess even you college educated, Ph.D types are capable of falling for the same old thing again.
We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they are flown in the next war
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
No, no!
I’ll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky
Though I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do ya?
There’s nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Are now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
John, Can’t you be any more creative. Plagiarism of The WHO…Really.
Where have you been the past 8 years?
I could easily delete any of these comments…those in power the last eight years would have. Good comments…but misguided.
On this poem, a critic casts sneers.
At its traits literary, he jeers.
But is he a critic
of matters poetic
Or is it the hard truths he fears?
Wow, another bard. You should be doing a blog! That was really cool. Thanks
Ruthie the bard (ess)
Writes of things she knows little, or less
But is she just spouting haiku
To aim the cutting kireji at you
No, all she does is make a mess!
Hi John, Not bad but your syllabic count is off.
To critique me, JL has a plan.
He rhymes well, but he doesn’t quite scan.
It won’t bring me grief!
I’m still sighing relief -
There’s just SEVEN more days of HIS man!
Bush is, and was, not my man. It’s a sad affair when those that aspire to that top office are the likes of what we have seen in the past few years (present day included). A buddy of mine told me once that Bill Clinton was a great president because he was the consummate politician. My Lord, whatever happened to statesmen? And before you speak of the statesmanship of your man, consider that there is a difference between statesmanship and appeasement for political favor.
Haiku, smaiku!
Dubya is the consumate know nothing do hothing failure at ever thing he ever attempted except avoiding either work or taking responsibilty. His only possible choice for a “career” was following in Daddys footsteps? He failed at college, cheerleading, oil, baseball and Pres.–mentored by Kenny-boy Lay.
Lets see if he fails at retirement.? If you voted for him twice you voted against your own economic and National interests–both of which are now into the Tank until Barach sweeps up after the Elephants. Bill left us a legacy of 8 years of prosperity and job gains. Dubya cancelled all that and then some/
Rick, if you really want to know the inside dope on the Bush family, I encourage you to read Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty written by Russ Baker. It is a newly published (December 2008) book which backs up with footnotes all of the accusations. Check it out.
The tendency Richard Hofstadter so aptly labeled “the paranoid style” in American politics operates independent of ideology.
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the great historian wrote in a 1964 issue of Harper’s magazine. He called the expression of that anger “the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”
Clarity and direct exposition are anathema to the wheels-within-wheels school of thought, in which Baker really should be given an endowed chair.
“One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with facts it invariably shows” is a characterization of Hofstadter’s that might have been tailored to fit Baker’s book. “It produces a heroic striving for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency that all but obsessively accumulates ‘evidence.’ This higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact, the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”
Baker’s coherent explanation of the world purports to be “a secret history” of a vast conspiracy stretching back more than a century in which a cabal of rich, interconnected men — mainly involved in oil and gold extraction — have used, first, private intelligence agents and then, later, the government spy agencies they helped found to manipulate . . . well, just about everything. Along the way, readers with enough stamina to wade through the mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places will discover heretofore “hidden” explanations for the American entry into World War I, the formation of the CIA, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal (which, by the way, turns out to have been a secret coup engineered by the petro-intelligence access).
Here it’s necessary to declare a personal bias. I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health. In fact, I think there are three things that every serious American needs to believe about our recent history: Kennedy was killed by a lone lunatic, Americans really did land on the moon and the Twin Towers were destroyed when they were struck by two fully fueled airliners that had been hijacked by Islamic extremists organized by Al Qaeda. People who do not believe in these things are, within reasonable limits, entitled to sympathy. They are not entitled to a seat at the table where serious discussions occur.
Lack of seriousness is not this book’s real failing, however. What makes Baker’s book singularly offensive is the way he recklessly impugns, in the most disgusting possible way, the reputations not simply of men and women now dead, but of the living. The great Satan in this fevered schema is not the current President Bush but his father, President George H.W. Bush, whom Baker alleges has been a covert intelligence agent since his teens. According to Baker, he also was at the very center of a successful plot to murder John Kennedy that included, among dozens of others, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the usual Cuban émigré suspects, a clutch of White Russian exiles living in Dallas, Sen. Prescott Bush and assorted Texas oil and money men.
By Baker’s reckoning, there seem to have been about as many people involved in the plot as there were on Omaha Beach. With that many people involved in the conspiracy, it’s a miracle it remained a secret long enough for Baker to “uncover” it. The elder President Bush is a public figure and, therefore, practically libel-proof. But using the tissue of innuendo, illogical inference, circumstance and guilt by tenuous association — as Baker does in this book — to indict rhetorically anyone, let alone a former chief executive, of an infamous murder is a reprehensible calumny.
The nadir of this particular chapter in the author’s “secret history” may be the paragraph in which he rounds up all his key suspects and then darkly muses that each had an alibi that put him at a distance from Dallas on the day of JFK’s assassination. What does Baker deduce from the consistency of his perpetrators’ absence? Why, conspiracy to create cover stories, what else? One can’t help but be reminded of the Crown prosecutor who argued that failure to produce a shred of evidence linking the Jesuits to the Gunpowder Plot simply was proof of how diabolically clever they were.
Baker does something similar to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, whom he accuses of being an intelligence agent who, with master co-conspirator John W. Dean, were the prime movers in a coup to remove Nixon for opposing the oil depletion allowance. Woodward’s legendary work habits are cited as evidence of how engrossed in the plot he was.
We could go on, but why? Life is short and real problems are pressing.
In the meantime, we can avoid Baker’s “Family of Secrets” and console ourselves with another of Hofstadter’s wise observations: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”
Dare I take credit for this excellent analysis of Baker’s book, which reminds me of Dante’s Inferno (a tour of the depths of the lunacy of the mind of a madman), no, I wouldn’t want to be busted again, like the time I copied ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who, in response to the original post of this very thread. Which btw, was done knowing full well that everyone over 30 could identify as being a The Who song. This is a paraphrased except from a review of the book by Tim Rutten, of the Los Angeles Times.
Dear Buckelew
I trie to follow your blog but you don’t post untill way too long when someone writes you.
Other than that, thank you!
Jimmy
John, Have you actually read the book?
Hi Jimmy, I know that I don’t respond as quickly as I should. However, many times, I feel it wise to reflect upon the comments and my answers. Also, I am involved in a number of projects and sometimes don’t find the time. Please accept my apologies and keep reading. I hope to diversify the blogs after the inauguration dust settles.