The Bush Administration jumped so many sharks this week it should change its name to Knievel. First, Scott McClellan—the most docile of the press secretaries, the roundfaced, bullied mouthpiece who repeated himself like the broken Vista guy in the Mac ads when the real world Jack Donaghys finally lifted their moratorium on journalism—hit ‘em up with the publication of a book that, as Frank Rich points out, covers a lot of familiar territory, but still fingers W’s henchmen for some nasty business. Alas, when a useful idiot ceases to be useful, he still makes a sound.

Then, Condi Rice swung through Scandinavia to the tune of headlines like “Condeleezza Rice enlists in KISS Army Fan Club” and “Rice rejects Iceland’s criticism of Guantanamo Bay.” I’m not one for stuffy notions of the dignity of the office, and I give Rice credit for kicking it with all our NATO allies, and not just the big guns, but there’s something sad about having to take the Guantanamo fight to Reykjavik when you already got clowned domestically by Harold and Kumar. It feels a little like Ted Haggard’s latest proclamation of heterosexuality. At least she got a photo-op with the dude who called Islam “a vile culture.”

But Bjork’s countryfolk weren’t the only island-dwellers to give W’s operation the shaft this week: today, Australia announced it was cutting and running from Iraq, mate. The contraction of our foreign coalition matches the contraction of W’s coalition in Congress: W and his would-be successor can’t even strong arm enough of their fellow elephants into opposing the new G-I bill to make it subject to a veto.

With Karl Rove defending his myopic strategery and dogging McLellan from his Fox News perch and Ari Fleischer, whose credibility is beyond reproach, coming out of his Arli$$ retirement to suggest that McClellan’s accusations actually came from a Random House editor, one wonders, where is attack dog #1, the the gun-waving, terrorism-fighting, smirking, steaming #2 known as Dick Cheney. It used to be, when things got hot, Dick got on camera. Where’s our “last throes,” Dick? Where’s a smirk and a McCarthyite attack on your opponents’ patriotism? Shark got your tongue? Sometimes a stunt gets the better of even a dude who’s earned the title “Evil.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Crazy People, This Week in the Bush Administration, The Mighty Have Fallen, Corruption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.