Bush In New Orleans: "I Was a Drunk and an Idiot":
What pathology impels President George W. Bush to joke about being stupid, an alcoholic, and a stupid alcoholic? While he does it under the bullshit guise of self-deprecation, he makes remarks so often, one must be tempted to believe he desperately misses the sauce. And as for the stupid part? Well, there's a difference between self-effacing and self-obvious.

Here's Bush speaking at a charter school in New Orleans yesterday: "Those are the two things I was good at at school-- eating and playing. (Laughter)...Sorry Laura is not here. She and I, by the way, spent some of our youth here in New Orleans. I really don't want to go into all the details of -- (laughter) -- but we know something about the town...I was talking to the Mayor about Mardi Gras, a subject I know a little bit about -- I remember most of them. (Laughter.)" Oh, god, yes, the laughter at how the President used to black out from his binge drinking.

Bush went to New Orleans "to remind people that the federal government still knows you exist, still knows you have issues, and wants to work with your leadership to address those issues." But most of the goddamn time, all Bush talked about was what he's done for the ungrateful fucks in Louisiana, who now have the audacity to ask for relief from needing to provide matching grants for federal recovery funds. Don't they get what George W. Bush has already done for them?

If not, he'll remind them: "I signed [a bill] that will enable more federal revenues to come down here to restore the wetlands. (Applause.) I'm a strong proponent of the restoration of the wetlands, for a lot of reasons...the No Child Left Behind Act -- and I am a very strong supporter of it...Louisiana has had -- now had $4.6 billion sent from the federal government. And actually, it's your money, so we're sending your money back to you...I don't know if you know this or not, but there is $6.2 billion that has been sent down; $50 million has been spent...Just so you know, of the $110 billion, $86 billion of that has been obligated -- in other words, it's out the door. But only $53 billion has been spent."

Bush visited a charter school, praising charter schools to the hilt - public schools run by private groups who received huge grants from the federal government to get up and running. Bush may say, "Charter schools work. It makes a lot of sense," and it'd be true, except it's not: they don't really work any better than traditional public schools.

Still, Bush ate at a restaurant that gave him an opportunity to touch black people, even as he talked about the time he had Ray Nagin take a shower for him (really). And he left them with this chilling warning: "And after I'm the President, I'm going to slide in incognito."

Over on CNN yesterday, a woman who works at a New Orleans school said this: "We're really beginning to panic, quite frankly, about how we'll continue to operate and continue to open schools and repair schools at the rate that we're going with getting reimbursed."

She gets the last word, not the wannabe drunk.