Pretzels
I admit that I never laughed at Bush’s pretzel foible. Small potatoes. Although, in the annals of the Bush Presidency, the pretzel incident marks a moment where the first chink was thrown into the post 9/11 hazed Bush armor. It was when the late night comedians could subtley turn from safely mocking Osama somewhere in a cave, being prepared for slaughter presumably, an toward something resembling the pre 9/11 Bush. (which would morph and change in various ways through the next couple of years.)
The post Gulf War Bush I image unravelled… I don’t know, maybe when he vomitted on the prime minister of Japan? Then again, the SNL sketch (from the Comedy Central reruns) had Bush provide a second joint-Congress appearance speech after the Gulf War victory, just because the first one provided him with such laudatory applause. This suggests, perhaps, that from the very beginning the one-note was turning into a half-note… “What else you got?”
Schwartzopft (sp?) was People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive”. And today, Rumsfeld is nowhere to be seen.
We’re a small handful of days away from burying the endless supply of anti-Bush books… picking out the small handful that will survive the test of time and supply some cognent analysis of what just happened. And we’re a small handful of days from the return of Phil Hendrie away from a stupor of “super-hawk commentary” to intelligible all-sides get skewered social commentary.
Kerry? We’ll have to see.