Maureen Dowd is a Horrific Tractor Accident (JM)

Soft Shoe in Hard Times

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

With apologies to Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers, but really? Really?! You are surprised that the president is optimistic. What do you expect, GWB to come out like Eeyore? “Siiiigh… hey everyone, the economy’s real bad… I’m soooooo depressed….”

“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”

He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.

“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

Dude, you’re already in the ditch.

You know what would help the economy Maureen? The President of the United States coming out and saying, “Well the economy’s in the tank. Quick everyone, sell your stocks, immediately! What, Commerce Bank’s running out of money; we gotta get down there and pull out our accounts as fast as possible!” Raising expectations is really maybe the only thing a president actually does for the economy.

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy. Yet the more terrified Americans get, the more bizarrely carefree he seems. The former oilman reacted with cocky ignorance a couple of weeks ago when a reporter informed him that gas was barreling toward $4 a gallon.

In on-the-record sessions with reporters — and more candid off-the-record ones — he has seemed goofily happy in recent weeks, prickly no more but strangely liberated and ebullient.

Maybe he realizes this whole debacle is coming to an end. Also maybe he loves the fact that journalists who write for the NYT spend their time authoring really terrible columns about Hillary’s personality and writing stupid nicknames rather than actually reporting on the many ridiculously immoral and illegal things for which his administration has been responsible. I mean this is really just a guess…

Even though he ordinarily hates being kept waiting, he made light of it while cooling his heels for John McCain, and did a soft shoe for the White House press. Wearing a cowboy hat, he warbled a comic Western ditty at the Gridiron Dinner a week ago — alluding to Scooter Libby’s conviction, Saudis getting richer from our oil-guzzling, Brownie’s dismal Katrina performance, and Dick Cheney’s winsome habit of withholding documents.

At a dinner on Wednesday, the man who is persona non grata on the campaign trail (except for closed fund-raisers) told morose Republican members of Congress that he was totally confident that “we can retake the House” and “hold the White House.”

“I think 2008 is going to be a fabulous year for the Republican Party!” he said, sounding like Rachael Ray sprinkling paprika on goulash. That must have been news to House Republicans, who have no money, just lost the seat held by their former speaker, and are hemorrhaging incumbents as they head into a campaign marked by an incipient recession and an unpopular war.

You are either the dumbest political journalist of all time or you just really don’t care anymore. Maybe you were kidnapped by aliens and they left a Maureen-related random column generator behind in your place. This computer has devised all sorts of rules and schemes to make people believe that the real Maureen is still here, while she’s actually on planet Perseus-9 being a slave servant to Emperor Glacticon. If this is true, then by the standard of column writing artificial intelligence this is not bad. Also, Glacticon, a warning, don’t let her out of your sight or she will soon be writing bizarre space columns, calling you Glacty and making fun of your personal hygiene.

If only they could see things as the president does. Bush, who used his family connections to avoid Vietnam, told troops serving in Afghanistan on Thursday that he is “a little envious” of their adventure there, saying it was “in some ways romantic.”

This is a nice little tidbit, good writing.

Afghanistan is still roiling, as is Iraq, but W. is serene. “Removing Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency, it is the right decision now, and it will be the right decision ever,” he said, echoing that great American philosopher Dan Quayle, who once told Samoans, “Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.”

In so far as it is a repeating trope it is the same, in pretty much every other significant way these statements are totally irrelevant to each other.

W. bragged to Republicans about his “considered judgment” in sending more troops to Iraq and again presented himself as an untroubled instrument of divine will. “I believe there’s an Almighty,” he said, “and I believe a gift of that Almighty to every man, woman and child is freedom.”

Although the president belittled the Democrats for their policy of “retreat,” his surge has been a temporary and expensive place-holder for what Americans want: a policy to get us out of Iraq.

“Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started?” Michael Kinsley wrote recently. “The answer is no.” Gen. David Petraeus told The Washington Post last week that no one in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.”

This is a great article by Michael Kinsley. Thank you, Michael Kinsley. Maybe you just collect links of shit you’ve read on the internet for us Maureen. You can be Drudge without, you know, the ole’ Drudge charm.

Maybe the president is just putting on a good face to keep up American morale, the way Herbert Hoover did after the crash of ’29, when he continued to dress in a tuxedo for dinner.

Yes. This is precisely what he doing.

Or maybe the old Andover cheerleader really believes his own cheers, and that prosperity will turn up any time now, just like the W.M.D. in Iraq.

Maybe he does a bit, but probably mostly that first totally correct thing you just said that disproves the entire thesis of this article. You know, that thing you’ve never disproved.

Or perhaps it’s a Freudian trip. Now that he’s mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies.

You ever get the feeling that Maureen is that crazy girl at a party who is so drunk and crazy that you just can’t wait to hear the next thing she’s going to say. Rather the sincerity and enthusiasm with which she approaches her every idea is commensurate with the opposite level of total insanity utter incomprehensibility of those very ideas. In other words she is that special brand of “matter-of-factly” crazy that makes rooms full of people turn around to see what’s up. So yeah Maureen, what’s up? Why don’t you tell us all about that street performer whom you once had a four hour conversation with which totally changed your life?

Whatever the explanation, it’s plumb loco.

Quid est demostratum.