Wasn't there a Question You Wanted to Ask...?

Over on Smirking Chimp, you can read a delightfully wretched little puff piece on GW Bush the Cowboy President--a fucking juvenile and retarded moniker, but hey, retards name themselves all sorts of fucked-up things.

Anyhow, the part that caught my eye was this section:

The Bushes bought Prairie Chapel Ranch from the Engelbrecht family for a reported $1.3 million in 1999, shortly after earning a $14-million profit from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise and a year before George Bush's first run for president.

He and Mrs. Bush immediately began transforming it into their Texas home, building a 4,000-square-foot, limestone-walled, passive-solar living quarters; adding an 11-acre pond stocked with bass and other fish; and planting native grasses, flowers, and a tree farm that might go commercial after Bush leaves Washington.

Bush prefers bicycles to horses and never claimed to be a cattleman. He has described himself as a "windshield rancher" who likes to escort such visitors as Russian President Vladimir Putin around his property in a pickup.

He once told a visiting journalist he had become an avid amateur arborist."I am," he said. "Tree man."

Now, is it just me, or did Bush not score a point (perhaps his only point) during the debates with Kerry when he responded to the very TRUE and wholly ACCURATE assertion that he and Cheney and their slimy friends had taken tax breaks as small business owners even while claiming multi-million dollar incomes? When his opponent leveled the accusation that Bush the millionaire claimed a small business credit for his stake in a lumber company, what did Bush say again? Oh, yeah: he said, "News to me! I don't own a lumber company...first I've heard about it. Want some wood?" At which point the audience laughed, the point was lost, and Bush went back to being a drooling moron.

Naturally, Bush's tax return is available to every person with a computer in the world; all you have to do is look it up on Google and you will see that, in fact, Bush did take a small business deduction for a lumber company. No one has any excuse for missing that little nugget. And, in fact, Kerry's people did a bright and potentially effective thing when they included that statement of fact in his remarks for the debate against the Working Man's Millionaire. But Kerry got ridiculed and had his truthfulness cast into doubt, while Chimpy got away with being a clown who doesn't even know what's in his tax return. As we might ask of all the President's pronouncements, "Is he the commander-in-chief, or not, goddammit?!"

And today, lo and behold, come to find out that people at the LA Times are perfectly aware of the lumber interests of the Bush family and the man himself has aspirations of being in the timber business. I suppose it's too much to ask that a reporter (whose job, last I looked, was to verify information for the public) would think back in time a whole fucking ten months and recall Bush's amazement that anybody would even imagine him being interested in trees or lumber, and that the same reporter would point out the obvious lie.

Nope. In America, a good one-liner beats the truth every time.