Bush and Barney: we’re on Candid Camera!

There are those rare moments of epiphany, and I think I’ve just had one. It was when I saw that George Bush has released a Christmas video of a story in which his dogs, Barney and Miss Beazley are appointed “Junior Park Rangers”. They engage in assorted antics, including being congratulated by “country music star Alan Jackson and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair”.

It’s just weird beyond words.

And this is what I suddenly realised: Bush isn’t really President. The last seven years have just been a big joke.

We should have been alerted to this when he won the election despite getting fewer votes than Gore, on the grounds that vote-counting was stopped by the woman in charge of (a) running Florida’s voting and (b) Bush’s Florida campaign, which was then approved by a court dominated by judges appointed by his dad, his dad’s old boss and Richard Nixon. Does that sound even remotely plausible?

Afterwards, rather than running the country, he spent half the time sitting around his ranch, clearing scrub and playing golf. He wouldn’t have done that if he’d really been President.

Then, on being told of the biggest terrorist attack in his country’s history, he sat around in a classroom reading ‘My Pet Goat’ for seven minutes before doing anything. That’s just taking the piss!

He smashed the Taliban in order to capture Osama bin Laden and then, before ‘smoking him out’, got fed up and invaded another country after going around telling everyone that Saddam was really behind 9/11? And people believed him? The Democrats and the media must have been in on the joke as well.

They must have been – otherwise, do you honestly believe that somebody could get away with shredding civil liberties in the most famously freedom-loving country in the world just by giving the law a tortuous name so that its acronym was the USA PATRIOT Act?

And then, having smashed Saddam’s feeble little army to bits, he couldn’t even secure a cheap and reliable flow of Iraq’s oil but still managed to get all his opponents saying the war was ‘all about oil’? That’s showmanship.

Appointing and then being forced to sack or withdraw a string of incompetent cronies? This is just a frat boy having a laugh with his mates!

A pretzel? The President of the USA was almost killed by a pretzel? Come on!

And when asked at a press conference “what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?” even the stupidest and least self-aware of dogmatic morons could have come up with better than this (imagine lengthy pauses between, and during, most of the sentences):

I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.
…
I hope I -- I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

And then, then… he got re-elected! Comfortably!

No, this can’t possibly be true. The Bush ‘Presidency’ is surely the finest practical joke ever played on America and on the world. So, where’s the camera?