Our fearless leader is once again going on vacation. He is going to go home to his "ranch" and do to brush what the Israelis are doing to the Lebanese. The WaPo has the
story right here. According to the White House, and former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, it's all about the "image". Too bad these people have no clue that a President needs more substance than "image". But I guess with Bush, you take what you can get, which seems to be lots of image and no substance.
The story has the various people commenting on the President's vacation schedule as if the things that interfered with it last year occurred for the simple purpose of making him look bad.
Bush's scheduled week and a half in Texas is a far cry from last year's working vacation, which was shaping up as the longest presidential retreat in more than three decades before it was rudely cut short by Hurricane Katrina after nearly a month.
The next two paragraphs deal entirely with image, not with what Bush, or anyone, actually did about the situation.
The image of Bush on an extended stay away from the White House while Katrina flattened much of the Gulf Coast and left New Orleans engulfed by floodwater proved to be a defining moment of his presidency.
The image of a president who critics say is aloof from details and too eager to delegate was only driven home when he ordered Air Force One to fly low over the stricken region so he could get a bird's-eye view of the destruction as he returned to Washington.
And apparently, the Bush vacations are hard on the staff, since they were too tired to notice that there was a huge hurricane heading for the Gulf Coast, and since it was all over the news, the internet, and there is a channel totally devoted to weather that gave updates on a regular basis on the track and severity of the storm, they must have been unconscious for a week before Katrina hit.
"The impact of Katrina was profound," said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. "It caught a tired White House staff off guard and turned out to be one of the most damaging events of his presidency."
Ah, but this year's vacation is going to be different..sort of. He is still going to go cut brush in Crawford, but only for about ten days. It seems that the Middle East being in a homicidal uproar is cramping his style, or at least making it look bad that he is going on vacation.
This year, with the crisis in the Middle East at a fever pitch, the carnage in Iraq continuing and even the first hurricane of the year brewing in the Caribbean, the president's schedulers left less room for this year's vacation to cause such political damage.
Oh, and would someone tell me what this means?? I was baffled..
White House press secretary Tony Snow said that "while everybody recognizes what happened with Katrina" the president's vacation schedule this year is "driven by sheer necessity."
Is he saying that Bush messed up, or that Katrina came ashore when Bush was scheduled to not be paying attention, along with most of his staff????
He is going to be out of town for most of the month of August, but since he will also be fundraising and giving speeches in support of his policies, it's hard work, not vacation. He has plans to stay at Camp David for several long weekends, and Kennebunkport with Labor Day weekend back in Texas. So for his vacation, he will be using tons of jet fuel, at our expense, while doing little or nothing to get anything done as far as the urgent matters of the country and the world are concerned. And as a final touch, I love this explanation of Bush's "shorter" and "work"-scheduled vacation..
"The president certainly took some hits for being so relentlessly on vacation during Katrina," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist. "One reason to break up the time away is to signal that there is some activity going on there."
All about image..the whole administration thinks life is all about image. Guess what, guys, the country is waking up and looking for the substance behind the image. And they will not accept the spin version of how hard the president works when on vacation. The WH staff needs to understand that image is useless, what counts are results, and they aren't coming up with any. So they may as well go on vacation, they are as much use working as not.