The Vacationer

[rodeodance]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/08/18/bush_woes/index.html

> The Vacationer
> By Sidney Blumenthal
> Salon.com
>
> Thursday 18 August 2005
>
> While the president worries about restoring "balance" to his life, Americans are worried by stratospheric gas prices and growing fed up with the war in Iraq.
>
> Now is the summer of our discontent, made lowering winter by this sun of Crawford.
>
> President Bush capers nimbly through his bicycle rides, fishing, brush clearing, attending a Little League baseball game and holding a merry meeting with his adoring and adored Rangers and Pioneers, his largest political contributors. His national security team comes and goes praising the nonexistent Iraqi constitution. He bestows souvenir pens on congressional leaders festively gathered around him, signing an energy bill that provides new loopholes for oil companies awash in windfall profits and drastically scales back measures for conservation as the price of petroleum skyrockets to near-record levels.
>
> Home on the range more than the deer and the antelope play. Near a drainage ditch by the road leading to Prairie Chapel, the president's ranch, the mother of a dead soldier has pitched a tent. Cindy Sheehan has refused to leave until she is granted an audience with the president. Her son, 24-year-old Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, a Humvee mechanic, was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004, and she calls her makeshift vigil in memoriam "Camp Casey." Her previous meeting with Bush has only impelled her to seek the satisfaction of another one. "He wouldn't look at the pictures of Casey," she said. "He didn't even know Casey's name. He came in the room and the very first thing he said is, 'So who are we honoring here?' He didn't even know Casey's name. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to hear anything about Casey. He wouldn't even call him 'him' or 'he.' He called him 'your loved one.' Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject."........