The Napping President

The Napping President
by Gary Leupp | Jul 9 2007 - 9:27am


"He is taking the entire month of August off! Well, who among us hasn't needed 30 straight days off after working six whole months?"
-- Jay Leno, August 2001


I read somewhere that while George W. Bush was governor of Texas he was prone to leave his office in the early afternoon. He was not the most energetic governor and retains a well-known penchant for naps even when surrounded by troubling news.

If true that Texas story would jibe with other reports I've read. After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where his main academic achievement seems to have been heading the cheerleader squad, he received his Bachelor of Arts in History from Yale with a C average in 1968.

Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1968, with a commitment to serve to May 1974. But there is no record of him performing any such service between May 1972 and October 1973. During that time he apparently refused to submit to a drug test, terminating his flier's career. In September 1973, eight months before his service was supposed to end, he requested discharge in order to attend Harvard Business School.

Yoshi Tsurumi, one of Bush's Harvard professors told CNN's Phil Hirschkorn in 2004 that Bush as a graduate student was "Lazy. He didn't come to my class prepared. He did very badly." His performance may have been influenced by substance abuse; he was arrested for DUI in Maine near his family's summer home in 1976 and had his license suspended.

After getting his Masters in Business Administration that year, Bush failed in several business ventures and in a bid for a House of Representatives seat in 1978. In 1994 his fortunes changed as advisors Karl Rove ("Bush's Brain") and Karen Hughes in a very sleazy campaign against the well-liked incumbent Democratic Governor Ann Richards engineered an upset. That allowed him to kick back with his cowboy boots on his desk and gleefully sign the execution orders of 152 death row prisoners (he was not much into pardons or commuting sentences then) while proclaiming June 10 "Jesus Day" in Texas.

As President of the United States, Dubya has accumulated more vacation credits than any of his recent predecessors. According to Dale McFeatters in a ScrippsNews editorial published last August, Bush "broke Ronald Reagan's record of 335 days for America's most vacationed president" on August 19, 2005, "and went on to take the longest presidential vacation in 36 years." That was over 18% of Bush's time since taking office (or about nine weeks in his average year) and there has been much vacation time since then for the wartime president. (For reference, the average vacation time in the U.S. is 12 days, Japan, 18; France, 25; Germany, 30.)


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:scared:

He's down the rabbit hole. Not a peep out of him, not a photo.

is he duck hunting again, and who are the lucky "friends" that are accompanying him on his summer excursion this year?...:scared:

dickie is just as stupid and warped as georgie. he just appears smarter.

I get tired of people referring to him as the brains of the operation. He's just as much of a loser as bush, failing in nearly everything he has done, too. He bought a company (was it Halliburton?) who had huge liabilities with asbestos. Duh. The only difference is Cheney actually works--albeit the work of the devil--and bush is just a loafer.



Cher

how'd you like it if he were working 24/7 365 a year to do what they're doing/ We'd be goose-stepping around the Mall by this time.

Laziness is an attribute when you're misguided...or dangerous.

because ole bushie is both

Cheney is running things, B*sh is just playing a role.

read up on funeralgate sometime.

anyone that had a clue back then knew what we were instore for when he* was appointed.