The magic number is 222. That's the number of days that President George Bush has left in office. That means the magic number for me is 31 -- that's the maximum number of weeks I have left to write about him while he's history's worst president.
Personally, I can't wait. If only we had a Congress with some integrity, they already would have impeached our warmonger-in-chief and I could have dumped him long ago.
But now our cluster bomb dropping, intelligence manipulating, malapropism slinging executive is off to Europe to sell his next war and it's irresponsible to let column fatigue stand in the way of pointing that out.
While we stay vigilantly dogging this presidential pawn of the military industrial complex, we must hopefully look forward to a time without him. So Monday as I watched the president give a four-minute address on the White House lawn, I wondered who would play Bush in the miniseries someone will make when he retires.
Oh yeah, there'll be a miniseries. It may only be shown in China and Japan, but there'll be a program that portrays the decline of the once great United States of America and the corresponding decimation of our dollar. It only stands to reason that the two countries that benefited most from our indebtedness are going to watch and savor how they gained the upper hand.
The most difficult part of filming the program will be casting the actor who'll play the president. Sounding so disjointed and perpetually confused will require great skill. Duplicating the president's demeanor Monday morning as he muttered in simpleton's prose to our European allies about the failing U.S. economy will be a heroic task, "I'll talk about our nation's commitment to a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in our nation's interests."
Yes, a strong dollar "is in our nation's interests." And Bush's policies -- not those of the European powers -- have imperiled our dollar. That's because "our nation's interests" don't match the interests of the people who put the president in power.
Does Bush think that Europeans can't read?
"We'll be talking about the economy," chirped the president. He shouldn't waste his breath or condescend any further; the learned Europeans already know what happened to our economy.
Imagine being the actor who portrays him; having to keep a straight face while capturing the president's trademark vapidity.
Coincidentally, today is the birthday of the guy who I think Bush would fancy most to play him -- John Wayne. But Wayne's dead, so even if Halliburton bankrolled the project, they couldn't get the actor with the biggest swagger.
As we continue our search for just the right guy let's return to Monday's tape from the White House lawn. Go to www.whitehouse.gov and you can watch, too.
This task would be much easier if Bush weren't such a conflicted character. In the video he stood there uttering one declarative sentence after another, even though these statements contradicted each other and insulted the viewer's intelligence.
For example, he intends to educate the Europeans on the need to find energy alternatives. "We'll remind our friends and allies overseas that we're all too dependent on hydrocarbons. We must work to advance technologies to help us become less dependent on hydrocarbons."
Now that's laughable, remind Europe. Maybe while he's over there, Bush can visit Fruges, France's largest wind farm, serving 150,000 households.
Regardless, his very next line delivered a radical about-face as the president stressed, "I'll also remind them, though, that the United States has an opportunity to help increase the supply of oil on the market, therefore, taking pressure off gasoline for hardworking Americans, and that I've proposed to the Congress that they open up ANWR, open up the Continental Shelf, and give this country a chance to help us through this difficult period by finding more supplies of crude oil, which will take the pressure off the price of gasoline."
And there in that rarest of all moments, as the president's manure spreading turned for an instant into truth, we saw the actor who must play this part: Jim Carrey. It'll be his best work since he proved himself worthy of the role by playing Fletcher Reede in "Liar, Liar."
