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He must be joking Funny Is As Funny DoesBy Rick Horowitz
So who says our president doesn't have a sense of humor? There he was just the other day, with the aftermath of Katrina still so awful for so many people, and with anger rising over the speed and the skill of the government's response, in Washington and elsewhere. The atmosphere -- not to mention the water -- was turning uglier by the hour. More desperate, less forgiving. It was left to George W. Bush, 43rd president of these United States, to lighten the mood. He said he'd look into it. Personally. No, really! He was sitting there in the Cabinet room, surrounded by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and the rest of his crack team of disaster advisers, when he must have decided that what he hadn't provided in manpower, he'd provide in mirth. "What I intend to do," the president announced, "is lead, uh, uh, to lead a...investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong." Now, doesn't that bring a smile to your lips? (I ran the video over and over again, by the way, just to be sure I got every pause and every syllable correct.) Can't you feel your mood improving already? George Bush, Detail Man -- except, perhaps, when it comes to remembering words like "investigation" -- says he'll take charge of examining the thousands and thousands of details that went into taking a horrible situation and somehow making it even worse. You're still chuckling -- I can tell. And I'm sure that's exactly the reaction the president was after, not from you so much as from all those thousands and thousands of disaster victims. I mean, with their homes destroyed, their lives uprooted, their families scattered to the winds, couldn't they use a great big laugh right about now? After all, there's only so long you can snicker at the upbeat reports from Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security. There's only so long you can giggle at the utter incompetence of Michael Brown, the director of FEMA -- which apparently stands for the Federal Except-When-It's-a-Really-Bad-Emergency Management Agency. These guys aren't exactly laugh riots, right? So there was George Bush stepping into the breach. After all, the very idea that the president, whose own actions (or lack of them) may have contributed to the mess, and whose top appointees' actions (or lack of them) certainly did -- well, he must have known that even suggesting an investigation of the president, by the president, for the president, would be just the thing to break the tension. What a kidder! But wait -- there's more! Because our president understood the gravity of the situation, he obviously decided that just one funny line, no matter how hysterical it was, might not be enough. So he turned it up a notch. There was the one about how soon he expects to get to the bottom of things: "over time," he said. There was that old favorite about certain people wanting to play the "blame game." (That one always cracks me up.) And then, just when you thought he couldn't possibly get any funnier, George Bush reached way down and somehow managed to top himself. "We're problem solvers," he said. What a thigh-slapper. Talk about knowing your audience. If you listened hard enough, you could practically hear them falling over with laughter -- on Canal Street, in the Ninth Ward. All over New Orleans. You could hear all those small and solitary voices, convulsed with hilarity, turning into one great big voice. "Stop it!" they screamed. "You're killing me!" Posted 9/8/05. For
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Rick Horowitz
