What is it about this picture that so annoys the Rude Pundit? There's George W. Bush, our goddamned President, sitting in a hybrid Ford SUV on Tuesday in a Missouri assembly plant with Ford employee and 20-year member of the United Auto Workers Barbara Neal? By this point, we should be used to the goofy grin, the same fuckin' smile he probably had when he paid someone to steal the answers to an algebra test at Andover. And certainly we've all gotten used to dress-up George, whether it's jet pilot George or brush-clearin' cowboy George. So seeing Bush wearing assembly line goggles, well, at least they've learned not to let a Bush ask how a price scanner works.
Maybe it's the fact that this picture was taken the day after the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. Maybe it's the fact that Bush is sitting next to a woman who he has worked very hard as President to dick over. Maybe it's because the photo was taken just a couple of hours before his pissy little throwdown with reporters over Congressional access to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers.
Or maybe it's because of this picture, another one from the same event, and not, as one might expect, the official White House photo:
Look at Bush there. Look at Neal. It's the look of a man who just got away with finger-fucking his prom date. It's the look of a jackass boy king, loving the way everyone wants to wipe his ass.
It's Friday. It's been a long week. The stupidity and greed of making Daylight Savings Time so goddamn early has fucked with the Rude Pundit's internal clock. He doesn't have a patch to download from Apple to take care of it. He doesn't like his president to act like a happy-go-lucky extra from a high school production of Lil' Abner while the world spins out of control thanks to the man's own slapping of the globe.
The Rude Pundit wants to see this man suffer and ache. He wants him to feel every day like the low man on the assembly line. He wants to see George Bush crumble under the weight of all the encroaching scandals, the ones that lap at his feet like Barney cleaning his toes.
Instead, we get this: the image of our leader, our goddamned President, as the Rude Pundit said before, sitting in a car that is not moving, that has not moved under its own power. And as we approach a moment of national stasis, with the House passing the Iraq timetable that'll be vetoed, with Bush not budging on the Rove testimony, and more, perhaps it is an apt metaphor for the weekend: Bush, grinning as it all stands still, the deer in the headlights look of the worker, the average American, next to him, wondering how the fuck to get out of this car, away from this man, with her limbs still attached.
