Outdoing Coolidge

Do you care if I self-reference? Well, do you really?

What could be more silly than a blogger self-referencing? How about a blogger out referencing himself while not wearing pants?

Wait, I wasn't wearing pants then either.

Hold on a second...

Okay, what could be sillier than a blogger self-referencing while not only going pantless, but going commando?

Damn strait!

Okay, now that the self-entertaining, self-referencing, joke is out of the way, I thought I would build upon the pants-wearing Champollion's post below about Dear Leaders strutting and grunting manner of communication. You know what I'm talking about, where he tries to look like a lobotomized Gary Cooper.

Bush is probably the President with the least eloquence since Calvin Coolidge.

Gerald Ford wasn't exactly "Mr. Charisma", but circumstances give him a bit of a break. Even progressives like me, for the most part, do not really hold much rancor toward Ford. Except for a good wisecrack from Lyndon Johnson, everybody pretty much concedes that Ford was a fairly intelligent guy underneath a charisma-extractic exterior.

In the past months (here, finally, is the self-referencing) I mentioned that somebody after Bush is going to inherit the shit-trough that he will leave the american economy when he leaves. Bush will probably coast past the effects of his disastrous policies. The next President is going to be to Bush, what poor Herbert Hoover (an otherwise decent chap and great humanitarian) was to Coolidge.

Not to be an unrepetent optimist or anything.

But Bush has some frightening similarities to Coolidge (and some differences, Coolidge unquestionably won an election and actually tried to, believe it or not, OUTLAW WAR with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as opposed to Dear Leader's love for the martinette strutting that would put Crazy Czar Peter III to shame). They both have an economy coasting toward imminent meltdown and they both like to make capital out of their lack of a gift with rudimentary english.

Coolidge could actually string sentences together, he just chose to make political use out of his being a taciturn New Englander. Bush, whose inability to speak the language is founded upon an obvious intellectual laziness, has managed to steal the imagery of the "tough guy", the "steeleye-eyed rocket man" motif consisting of determined looks and "Texas-sized" stuffed pantsuits.

A famous story about Coolidge involves a dinner guest, possibly Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice, making a bet she could get Coolidge to say more than two words. She told Coolidge of her wager. His reply: "You lose."

If our Chimperor were in a similar situation, I'm betting it would go something like this:

Guest: "Mr. President, I bet I can get you to say more than two words."

Bush: "No you can't!"

And Fox News would portray it as an example of Bush's simple affection for his "people" that he deigned to allow an average 'murican (no doubt a Republican Operative from the Midwest) and a woman at that (so they'll say) to think she outwitted him.