Weren’t George W. Bush’s years great? Didn’t you have a lot of fun? Bet you are better off now than you were in 2000. Everything was really swell for eight glorious years. I get all misty eyed remembering the dandy times we had under the Great Decider. Watching him reading “My Pet Goat” on 9/11, faking weapons of mass destruction, invading Iraq, occupying Iraq, dodging shoes in Iraq, ratting out a CIA agent, watching New Orleans drown, letting Dick Cheney shred civil liberties, melting down stock markets, vanishing retirement savings, bailing out crooks on Wall Street. Those were the good old days. I really liked Cheney’s theory that in order to save the Constitution it was necessary to destroy the Constitution. The Bush years were more fun than a barrel of rabid monkeys. All in all, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s goofy director Brownie during Katrina, President Bush has done a heckuva a job. We’re gonna miss him.
    When Bush ran for office way back in 2000 he promised to be a “uniter.” That may have been the only true thing he said in eight years. With the help of Karl “Boy Genius” Rove, Bush did unite America — against him and the Republican party. A recent poll has 76 percent of Americans united in thinking the country is going in the wrong direction. It takes a special kind of President to get 76 percent of Americans to agree on anything but W managed to do it. Thank you President Bush for bringing us all together, even if it ultimately will be standing next to each other in bread lines.
    By the time this column appears, W’s reign of error will be down to a mere fortnight. Hold onto your food stamps though, there’s no telling what wild and crazy things he will be able to pull off during his last two weeks in office. Remember, it’s always darkest before the storm. If we are all lucky, he’ll just hang out in Crawford. If we’re not so lucky, he’ll have time to bomb Iran or North Korea as a going away gift to the world. Who knows? Maybe he’ll just bomb Bermuda. We should be able to win a war with Bermuda in his last two weeks so he can have a real “Mission Accomplished” moment. We certainly want to send him off in a cloud of positive self-esteem.
    {mosimage}Pondering the end of Bush’s term, I am reminded of the subtle quote in 1974 by Nicholas Von Hoffman who was referring to President Nixon right before Nixon resigned in disgrace. Nick felt it was time for Nixon to go and called out Nixon as “a dead rat on America’s kitchen floor” that needed to be removed. This comment caused a bit of controversy, and got Nick fired from 60 Minutes.
    Despite our financial gloom, all is not lost. Skateboarders in California have discovered a silver lining to the clouds of the foreclosure storms. It turns out that many of the rapidly multiplying abandoned foreclosed homes in California have swimming pools. These swimming pools when emptied of water make excellent skate board ramps. The skaters locate the foreclosed homes with pools on realtor Internet sites and take pumps with them to empty the pools so they can skate. This serves two useful purposes — skaters get exercise and the pools get emptied. The undrained pools at abandoned houses tend to fill up with green slime, deceased animals and West Nile virus carrying mosquitos causing some interesting Third World public health hazards to occur right in American suburbia. Double yikes!
    Skaters can’t do it all though. There are too many abandoned pools for them to drain. What we need is a core of workers to drain America’s green slime-filled pools. Fortunately, America does have a group of individuals trained as financial blood suckers whose talents could be easily switched to sucking out pool scum. We could use the CEO’s of the Wall Street investment banks who came up with the brilliant derivatives schemes that resulted in our current economic Armageddon to suck out the green pools. Provide the wizards at Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns and other financial outfits a case of flexible straws, put orange jump suits on them and let them start sucking out scum from abandoned pools.

Contact Pitt Dickey at editor@upandcomingweekly.com