CAPITOL COMEDY (published 04.16.2003)

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BY PETER KURTH

Say, did you hear the one about George W. Bush? Seems the president went to a library recently, walked up to the reference desk and said in a loud, clear voice, the kind he uses when addressing the troops, “I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”

“Sir,” said the librarian, obviously shocked, “this is a library!”

“Oh,” said Bush, lowering his voice to a whisper: “Shhh! I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”

Not funny? How about this: Seems that Bush was out golfing the other day when he noticed an old man with a long, white beard and a white robe standing on the fairway.

“That looks like Moses!” said Bush, who, as everyone knows, is deeply religious. Quickly approaching the stranger, he asked, “Are you Moses?”

There was no reply. The man looked away.

“Hmm!” said the commander-in-chief, scratching his head. “I could have sworn that was Moses.” He turned to a Secret Service agent. “Go find out if that’s Moses, on the double!” he barked.

The agent complied. “The Leader of the Free World wants to know if you’re Moses,” said the bodyguard -- menacingly, we can assume.

The old man sighed, looked quickly from left to right, and answered, “Well, yes. But the last time I talked to a Bush I ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years.”

Yuk, yuk, yuk -- I got a million of `em! But maybe the truth is funnier than the jokes. Here’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, complaining last week about press coverage of the “widespread looting” -- read: sheer pandemonium, terror and chaos -- in Iraq’s capital city of Baghdad.

"It's untidy,” Rumsfeld conceded, jabbing his hand in the air at an imaginary enemy, “and freedom's untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." Rummy insists that words like “anarchy” and “lawlessness” are the wrong ones to use, “unrepresentative of the situation in Iraq” and "absolutely ill-chosen.”

"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it," he said. "I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- 'The sky is falling'.”

I think he means Chicken Little, but never mind: Chicken Little sounds too much like “Chickenhawk,” and that might get people wondering how we got into this mess.

“I've never seen anything like it!” Rumsfeld went on. “And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot -- one thing after another. It's just unbelievable."

Amen, brother. It was unbelievable when you started this war and it’s unbelievable now that you’re “ending” it and moving on to Syria. The Guardian of London compares Rummy’s tirade to “the Iraqi information minister who assured the world that all was well even as battles raged visibly around him” -- yuk, yuk, yuk!

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” says Rumsfeld, “and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"

Well, maybe there were, although I expect most of them are now shattered in pieces, like the rest of Iraq’s “infrastructure,” or stolen for the international art market during the wanton, anarchic, chaotic -- forgive me -- destruction of buildings, hospitals, schools and Baghdad’s National Museum. An employee turned up there for work on Saturday -- again, according to The Guardian -- and found the museum’s administrative offices completely trashed and most of its antiquities missing: “The only thing she could salvage was a telephone book. … She refused to give her name. With tears, she said, `It is all the fault of the Americans. This is Iraq's civilization. And it's all gone now.’”

Crybabies! If that’s how they really felt about their country and their heritage they’d have dumped Saddam a long time ago and not made the brave men and women of our armed forces do it for them. This is why we have to put our own people in power over there -- yuk, yuk, yuk!

Another one who’s completely unmoved by all the things that aren’t happening in Iraq -- chaos, anarchy, slaughter, etc. -- is Barbara Bush, the First Mom, who last week, dressed in her trademark pearls, told ABC News that she never watches television.

“I read books,” says Bar, “because I know perfectly well that -- don't take offense -- that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. … Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Yuk, yuk, double yuk. On the same day, while giving a speech at Ashland University, Mrs. Bush was asked which American politician she admired the most.

"George Bush," she said, and the room exploded in laughter. "As I watch him guide our country through this very difficult time,” said Dubya’s mom, “I can't help but wonder, 'Is this the same kid I used to spank?'"

Not hard enough, Bar, not hard enough. Yuk, yuk, yukkety-yuk.

Yuck.

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" -- Dorothy Thompson, 1935

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