The White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

First, a quote by the great Henry Louis Mencken..

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

I can certainly understand Mr. Mencken's invective when evaluating the presidency of one George W. Bush. Bush came to power in the grim Year of Our Lord 2000 AD after many shenanigans, malfeasances, and some outright vote fraud in the Great State of Florida, which is the fifedom of his brother Jeb. W, who was admitted to Yale as a silver-spoon special, barely made a "C" average as an undergraduate. Despite this poor performance, the man ranked a place in Harvard's graduate school majoring in business. I suppose the old "My deddy's a Congressman" line served him well as he continued his mediocre streak as a grad student. Affirmative action for the rich, I suppose.

Concurrent with his Ivy League education, W was supposed to be a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. W, showing his physical courage, bravely stepped up to the plate to insure that cities such as Houston, Laredo, Dallas, and San Antonio were free from the scourge of the Viet Cong. In a copacetic lapse of memory, military records keeping, and apparent collective dementia, W supposedly received permission to work on a Senatorial campaign here in Alabama. Now, how the Viet Cong kept from over-running Texas is a mystery, but the bigger mystery is whether W actually served the Air Guard in Montgomery or even worked on the campaign in question. A reward was issued to anyone who remembered serving with W in Alabama and five years later, it remains unclaimed.

After defending the intergrity of Texas and Alabama, W entered the business world by heading a petroleum drilling company. With Saudi Arabian backers, W formed Arbusto Drilling, a company that specialized in prospecting dry holes in Texas. Further business exploits included a Major League baseball team and a seat on the board of Harken Energy. Now, keep in mind that Saudi funds were generously funneled to support his failed ventures.

Then, in 2000, W's daddy's friends on the US Supreme Court appointed (or anointed) him president. The man spent more time on vacation during his first year in office than any other president in history. W had a rough ten months and it appeared he was going to start his term as a lame duck. Then suddenly, he received the greatest gift anyone could have given him : a terrorist attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Without recounting all the details, about three thousand people died, the WTC collapsed, and we had a bogeyman tied to his old business partners, the Saudis. While the WTC burned and collapsed, W sat in a Florida classroom paralyzed and reading "My Pet Goat". Once he regained some semblance of awareness, he promptly disappeared.

Once he returned to DC, W allowed all of the Bin Laden family to leave the country with FBI assistance and then evaluated his next step. Now, W had intelligence that the culprit of the attacks, Osama Bin Laden, was hiding out in Afghanistan. In fact, former Clinton chief of national security Sandy Berger de-briefed W's people on OBL and stated Bin Laden was the paramount threat to the USA. What does W do after taking office? Why, he does the logical thing and orders missile attacks on Iraq. When a Presidential Daily Briefing was coveyed to him in August, 2001 while on vacation in Crawford, TX, he apparently ignored the Bin Laden threat. So, now that we have a name attached to the attack, W chivalrously gives Bin Laden a six week head start before sending in about fifty thousand soldiers to secure Afghanistan. To back up this small number of troops, we contract out the Bin Laden hunt to local warlords who, in the past, had ties to Al Qaeda. Of course, Bin Laden escapes, likely across the border of our ally Pakistan.

Now, the hunt for Bin Laden is a dud, we discover that the hijackers were mostly Saudis funded by other Saudis who were tied to, say it with me, Osama Bin Laden. So, what does W do in response to this? Why he beats the war drum to attack Iraq by holding Saddam Hussein out to be a threat to the USA. According to W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, Hussein possesses the means to attack American through weapons of mass destruction; meaning nuclear, chemical , or biological warheads with a surfact-to-surface delivery system. Now, these four men and their subordinates go on a media blitz repeating these "facts" like broken records. Long story short: we invade Iraq, demolish much of the country, endanger American lives, and find not one shred of evidence of WMD. After two years, a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, over fifteen hundred dead Americans, and twenty thousand wounded Americans, the country is no more stable, prosperous, or free than before. The country is embroiled in ethnic and sectarian strife, the resistance is effectively shutting down entire areas, and our military is bogged down due to personnel shortages.

Let's evaluate the dubious achievements of W over the past four years. He was handed a budget surplus, a stable economy, and an America that was at peace. In four short years, he has lowered taxes on American corporations at the expense of the rest of us, driven our economy into recession and inflation, taken us into a futile and unjust war against a nation that had never attacked us, and left a nation politically and socially divided. The man is an oblivious idiot, pure and simple. Any man who, at a public venue, jokes about his own mediocrity is not someone to be placed in charge of a two car funeral procession. W has the worst job record of any president since Herbert Hoover and it's not getting any better. He wants to allow illegals "guest worker" status which will insure more unemployed Americans. W was a champion of outsourcing and has given generous corporate tax breaks to companies who embrace the practice. W has been a disaster. Yes, Mencken was correct, we have elevated a moron to the presidency and our nation, sadly enough, shows the effects.

;)