The Incredible Shrinking President, Part 1: Size Matters:
So yesterday the Rude Pundit did his laundry. And in that fine urban laundromat, the Rude Pundit was alone with the Chinese immigrant and Nuyorican women who work there. The television was tuned to CNN, where the "news" network paused in its Scott Peterson trial coverage to show the unveiling of the portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton. George W. Bush spoke, earnestly, kindly, even transcendantly (in the context of Bush's politics), about the Clintons, but it was a typical "performance" by "compassionate" George - trying too hard, awkwardly pausing and smirking. We folded laundry, transferred things to dryers, and occasionally paused and watched. Then Bill Clinton began to speak, and all three of us stopped, almost at the same time, and turned to the television above the change machine and saw this man with such a command of self and words and such a knowledge of audience and humanity, someone funny, wise, and comforting. When he was finished, the Rude Pundit said, "Remember when we had a President?" The Nuyorican woman laughed, the Chinese woman nodded, and we may as well have all sighed in lust over Clinton, remembering a time when our President stood tall when he spoke, spine straight, not hunched over like a French bellringer.
Our President, and, no matter what, Bush is our President, is shrinking before our eyes. Even those who once believed he was a mighty, mighty man are now watching him get smaller and smaller and smaller. It's really no fault of his own. He was never a large man to begin with. Through tricks of the camera and historical circumstance, he came to seem so much bigger, a giant to our mere mortal sized. Now, though, not only has he returned to his original height - he is shrinking into nothingness.
It happened first to individual body parts: his cock was the first thing to shrink. Oh, god, what a gigantic cock the man had a year ago. Jesus, when he was in that fuckin' flight suit, he could barely stand straight because of the weight of his humongous phallus. And his fuckin' speech that day, where his cock was batting against his right knee ('cause that's the direction his cock curves, radically), all full of balls and bluster: "With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent." His Secret Service detail had to give him wide berth for fear of being bumped by his enormous erect penis.
But what rises must eventually fall. Icarus learned this. The tower builders at Babel learned this. And so, constantly, painfully smacked with the paddles of mounting casualties, insurgencies, and lack of WMDs, how that Presidential putz shrank, first to its former size of "do I need to try male 'enhancement' or not" dubious inches, to, now, its near inverted lack of length, girth, or width. Here's how you know a President's cock has shrunk to the size of an infant's thumb: "I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not . . .I haven't met the Prime Minister yet, but he sounds like a very strong, courageous individual . . .let me remind everybody about Saddam Hussein, just in case we all forget. There were mass graves under his leadership. There were torture chambers." All statements, all, from one press conference, at the G-8 summit last week. Someone call a surgeon to remove his balls from his body cavity.
So watching Clinton and Bush yesterday for the Rude Pundit must have been like conservatives watching Bush in Reagan's shadow last week. What a small petty man, we all thought. What a ridiculous shadow of the office that he holds. And, to be clear, it is an "office" that is his only for a temporary period. Which is why it's extra petty and small when the White House website, which one would assume ought to be devoted to the "Presidency" and not the "President," contains the text of President Bush's speech at the unveiling of the Clintons' portraits, but not the text of the former president's remarks. And God only knows what psychological damage would be done by including the text of Bush's father's words at Reagan's funeral. Because even next to the smallest of men, this current Bush keeps shrinking.
More on the shrinking brain, the shrinking heart, and the shrinking arms tomorrow.
