Big border

Recently I’ve been seeing these stories about how Bush actually reads books, and does not amuse himself in his off-hours, as most of us had thought, with a ball of string. George, these stories try to convince us, is smarter than we think. But if he’s reading all these big-boy books, why is most of his vocabulary still that of a 3-year old? Today, for example, in a news conference with the heads of Canada and Mexico, Bush kept saying that the US has a “big border” with those countries. Long, you moron, the word is long.

Jeb Bush trotted out a “renowned” neurologist to claim that Terri Schiavo was not without brain function but had “minimal consciousness.” At this precise moment I’m suffering from a surfeit of consciousness, as five million Florida jokes all seek to emerge at once. The doctor himself suffers from false consciousness, telling anyone who will listen that he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize, which he was not.

There’s one significant datum in the Terri Schiavo affair I haven’t seen: the cost of sustaining her vegetable existence year in and year out.

The British elections are moving along nicely, with Michael Howard running a campaign that’s a never-ending quest to find people to attack who are more repugnant to the British public than he is. I check in on the Tory website every few days to see who’s on the menu of hate, and yesterday it was “travellers,” aka gypsies, people who have caravans. Mark Steel of the Indy comments:

Having got through burglars and asylum-seekers, he’s running out and has had to go back to historical groups such as Gypsies, with six weeks still to go. Soon he’ll tell us that decent people are having their lives ruined by hordes of Huguenots. He’ll hold a press conference to say: “I was speaking yesterday to an old-age pensioner who can no longer hear her pet cat crying to come in because of the noise of all the Huguenots in her street speaking Flemish and making cloth. The time has come to say Enough is Enough. If you want to weave - you’ll have to leave’.”

This picture of Blair comes from the Tory website: