Wednesday, May 14, 2008
He Feels Your Pain
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf."I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."
Oh for fuck's sake. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. DEAD!!!! Families torn apart. Widows. Orphans. Brothers without brothers, sisters sisters. Hundreds of thousands of people are maimed for life: blind, deaf, missing limbs, psychologically scarred, and this man thinks he has sacrficed because he stopped playing golf for a few years? Yeeeeaaarggghhhhhhhh!!!!!
As you most likely have come to expect, it gets worse:
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization's high commissioner for human rights.
"I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life," he said. "I was playing golf - I think I was in central Texas - and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, 'It's just not worth it anymore to do.'"
Great story with one minor flaw: it's a lie. Bush played golf at least as late as October of 2003, some two months after he supposedly swore off it. Further, there are medical reasons (muscle tear and sore knees that caused him to give up running for a span) that might have forced him to take a hiatus at the time regardless.
And as Brad Le Roque points out, Bush might have "“sacrificed” playing golf, [but] he still managed to set the all-time presidential record for vacations back in 2005."
Yeah, but he needed all those vacation days. Think of how stressful it was for him to persevere in the face of a life without golf. Now I know what Laura was getting at when she scolded the nation by pointing out about the war:
Rumor has it, she gave up macrame.No one suffers more than their president and I do.
