James Carville called Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign “the most expensive act of masturbation in human history.” One wonders if Carville caught G. W. Bush’s performance on the USS Abraham Lincoln tonight.

Was there anything about the event that didn’t seem hopelessly contrived? From the ship to the Friends lead-in, the Pilot Bush clip to the strangely well-timed way the live camera managed to pull back just before a “spontaneous” standing ovation, we had all the markings of a dry-run for a re-election campaign. All that was missing was some of that “crowds“-pulling-down-a-Saddam-statue footage.

Or maybe some weapons of mass destruction. After hearing all along that Iraq was just on the edge of using the weapons we “know for a fact” they have — the evidence of which Colin Powell was sorting through to present to the U.N., the prize that military planners were supposedly preoccupied with (since we know it wasn’t museums or hospitals) — well, all we heard about those was:

We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.

That roughly translates to: “we already know of some places we should look.” I feel safer already.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2003 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Law & Politics.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.