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By the time you read this, George W. Bush may be president of the United States of America and leader of the free world. If that isn't scary, what is?
A congenital dim bulb on the world stage, representing you and me. Now that makes me see red.
Despite a life of comfortable wealth and the civilized polish it is alleged to imbue, George W. lacks simple social skills. As an example, he has never learned how to sit in a chair with either grace or modesty: his body slumped so it sometimes appears he lacks a neck and his legs macho-male akimbo. Didn't his mother, the sainted Barbara, tell him to sit up straight and put his knees together? The world isn't interested in viewing your crotch.
And, of course, none of the Bush boys can stand upright without shoving their hands in their pockets. George the First used to do it at state dinners, for pity's sake, so perhaps some damaged paternal gene afflicts George the Second and Jeb. The second Bush son is a man who has been caught on camera picking his nose, so keeping his hands in his pockets may have its uses. But I do remember that besides providing my two snotty-nosed male siblings with handkerchiefs, my mother would admonish them to "get your hands out of your pockets and stand like men."
I know George W. has a degree from Yale. Isn't it lucky Daddy was an alumnus with money and an ex-president to boot? How else to explain giving a degree to a man who can't speak in simple declarative sentences, not to mention correctly pronounce words with more than two syllables? But perhaps I'm unfair. George W. may be really good at mathematics or business, or something besides being an ex-president's eldest son. Dubya did make a fortune, partly in the oil fields of Texas, the state where his political partner Dick Cheney also reaped millions of dollars of oil industry money by retiring to run for vice president. Cheney, of course, has been on the political stage for a while, and I could have sworn we'd seen the back of him after the last President Bush retired to Maine.
I didn't care for Cheney then, and even less now. His thin-lipped outrage at Gore's reluctance to concede Florida reached the heights of hypocrisy. I lived in Florida for 12 years and I can tell you it has a good solid record for voting graveyards when needs be. A mayor of Miami recently was elected when a bunch of dead people put him over the top. In the end, the courts tossed out the election, and the mayor.
Also, the governor of the Sunshine State is none other than Jeb Bush, the nose picker. Who knows how many graveyards a governor can unearth? Under the circumstances, I would not expect Gore to quietly accept he lost the state by 300-some votes.
Cheney's sanctimoniousness over the legality of manually counting ballots is another bit of posturing that put my teeth on edge. I can't think of a reason why citizens would not countenance a hand-count of the whole state if the election is as close as the Florida poll. A reason besides the obvious one: Bush might lose Florida and thus the election.
I find a Bush presidency perturbing in the extreme. A man who would execute a convicted rapist-murderer with the IQ of a 6-year-old should not have his hand on the red phone. Russia rarely behaves well for long and we don't want some trigger-happy cowboy blowing us all up.
I am considering moving to another country. I could lie about my fluency in French, invent a few resident relatives and I might be admitted to Canada as a landed immigrant. But its parliamentarian system of government means that sometimes you get stuck with a prime minister for umpteen years because the party, not the people, selects him.
At least in America we'll only have to put up with the Bush-league George Dubya for four years, because we are definitely looking at a one-term president. If he doesn't shoot from the Texas hip with touchy nuclear powers that increase every year and launch us all into oblivion, in 2005 he'll be out of the White House and back on his ranch whining about his one-term reign.
(S.K. Brown is a freelance journalist who worked for 14 years for Knight Ridder Newspapers in Detroit and Toronto.)