Archive for August 31st, 2007
by Daniel Clark
You can tell that things are looking up in Iraq, because President Bush's enemies are having to delve deeper into the mothballs to come up with reasons to criticize him. One example of this is an Aug. 9th Houston Chronicle story by Julie Mason, in which she revives the fatuous argument that Bush spends too much time on vacation.
Citing numbers that had been compiled by a CBS reporter, Mason writes that Bush is only a couple weeks away from breaking Ronald Reagan's record for vacation days taken by a president. This assumes, ridiculously, that the President of the United States is no longer on duty when he leaves the White House. In reality, there is seldom any particular reason that the president must stay in Washington when Congress is out of session. It stands to reason, then, that Republican presidents would leave town more often, rather than remain in the midst of a hostile Washington press corps.
From the way that liberals talk about Bush's "vacations," you'd think that when he moved operations to his Crawford ranch, his work went undone. One imagines him returning to his desk to find one of those pink "While You Were Out" slips, saying something like, "Putin called. Said it was urgent, but you know how he is. Told him you'd gone fishing."
The headline of Mason's story dubs Bush "the vacation president," but the truth be known, President Clinton was more on vacation in the Oval Office than Bush has ever been in Crawford. For all we know, one of Clinton's many sordid trysts might have even involved a snorkel.
It was Clinton who said that the one thing he'd miss most about being president would be the White House movie theater. Any other president would have said something about the privilege of serving the American people, or maybe the dedication of his staff and secret servicemen, but leave it to Bill Clinton to take that question as an opportunity to audition for MTV's Cribs.