My Pet Goat II: Still Missing

Posted on 12/29/2004 at 8:39 am by Bob Cesca

Where is Mr. Bush? On vacation, clearing brush, talking goo-goo talk with Barney the dog, mopping up Jenna’s egg nog puke. Or is he reading “My Pet Goat”? As the death toll in the Indian Ocean tsunami crisis nears 100,000, he’s, again, the invisible man.

He’s unable to express empathy, yet he’s most comfortable ticking off war-hawk sloganeering, so his lack of response isn’t surprising. But it’s another example of how we’re stuck with a piss-poor chief executive, and we’re seemingly powerless to wash his embarrassing stink from our skin.

The Washington Post notes that President Clinton has been more visible in the crisis than Bush. So the only statement from the White House has been to backhand Clinton:

“The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn’t want to make a symbolic statement about ‘We feel your pain.’”

Shame on you, Mr. Bush! And even though he’ll crawl out from under his ridiculous Stetson hat this morning to make a statement, you can bet it’ll be stacatto, uncomfortable, uninspiring, and too late.

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  • Simon

    The Bush Administration’s lack of empathy may be disturbing for its ghoulishness, but it is only a new low in the history of American powermongering. Americans have been relatively sanguine for the last 60 years to comprehend the world with a combination of free market triumphalism and manifest destiny. It has been long part of our culture simply to ignore the suffering we have caused by cloistering ourselves in a fantasyland that even our sixties revolution failed to perceive. The U.S. spent the second half of the 20th Century ensuring its hegemony through rigging foreign elections, upholding and arming despots, inciting coups on behalf of private interests and otherwise aiming its formidable conventional and nuclear arsenal at any real or apparent threat to our way of life. Bush’s response to Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, and the general “let them eat cake” attitude is nothing more than the illumination of the dark recesses of our national conscious. And instead of recoiling from this realization of our true nature, we embraced it. As inhuman and reprehensible as George Bush behaves, he is nothing more than the synthesis of our cultural exectations and it is within our culture that we must rectify America.