Give Bush a crown & call it a term - And stop treating me like I'm stupid

As the New Year approaches and we head for the home stretch of his administration, I’ve been trying to decide if George W. Bush is a bad guy. I’ve always believed that you can find something good about anyone if you look hard enough. If you judge him by how he treats his wife and his children, he scores well (he quit drinking for Laura and didn’t get mad when Jenna called him from the set of the “Ellen” show). Since I don’t know him like that, I have to judge him by how he treats me. That’s where we run into problems. I don’t insist that he respect me, I just hate that he treats me like I’m stupid. So he may not be a bad guy, he’s just a really lousy President. Last week’s statements about Iran are the perfect example of why I say that.

As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has every right to civilian nuclear energy. For four years, the UN and the IAEA has been trying to get Iran to come clean about how much progress they’ve made; the idea being to find out whether or not Iran was working on developing a weapon. Luckily, the U.S. has its own intelligence professionals working to answer the same questions. The conclusion they came to in the National Intelligence Estimate was that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.

In October, the President was asked if he believed Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon. Part of his response was, “yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon…I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

There are two big problems with this response. First, I saw a movie about nuclear holocaust called “The Day After” when I was in 6th grade and it scarred me for life. Second, under the NNPT, Iran has every right to the knowledge of nuclear power that President Bush is willing to threaten nuclear war to prevent it from acquiring.

Did the President know that the NIE had concluded Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program when he used the words “World War III”? His answer was, “I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said we have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze…it wasn't until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.”

The President’s official story is that the Director of National Intelligence mentioned in passing that he had new information on the nuclear threat posed by Iran (the last country standing in Michael Gerson’s infamous “Axis of Evil”), but that he, the President, didn’t ask any follow-up questions over the course of the next three months. Then, six months after it was finished, the Commander in Chief was finally briefed on the NIE right after Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t believe this excuse if it came from my teenage nephew, yet the President expects me to believe what he says - as though I’m stupid.

It makes me wonder if we need to hear from him at all over the course of the next twelve months. What is there left for him to do? We know he’s not pulling any troops out of Iraq, we know he’s not putting any back into Afghanistan, we know he’s not going to get personally involved in brokering an Israeli/Palestinian peace deal, and we know he’s not signing any bills into law if it might help the Democrats. Essentially, we know he’s not going to do any of the things we need a President and Commander in Chief to do.

So let’s make him a deal. If he’ll agree not to bomb Iran and just retire to Crawford, Texas, we agree to let him be King until the end of his term. It’s what he really wants, anyway. We’ll get him one of those Burger King heads with the crown and the “Three Musketeers” goatee, and he can wear it with his suit and tie or his pilot’s jumpsuit or whatever. The people that love him will believe anything he says, and the ones who don’t wouldn’t believe him if he said water is wet; so it won’t matter that the King doesn’t speak. With Press Secretary Dana Perino as the prettiest mouthpiece to ever spin his lies, King W. can spend the next year doing what he does best: serving up “Whoppers” with a big, fake smile.