"Going Back to Texas to Be One More Horse's Ass"
"So paste a tail upon my nose and point me toward the grass. I'm going back to Texas to be one more horse's ass." -- Shel Siverstein
When an army withdraws from a battlefield, it doesn't just turn and run. It slips away one or two units at a time, leaving other units in place to cover the exit. It's called strategic withdrawal.
Like Rove's, Gonzales' departure from Washington should be seen as part of the greater Bush administration strategic withdrawal from Washington. He is, in Shel Siverstein's words, "Going back to Texas to be one more horse's ass."
Better a strategic withdrawal now than a wholesale retreat in January of 2009. A trickle of departures, followed by presidential pardons on the way out of town, will be smoother and more historically graceful somehow.
(For pure symmetry, it would be fun to see the Bushies conclude the whole sorry show with one last James Baker and Theodore Olson appearance in front of the Supreme Court. Then Baker could leave D.C. for Texas aboard the Enron plane the Bush's lawyers took from Texas to Florida in November of 2000.)
In true George W. Bush fashion, this strategic withdrawal leaves the rest of the Republican Party -- and the rest of the nation -- holding the bag. With the country in a shambles, with our civil rights shredded, with Iraq eternally SNAFU'ed, and players like Rove, Gonzales, and who-knows-who-else safely back in Texas, the Bush administration can take the theme for the rest of its term from National Lampoon's Animal House:
"You F'ed up. You trusted us."
So, bye-bye Karl. So long Alberto. Take care of Texas until Cheney and Bush get there. And don't worry. They've got your withdrawal covered.
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Hey, folks -- these people are NOT Texans! GWB arrived at 7 and left at 12 to go to Andover. He didn't come back until his 30's trying to act on his Oedipal problems. I'm telling you, no self-respecting Texan would have admitted to being an oilman if he couldn't find ANY oil in the middle of West-freaking Texas. I mean, how could you miss it? And that "ranch" -- please! No real Texan would've bought that piece of hard scrabble and be proud of it. Oh, and FYI, in Texas if there are no cattle there is no ranch! And, Rove didn't arrive here until he was almost 30! And all those people that put GWB into the Gov's office probably weren't Texans either. They probably came in with those corporations trying to escape the taxes in Manhattan in the 70's and 80's. Cheney isn't a Texan either, he just worked here for awhile. He's from Wyoming. Go talk to those people about Dark One. Molly Ivins, Anne Richards LBJ, Sam Rayburn those were actual Texans!
You are so right.
Bush bought that so-called ranch, because he wanted people to associate him with Reagan, who had a ranch. He didn't even buy the horrid piece of land, until Rove had decided he would run for President.
Then, these stupid people voted for him.
Mommadonna I looked it up. Reads like the who's who of demonology.
I want to personally thank the great state of Texas (where, BTW, I was born and raised - in Houston) for giving to America the most inept, corrupt, incompetent, uninterested bastard to ever call the White House home.
Ya'll really did it good this time.
Look, there are a few of us here in TX, who are good, upstanding, Bush-hating moderates and liberals, and Austin is a grand place.
It is also the most liberal city in Texas.
Bush has never exemplefied what a real Texan is. There will be no signs at the state lines welcoming people to Texas, "home of George W. Bush." Texans are no more proud of him than California was of Richard Nixon. Texas did not send George to Washington, the Republicans and the religeous right did that. The boat load of cronies dangling from his coat tails is evidence of poor choices George has been making his entire life.
The worst mistake we Texans made was sending that super asshole John Cornyn to Washington. That will be corrected in the 2008 elections.
I hope they are planning to leave/quit, because prior to Gonzales taking his hat, they were talking about impeaching him, and if you visit www.impeachbush.org, there's plans to do the same for Bush and Cheney both. These people have grabbed a lot of money for their friends and cronies, screwed up a lot of things, screwed with the Constitution, the list goes on, and though some of it might have started out well-intentioned, if the cure kills the patient, then the operation was still a failure.
Moral of the story: Don't let the oil companies run the country anymore...
Am I the only one who has noticed that those "steadfast friends" of George the Lesser, in whom he has "the utmost confidence" and have vowed never to resign are being used as ablative armor for the White House? I imagine the Prez's side of a telephone conversation must go something like this: "Trouble looming and the Congress is nipping at our heels?? Who do we have left to resign and take the brunt? Rumsfeld? Gone? Rove? He's gone too? What about Gonzalez? ...Meyers? ...Snow? Hell's bells, what about Powell? What? When did he leave? Dick, I'm scared....does this mean I'm...gonna...hafta...take RESPONSABILITY?? Waaaahhhh!"
Texas gets a bum rap for being the state that gets to "Welcome Home" all the corrupt retired politicians.
At least one of the worst left Sugarland and went to where all corrupt polliticians (including those from my state of Alaska) belong. -That cesspool called K-STREET.
It's not a bum rap. I'm a current resident of the state (not a native), and even so, I'm thinking we need to draft some kind of legislation that says essentially "no more presidents from Texas." I'm only half-kidding. Johnson and Bush? Two of a kind, mostly--front guys for the oil and defense industry, strings pulled by powerful people whose interests were nearly always counter to those of the population at large.
Can we give Texas back to Mexico now? Cowboy fascists run the place and it ssems to encourage pretend cowboys from old money Connecticut in their presidential aspirations.
The problem is not Texas. The Bushes you will always have with you. The problem is the base, the lockstep voters who put him in office, the groupthinkers who will learn to blame Bush just like the rest of us. They will be misled again next time, maybe every time.
Who voted for Bush and why? Answering that question is the only hope for any improvement.
If we are in luck a few more resignations are gonna come....Bu$h, Cheney.... I know I am just dreaming. But a gal can wish can't she??
The real irony will come when the people of Tex-ass elect this goon to some public office.
View From Across The Pond:
They came, they saw, they looted your Treasury.
They took away your freedoms and trashed your Constitution.
They transformed your wonderful country - once the most envied and beloved place on earth - into the most ridiculed and reviled.
(And you let them.)
Then they left.
That sums it up perfectly, HLM.
Boy, Howdy! You hit the head right on the nail, and all we've got left is egg on our face.
Ya got that straight!!!
That is an excellent point. However, the country should turn on these villains, and treat them to some of the Texas Justice that Bush and Gonzales, and Rove were so fond of seeing enforced.
General Philip Sheridan said it all in 1866 when he commented that if he owned hell and Texas, he'd rent out Texas and live in hell.
Apparently it was as true then as it is now that hell has a higher class of demons than Texas does.
i think the final phase of the strategic withdrawal will be a pas-de-deux involving Bush & Cheney, where the timing will get pretty exquisite. Bush first pardons Cheney, who stays in town. Then Bush formally resigns, invoking the Succession Amendment, and Cheney becomes President long enough to pardon Bush. The Democrats should be alive to this two-step, because it's coming and they might be able to throw a log across the rails to stop it. More likely, they won't.
What's truly ruinous is watching half the country adopt the right-wing standards of "never apologize, never admit wrongdoing, always smear, always accuse the other side of every evil, always excuse your own wrongdoers, use the media to confuse the public, and when all else fails, lie, lie, lie..."
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Posted August 27, 2007 | 12:03 PM (EST)