A couple of you, my dear readers, saw fit to stop me on the streets of Lower Queen Anne and ask me why I "have let up on Bush."
True, I haven't written for a while about America's worst pres-dent since Warren G. Harding, but frankly I thought I had said all there was to say. Repeatedly.
But for those of you who haven't enjoyed my recent excursions into other, more fruitful fields, here's the latest on Li'l Georgie.
British prime minister Tony Blair, the hero of the Oscar-nominated film "The Queen" and once a popular figure in Great Britain - before he tied his horse to Dubya's lost and bewildered Iraq war cart - announced last week that Britain is shortly to begin pulling troops out of Iraq.
This follows on the heels of the Italians and Slovaks leaving - and the Danes and even the South Koreans, saying they too feel there's nothing to be gained by keeping their soldiers in the desert quagmire also known as Iraq.
With the so-called coalition apparently coming apart, our fearless leader announced he was adding 21,500 Americans to the murder pot we've helped stew up in the Middle East. Twenty thousand more Americans at risk for what?
All but the most demented war watchers know by now that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. All but the most demented's best friends know Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. And anyone with eyes to watch the BBC nightly news on PBS knows Iraq is in worse shape now than when we arrived four years ago, and that we are not "winning" the peace.
As of Feb. 20, 3,146 members of the U.S. Armed Forces have died in Iraq. That's not counting contractors and civilian volunteers. That's not counting Iraqi dead. We don't keep those numbers. Foreign news sources estimate the dead citizenry anywhere from 40,000 to more than 100,000 folks. A Pyrrhic victory at best.
More than $10 billion raped from the American people for this war has mysteriously been "lost."
And yet, what makes Li'l Georgie special is his insanely positive spin on even the worst news.
Bush called Blair's announcement of troop withdrawals "a sign of success."
The coalition Bush overhyped from War Day One is down to an estimated 16,000 troops, compared to 132,000 (and rising) Americans stuck there. Numbers are so low even Bush has signed off on more Americans going, yet he tries to call other countries fleeing from his mess a sign that things are going well.
Maybe if America was withdrawing our troops at the same time, a reasonable person could point and say, "See, fewer folks needed on the ground." But after putting more Americans in to make up for those alleged allies leaving, Georgie can't just be quiet - he has to call yet another in his endless string of defeats a victory.
I had a boss once at a newspaper in Kitsap County who always forced his way along when two of his editors played golf. This executive was a little guy with a pretty cranky golf swing, even by newspaper-editor standards. His ball was invariably short of his editors' 200-yard (pathetic themselves) drives. And he spent a lot of time in woods and water.
He almost always arrived on the green last, three-putted - counting a self-given gimme - and then asked his employees, "What did ya get?" Whether the employees grudgingly admitted triple-bogey sevens or proudly said double-bogey six didn't really matter. The little exec always said the same thing: "Me too."
Since he signed the paltry editorial bonus checks at the end of the year, nobody ever called him on his "unique" scoring system. Evidently, Li'l Georgie, America's worst president in 90 years, views the world the way the Little Boss viewed golf scorecards. Such a system unfortunately makes us all losers.
I can't wait for Jeb's candidacy.
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