But then, there he was, wheeled quietly in from the wings, down front and low down, a virtual non-presence, avoiding and avoidable. I believe his entrance via wheelchair was a compromise, an anti-pollution maneuver, an attempt to not spoil this day. A sneaking in and sneaking out. His final official slither.

“I’ve got a lot of rivers to fish,” he said. “So I don’t think anybody will feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t.” And I won’t. Never even crossed my mind. My wife, a Wyoming native and fisher-person, mentioned something about slippery rocks, fast currents, things happening before you even know they’re going down. I said that I’d thought that, too, but didn’t want to say it. Twenty years I’ve been thinking that: a hat and a sneer, somewhere downstream.

And yes, I think they should go after him. You can’t step back from the fear of future partisan retribution. That’s going to happen anyway. It took a quarter century to strike back for the Nixon debacle, and to think that this will not happen if we just let them fish and mountain bike into the future is naive. Screw ‘em all, and screw ‘em good. And screw their defenders. And then send them off to The Hague and let them sit behind a thick glass for the world to see and judge. That’s where they belong. That’s the way we get this thing back to where it so desperately needs to be. This is how we do our best to resuscitate the world. You walk away from this, you let it happen again. If our history tells us nothing else, it sure as hell tells us that looking away is a recipe for future disaster. Slavery and the inability to address it from the very beginning told us that. And it’s still telling us that, how much we need to not look away. How much we need to take a stand and make it stop here, so we can get our feet. Nunca Mas.

I wrote the following piece back in 1993, right after the Clinton inauguration, and it was published in a small journal (also now no longer with us) called The Free Cuisenart. Dick Cheney has been on my mind for a lot of years. I lived in the Bighorns nearly three decades ago, and I was onto him then, while he was still on the rise. He is our greatest public stain. And yes, today is full of lots of wah wah-pedaled hope, and maybe the lines of tribes may, in fact, dissolve (though I’m not looking for it in my lifetime), but the future will always have to deal with the mutants among us. So enjoy it tonight, but tomorrow’s a workday, and there’s a lot that needs to be done.  Obama knows the Constitution, and he knows how it’s been raped over the last eight years. And you don’t let that one get by. You never let that one get by. If you do, pack it in and give it back to the mutants and hang on to your hat as it all spins down into a glorious wreckage. We owe more to our kids than to let these criminals walk.  So, yes, I’m happy, but not stupidly so. It’s already tomorrow here.
________

On the afternoon/early evening of Sunday, January 17, 1993, as President-Elect Bill Clinton was walking in procession across the Memorial Bridge on his grand entrance into the capital city, Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under the direction of the outgoing president George H. W. Bush, was coordinating a Cruise missile attack on Baghdad.

This from the January 18, 1993 NYT – Raid on Iraq: Bush Launches Missile Attack on a Baghdad Industrial Park as Washington Greets:

But Pentagon officials said tonight that it was possible that one of the cruise missiles had slammed into the Rashid Hotel, a favorite of foreign journalists in Baghdad and the site of an Islamic conference. A Pentagon official said that some missiles had been routed near or over the hotel.

A Death
(1993)

It’s not the sneer as the Secretary of Defense talks of bombing Baghdad, and how he’ll miss his job after Monday; it’s knowing that he owns a ranch in the middle of Wyoming, is “Boss” to men with bad teeth who pinch snuff and know the kind of cold that freezes snot before it hits their ear-waxed upper lips.

In the warm sanctuary of his kinder East, comfortable and balding, he tells his colleagues who jog the Mall for the requisite chiseled look, tales of wind and ranching, of wild life and wilder men who age leathery like their saddles beneath the clear high-plains sun, for wages and the warmth of winter fire. “Real, by god, men,” he claims slapping his creased leg, then tells of how they call him boss, trust him implicitly, and believe, too, that Baghdad is full of dark and godless thieves.

There is never any mention of the families and the children; not the young woman, someone’s beautiful daughter, who went to work as she did each day at the al Rashid Hotel, dreaming of life. Of love. Of going home in the cool of the evening. But who, instead, died before the world’s eye, a numberless stray frozen in some awful blizzard.

When he leaves it will be with victory tales of war rooms not the war, of colored lights seductively winking across a plexiglas wall, of how they clapped each other’s backs long into the safe suburban night.

Tomorrow he’ll parade about in custom-fitted boots and tell the hired hands who jump to his orders and offer him the whiskey bottle as the cold sun falls into the Bighorns, that this is what right is, this is why wars are, this is what needs to be done to keep them free to ride.

© Jim Gourley, 2009

It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

It is worth a look, though for those with a weak stomach when it comes to being fed anything presidential over the last eight year, I recommend that you view it as an Onion article rather than as a piece that resembles anything credible. It made me wonder if the president was practicing for the book duel when Katrina visited New Orleans? It must have been riveting, since, obviously, he couldn’t tear himself away from it. I wonder if the FEMA’s Mike Brown was part of the book club, too, and this is what really explains their lack of response. An incalculably long string of miscues and missed opportunities, and all because the White House was frantically reading James M. McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief or Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number when they should have been wondering about the moral and legal legitimacy of their extrajudicial playground at Guantanamo Bay?

At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.

Crass, Karl, really crass, and despite the impressive list of titles I’m still left with the image of the leader of the free world reading My Pet Goat to Florida elementary students when the news that New York was under attack was whispered in his ear. He kept reading through that one too. And that was several years before the contest.

My take is that this is the opening volley in the fundraising campaign to finance Dubya’s Presidential Library, an attempt to make the wealthy right believe that he can actually read. A lot of us are still not convinced. Good luck with collection development, boys.

Stay tuned for The Karl’s next political fish tale: Hu and Wen in a calligraphy clash: zhuan, kai, li and cao shu. Gentlemen, start your brushes!

* Apologies to Alexandra Day’s and her wonderful – and nearly word-free – children’s classic, Good Dog, Carl, an illustrated story of a Rottweiler who looks after the baby when Mom steps out for awhile.

“This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

These were the words that accompanied the second shoe that Muntadar al-Zaidi hurled at POTUS Bush as it sailed harmlessly over the Texan’s head. The first shoe nearly nailed the US commander-in-chief, and while Mr Zaidi didn’t make contact with either, he clearly made his point, one that the whole world, with the exception of the current White House, had gotten a long time ago.

It is still unclear what will happen to Mr Zaidi, who is now a hero throughout the Middle East. I cannot speak for the rest of the world – though it appears that favorable reactions are coming from every burgh and roadside turnout around the planet – I can say that he has very favorable ratings in one little corner of Tianjin, and I suspect that corner is bigger than I know.

Mr Zaidi, who remains in custody facing seven (7) years for “an act of aggression against a visiting head of state,” has presented Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki with a classic dilemma. I am sure that there is an Arabic saying that mirrors the sentiments that when you swim with piranhas you best not bleed. Mr Zaidi has drawn Mr Maliki’s blood, and he might very well get eaten. I expect that this one might not be resolved until after January 20, 2008.

If Mr Bush had the least lick of sense – a quality which, if he has it, has been effectively kept secret for the last eight years – he would publicly ask for Mr Zaidi’s immediate release, invite him to the White House and present him with a new pair of shoes, an act that could be amazingly disarming, while giving justifiable anger a semi-civil forum (‘civility’ will not be restored to that office for another five weeks), and which might salvage the thinnest shred of international respect for this lamest of ducks as he heads for the infamous corral of history (or Trent Lott’s porch). I feel quite certain that Mr. Bush, who has never been accused of being disarming, will once again miss a golden opportunity to rise above the baseline of common, just as he did with 9/11, confirming once again that he failed to follow his true calling of bussing tables at a Texas diner, making small talk with the early morning biscuits ‘n gravy Stetson crowd and fetching them the newspaper as they head for the john.

If Mr Bush’s PR people would rise from the dead, the White House could sponsor a Shoes For The Homeless Holiday Drive, or a Toss A Shoe at the President fundraiser for veterans and Iraqi civilians who have lost limbs in this senseless occupation. There are so many ways that they could positively turn this, though the only thing that we can count on is that they’ll continue to do as they’ve always done. It’s so much easier to hunker in the bunker and pray for the assault to end. Unfortunately for them, their long record of crimes and villainies will dog them to their graves. Perhaps that’s the only justice we can hope for.

There’s the bullet train from Tianjin to Beijing (and vice versa, though we only took it one way) to report on. And Ai Wei Wei and Norman Foster at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing 798 on the morning of August 8th, an odd encounter on Wangfujing, water polo, a retired Brazilian colonel in the rain, and George Bush, both of them: we shared the same basketball game, though they were on the far, other side and I am quite sure that we were seeing the entire experience from distinctly different angles.

And (surprise!) I took more photos of the CCTV Headquarters Building in Olympiadic repose. (Click on any of the photos below for a larger version.)

And there are a lot more here, which I will be adding to over the next few days.

George Bush, the perfect symbol of the intrinsic shortcomings that have historically plagued the democratic process – sometimes you get a pseudo-cowboy yee-hawing on a mountain bike and a sidekick who shoots his friends in the face – that’s, unfortunately, the deal. Be that as it may, he will still be speaking in Beijing over the next week as the head of a state. If the last seven-and-a half years are any indication of significance, what he will say will be unimportant. He could show up on Chang’an Jie hawking Diebold voting machines, and he’d still earn a Page Two to “Three-Headed Teen Gives Birth To A Pig.” And if he doesn’t, he should.

This is diplomatic business and George and his crew have proven too many times that diplomacy is dirty, brutish work and, obviously, not to be trusted to diplomats. When he had the chance to actually have a voice in the swirl that has surrounded these Games, he maintained his silence. There was, at least for a short time, the slimmest of possibilities that he was holding out to negotiate some sort of higher-purposed deal (I know, I must have been dreaming), one that possibly could have added a shred of decency to a future legacy that will, no doubt, become the benchmark for incompetence and abject failure. I imagine Michael Dukakis is just biding his time, waiting for any of the pictures of George Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to become the number one most ridiculous political photo in American history, thereby knocking helmeted Dukakis in a tank from #1. (My personal favorite, which I cannot seem to find, is Richard Nixon, August, 1974, Yugoslavia, shaking hands with random admirers in a cordoned crowd as he looks intently at his watch, days before he was lifted from the White House lawn for good.)

But George just wants to have a little fun, and Beijing’s a good a place as any for a recovered Christian alcoholic to let his hair, short as it is, down.

So much for dreams, Olympic or otherwise. Instead of attending the Beijing Olympics as a competitor, Marion Jones is serving six months in a Texas federal prison for pathologically lying about her use of performance enhancing drugs. Along the way she claimed a string of incidental victims, including her relay partners at the Sydney 2000 Olympics who are now fighting to keep their medals. Though her Olympic dreams have been altered, they have obviously not been totally abandoned. She wants out a jail (who doesn’t?), and she’s appealed to President George Bush for a commutation of her sentence less than three weeks before the beginning of the Beijing Olympics, whose opening ceremonies Mr. Bush plans to attend. By my calculations she only has about 6 weeks left to serve. It is easy to call this one a no-brainer if it were not for so many other ‘no brainers’ that Mr. Bush has haplessly fumbled.

In an open letter to President Bush, Douglas Logan, the new CEO of US Track and Field, has urged Mr. Bush to not commute her sentence, seeing a potential early release as an undermining of the current efforts to keep drugs out of track and field. It’s in Bush’s court now, and though this seems like an obvious slam-dunk no, if recent history is any indication, this one could go either way. It is, after all, sports, politics AND Texas.