After spending Sunday morning as a political-junkie couch potato, I’ve decided that the best way to gauge the B.S. factor coming out of the White House is to watch spokesman and counselor to the president
Dan Bartlett. You can tell how much at a loss he is to answer a question truthfully — or answer it at all — by how far under his front teeth he rolls his upper lip. I mean, sometimes it downright disappears and he looks like a dog I once had that used to do that when he wanted to go outside to go to the bathroom. And did Bartlett ever have reason to curl his lip last weekend! Poor thing. It looked like everyone in the White House had gone into seclusion, leaving him as the only Bush-Cheney puppet left to go in front of the cameras. And it hasn’t been a very good couple of weeks for the Evil Duo. First, there was the Clinton interview on Fox News. Ouch. If Chris Wallace could roll his upper lip under like Dan Bartlett, it would have disappeared completely. But at least it has given the geniuses at Fox plenty of fodder for their “A-List” roundtable discussions. Just what the “A” stands for I’m not quite so sure, but I have my own ideas about what it should stand for (no offense to the local Fox-13 station). The great part about the Clinton interview is that Condoleezza Rice disputed what Clinton said. I cannot wait to see what happens if she decides to go up against him. I wonder how long she would be able to sit there alternating that vacuous smile on her face with the concerned furrowed-brow look and make up those answers that contain no sense at all. I think she is becoming her boss. And then there’s the Bob Woodward book, State of Denial, which had everyone in the White House running around like little chipmunks trying to figure out how to respond to its allegations that the administration ignored multiple warnings about a terrorist attack. What gets me is that that news has been out there for a year. Bush was given a report outlining how bin Laden was going to attack America with airplanes and that he spent the rest of that afternoon fishing. And now Rice says she doesn’t remember having a meeting with the then-head of the CIA about the threats? She doesn’t remember? I wonder if she remembers how much those Italian leather shoes were that she was buying while half the population of New Orleans was facing the Katrina floods. But she’s always been a little slow that way. And then there’s the secret NIE report that was leaked, outlining just how bad the situation is in Iraq: At least a couple of news sources compared it to the “redacted” report released by the White House telling us how great things are. And to top it all off, Republican representative Mark Foley of Florida resigned because he got caught sending sexually charged e-mails to teenage male pages. And then it came out (no pun intended) that many of his Republican cohorts, including the House leaders, might have known about it for some time and did nothing. And now, of course, Foley has checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program, claiming that the disease of alcoholism made him do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was boner-time at the congressional office building that led him to do it. So we have an administration that pretty much ignored specific warnings about the terrorist attack or now says they can’t remember the meeting where they were warned. We have Condoleezza saying that Bill Clinton is lying about it, when we know he’s not. We have a secret report outlining what the real situation in Iraq is (like we didn’t already know that). And we have a drunk old Republican queen in Congress sending out dirty e-mails to teenage boys. When, again, are the upcoming mid-term elections?
