The constable missed fourteen weeks of work.

Less vacation time than gwb has taken!

"First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." Mahatma Gandhi

It would be so cool if all of us who feel run over by george's reckless steering would take 14 weeks off.  Sort of a sympathy strike.

Always fantasizing....

::sings a few bars of "How Long Has This Been Going On?::

Just another example of President Bush losing his balance. There have been sporadic comments about his drinking perhaps being behind all the cuts and abrasions he's suffered, but I'm beginning to think that all this links to two other well-documented phenomena:

1) The extraordinary amount of time he spends in seclusion on his Texas Ranch

                     and

2) The bewildering number of times he has appeared out of the loop, the last being the beginning of the Dubai Ports controversy.

What if - and this is entirely speculative with NO hard evidence to back it up - Bush has become so unreliable at times the government has learned to bypass him and function without him.

He retreats into seclusion at his Texas ranch precisely because no one can see him imbibe and the consequences of his drinking remain hidden.

Wouldn't this additionally explain why Vice-President Cheney has so much power? There's no one there to restrain him. Indeed, his office may be the only functioning on at the top of the Executive  (God help us).

Bush has so bizarrely appeared to be out of synch with major events that perhaps we're all missing this most simple explanation: he's often too drunk to be briefed, much less consulted.

Is it too much to expect of our president the ability be able to ride a bike, form simple sentences or chew and swallow a pretzel? We're really not setting the bar too high are we? And for this we're called elitists. BTW - He hasn't had any scrapes on his face lately, has he? He gets a few of those now and then. What's up with that?

You mean like this?

Visit Hoot At the Dark.

Bush is less dangerous riding a bike or brush cutting. He remains unaware even to Cheney's cabal -  first reported in the Financial Times of London, before being picked up over here. I diaried on the Cheney hijacking of the government apparatus over at Dkos on 10.20.05 when Wilkerson first went public in the FT article. MSM was very late to the table.

The more danger is Cheney with or without his 28-gauge shotgun.

Every American of all stripes should go read Sidney Blumenthal's article in Salon on 'Cheney's Coup' Take the Free Site Pass.

And, Clemons' critique that 'Bush's "Unitary Executive" Notion Must be Obliterated'. In part, he draws on Blumenthal.

Excerpt from  'Bush's Unitary Executive Notion Must be Obliterated'

Cheney's team have been the architects of both a kind of Presidency that is exactly what the Roman "dictatorships" were defined as -- a temporary provision of unchecked executive power to a ruler -- as well as the mercurial rise in power of the Office of the Vice President. And Cheney's team is the scary sort of lot that is hell-bent on establishing a kind of permanence to their power that threatens in very, very real terms the genuineness of our democracy.

[..] This power grab should dominate our media and our civic discourse. Our President -- via a deranged, anti-democratic team of power-obsessed thugs in Vice President Cheney's office -- is engaged in a clear assault on the core architectural joists of American democracy.

Also in Clemons post he notes Cheney's new Chief of Staff, "David Addington, Rasputin's Rasputin, needs to be outed, vilified, and removed from power."

emphasis mine

Senator Harry Reid, in early November '05, is reported in TNR's The Plankas saying "Nothing happens regarding intelligence gathering..unless it's signed off on by the Vice President." When asked if he meant to state so flatly, he didn't pause a beat. "Yes. I say that without any qualification...Circle it"
What's the larger implication? Plame anyone?  and Scooter's claim, 'my superiors made me do it'.

Laura Rozen cites the Steve Clemons critique and dubs this situation a cancer on this presidency.
 At the very least, the constable will recover. Not so sure about our Republic.

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"

As good a metaphor for how Bush has handled Mid-East foreign policy as any (actually maybe all executive decisions): too fast, out of control, wreck happens when he tries to more than one thing at once, and ends up wiping out whatever stability already existed.

Come to think of it, this is pretty much his track record for his whole "professional" life.  The CEO President! We just didn't realize his model of corporate excellence was Enron.

It was "about 1800 hours on Wednesday, 6 July, 2005" that a detachment of Strathclyde police constables, in "Level 2 public order dress [anti-riot gear]," formed a protective line at the gate at the hotel's rear entrance, in case demonstrators penetrated the biggest-ever security operation on Scottish soil.

I can never get enough of hearing about "the bubble".  Level 2 public order dress, awesome.  Next time I have a party, I'll put that on as the dress code.

Man, if a protestor skidded out and smashed into a riot line, they'd probably assume he was carrying a bomb and shoot him...

(Sorry about the subject line, I watch a lot of Dora the Explorer these days!)