Your Humble Blogger will join in the general and genial mockery of Our Only President. Gentle Readers will no doubt be aware that biking-related program activities briefly felled Our Only President. "It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose," said Trent Duffy, White House spokesman (no relation to fictional character Duffman). Sadly, there are records of this sort of thing; it hasn’t rained in Crawford for a week. In fact, there’s been all of an inch of rain in the last three weeks; even in Texas, that’s not “raining a lot”.
Mr. Duffy’s other statement was that “[Our Only President] wasn't whistling show tunes.” We may never know the truth of that one.
Last fall, Al Franken and his team of Harvard students did a promo for his book LIES: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them—A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, during which he just opened up The O'Reilly Factor to a random page and handed it over to Team Franken, who Googled and Lexis-Nexis’d and so on for, oh, say, a minute or two before finding an untruth. That’s what this reminds me of. Yes, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel after two weeks without rain, but what the heck.
And yes, Bill Clinton lied. Oh, yes, he lied. And, YHB must admit, if Bill Clinton told me the sun was out, I would check the sky before lending him my umbrella. I know all that. That’s fine. If the response of Our Only President’s supporters is “He’s not significantly more dishonest than the last fellow, but of course less competent, less effective, less articulate, and less knowledgeable, as well as being headed in the wrong direction, and of course surrounding himself with a secretive corral of fools, thieves, and scoundrels that make Bill Clinton’s associates look like Madison, Hamilton and Jay. So I’ll take that comparison, and I’ll keep mocking Our Only President. But gently, gently.
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-Vardibidian.
Erratum: I've just watched the promo I linked to above, and it does not contain the Team Franken bit I said it did. A member of Team Franken told me it happened; I may have misunderstood which event it happened at, or I may have been, like Rick in Casablanca, misinformed.
It was interesting to see this speech from eight months ago. Among other things of historical interest, when a third audience member mentioned Diebold, Mr. Franken took out a pen and made a note. He hadn't heard about it, or at least hadn't paid any attention up until then.
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-V.
Bush got the idea from an incident on the pilot episode ofThe West Wing: “The President, while bicycling, came to a sudden arboreal stop.”