Extracting blackmail

Bush was in Montana today, campaigning for firefighter-hater and general schmuck Conrad Burns in another of his Just-Say-No, Hey-Did-You-Hear-About-The-Time-I-Went-To-Graceland-With-The-Japanese-Prime-Minister rallies. He’s confining his campaigning entirely to traditionally Republican states, and I’m not sure how much of that is the Republicans being on the defensive, and how much is Bush’s unwillingness to look like a lame duck by campaigning for a lot of people who then lose.

He began, “It’s good to be in a part of the world where the cowboy hats outnumber the ties.” I had been planning to mention the fact that when he goes from the White House to Air Force One, his traveling attire is always formal...


(God, I can’t even look at him anymore) ...but he arrives at the rallies in his brush-clearing clothes (the hat is borrowed).



Increasingly, his bad grammar is grating on my nerves. “You see, we not only got great assets in our military, we got a fantastic asset in the power of liberty.”

He painted a dark picture of what would happen if we withdrew from Iraq: “I want you to envision a world in which extremists battle for power, in which moderate governments have been toppled, in which these radicals are then capable of using oil to extract blackmail from the West.”

Are you doing it? Are you envisioning radicals using oil to extract blackmail from the West?