Guardian: A Greenhorn on the Ranch

[kskiska]

It's a good thing George Bush found a job in the White House. Though he owns a ranch in Texas, he'd make an inept cowboy. He can't seem to keep the herd settled in for the night.

All those little calves getting lost in the gullies. One is Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by someone hanging around the White House corral. Another is the Afghan war, orphaned by the Iraq campaign.

A third, the cost of the prescription drug programme, just keeps bleating from the bushes: $40bn a year as the White House promised eight weeks ago when the bill was being debated? $53.4bn as they say now that it has become law? $60bn as the administration's own analyst warned months ago but which his bosses ordered him not to share with Congress?

The president wouldn't do so well in all those small town saloons either. Too tempting to get all liquored up and then pick a fight with just about anybody for no good reason, as he's been doing since he came to Washington. The world's steel industry had to obtain a protective order to keep Bush from assaulting it.

Who knows why he's taken to beating up on scientists of every description, not just on global warming but on points that have been long settled. On evolution, for instance, he believes "the jury is still out," as he said in the last presidential campaign. Charles Darwin is damn near pre-deluvian himself, at least in the Christeo-Bush Calendar, the one that believes time began six thousand years before the birth of Mel Gibson. Besides, he wasn't even a Democrat.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1182105,00.html