Bush arrives on USS Iwo Jima where he played guitar and sang chanties for the sailors.
If you listen to what some of the GOP leaders and their mothers have been saying lately with regard to the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, you would have sworn that some mischievous old hippies were around putting LSD in the Republicans’ bottled water.
An example of the perplexing statements came straight from the lips of our own illustrious leader President GW:
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
Of course, Brownie was removed from his job as head of FEMA and resigned today. I wonder what kind of acid the president was on the day he told “Brownie” that. Or even that day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast when he stood there fantasizing about sitting on the porch swing with Sen. Trent Lott:
“Out of the rubble of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”
Oh wow, man, that spider web looks like a tunnel into the center of the earth! Did you see it Trent? Wow!
Then the president reminisced in New Orleans about visiting that city in his younger days “to enjoy myself — occasionally too much.” Ah, Mr. President, I also got torn down a time or two in New Orleans when I was younger. But I’m not leading the nation and trying to inspire people who have lost the better part of their city.
It wasn’t just the president talking like he had dropped acid, however. Even GW’s mom, Babs, must have downed a tab or two.
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” Barbara Bush said about storm evacuees in a radio interview from the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — is working very well for them,” she said.
U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert no doubt was hallucinating when he told an interviewer that he thought New Orleans should be a candidate for a bulldozer. And Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, perhaps pulled a magic mushroom from a cow patty before he made a statement to some evacuees last weekend at a Houston shelter, reported in this dispatch by the “Houston Chronicle:”
“While on the tour with top administration officials from Washington, including U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao and U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, DeLay stopped to chat with three young boys resting on cots. The congressman likened their stay to being at camp and asked, ‘Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?’
“They nodded yes, but looked perplexed.”
Maybe the pressure is just getting to all these people is the reason they are making often insensitive, nonsensical and, at times, absurd remarks.
Or maybe they are just really, really stoned.