There are so many crises these days, it’s hard to rank them in order of urgency. None is more important than the one reflected in a recent Washington Post headline: “President Struggles to Regain His Pre-Hurricane Swagger.”
This is a lot more serious than getting dressed in the morning and shouting out to Laura, “Honey, you seen my swagger anywheres around? Forgot where I threw it last night.” For a Texan to lose his swagger is tantamount to losing his stones.
Where is the George Bush of yore? What happened to the man whom the Washington Post remembers for “the arms-swinging gait of his walk, the glint in his glare, the college boy grin that flashes even in sober moments?”
It was Katrina which cost the President his swagger and thus Rita was welcomed as an opportunity to get at least some swagger back. In such situations the approved method of swagger retrieval is to swoop in at headquarters and look Determined and Dynamic. Just before Rita struck, the President was all set to swoop into San Antonio on one of these D and D missions but the tired and stressed out rescue organizations made it known that they were overswooped and that, since the President goes nowhere with less than a thousand people in attendance, he would be getting in the way.
If not D and D, then what about C and C (competence and confidence)? To that end, according to the newspaper, “There are private talks of tearing up Bush's agenda to change the second-term focus to the poor and preventing future disasters.” Talking up the poor, however, will not do much for swagger restoration.
When you’ve fallen off a horse you should get right back on. If George Bush lost his swagger when Katrina threw him and he didn’t re-mount on Rita he needs another hurricane, which may be too much to ask for. Besides, down south they’ve had their fill of them.
There is disaster prevention as a way to go. The President thinks that if Osama Bin Laden is not behind the hurricanes, Al Qaeda would be if it could because theirs is a religion of hate and terrorism. Hurricanes are a weapon of mass destruction, which is why we cannot pull out of Iraq where they have hidden his swagger.
It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
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