Having framed houses for a living for several years early in my
professional life, I can say for sure that Dubya holds his hammer like
a pussy and wears his nail apron backwards. Stingray
WashPost Dana Milbank Link
"Does it worry you," NBC's Matt Lauer is asking him at a
construction-site interview in Louisiana, that prosecutors "seem to
have such an interest in Mr. Rove?"
Bush blinks twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more. He starts to answer, but he stops himself.
"I'm
not going to talk about the case," Bush finally says after a
three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial
break.
Only the president's closest friends and family know (if
anybody does) what he's really thinking these days, during Katrina
woes, Iraq violence, conservative anger over Harriet Miers, and legal
trouble for Bush's top political aide and two congressional GOP
leaders. Bush has not been viewed up close; as he took his eighth
post-Katrina trip to the Gulf Coast yesterday, the press corps has
accompanied him only once, because the White House says logistics won't
permit it. Even the interview on the "Today" show was labeled "closed
press."
But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC's
broadcast during Bush's 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he
stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of
blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an
active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady,
he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.
The
fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if
Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was "trying to get a second
chance to make a good first impression," Bush blinked 24 times in his
answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back
funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his
trousers up by the belt.
When the questioning turned to Miers,
Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the
lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling. Laura Bush,
by contrast, delivered only three blinks and stood still through her
entire answer about encouraging volunteerism.
Perhaps the set
itself made Bush uncomfortable. He and his wife stood in casual attire,
wearing tool belts, in front of a wall frame and some Habitat for
Humanity volunteers in hard hats. ABC News noted cheekily of its rival
network's exclusive: "He did allow himself to be shown hammering
purposefully, with a jejune combination of cowboy swagger and yuppie
self-consciousness."
Perhaps, too, the president's body language
said nothing about his true state of mind. But the White House gave
little other information that might shed light on this. A White House
spokesman, Trent Duffy, entered the press cabin on Air Force One to
brief reporters at 1:58 p.m. He left two minutes later, after answering
the only question by saying, "We don't have anything to announce."
[...]
Bush
joked about his state of mind when Lauer asked Laura Bush about the
strain on her husband. "He can barely stand!" the president said,
interrupting. "He's about to drop on the spot." But the first lady had
a calming influence on the presidential wiggles. When Laura Bush spoke
about her husband's "broad shoulders," the president put his arm around
her -- and the swaying and shifting subsided.
The president, now
on more comfortable terrain, delivered a brief homily about "the
decency of others" and "how blessed we are to be an American." Through
the entire passage, he blinked only 12 times.
Did everyone notice how he NEVER answers a question? Lauer asks him why
our citizens have to pay back the rebuilding loan and the Iraqis don't
and he goes off on some tangent about how generous Americans are, blah,
blah, blah (yea, George, we're generous because your government has
decided to write off the poor and needy). He's such a pathetic, foolish
little man. My grandad had a saying (I'm paraphrasing), "I prefer an
evil man to a stupid man." Unlucky for us, George is both.
The
misery this clown and his creatures have brought to our country and the
world is legendary. If Fitzgerald is able to bring them down the
service he will have performed for his country will be of the same
calibre as some of the great patriots in our history. If this long,
hideous nightmare ends and we can go to work restoring our country,
then the lessons learned will serve us well in the future.
The Army's rules on sexual activity is not covered
in General Order No. 1A, but the chain of command instructed
married troops not to fool around, “and if you're not married, just
don't get caught.” The General Order does say that members of the
military can't drink alcohol or possess pornography, “which everyone
does anyhow.”
TAQADDUM,
Iraq - If every male soldier here were having as much sex as he claims,
his female comrades would hardly have time to fight the war. Still, sex happens. And in Iraq, it happens a lot.
It's
hardly a national secret that male and female soldiers have been
mingling for as long as both sexes have been in uniform. And, some
soldiers are wont to point out, some male warriors have been finding
comfort in each others' arms for as long as wars have been fought.
But with limited exceptions in other conflicts, there has
never been a time in which American men and women have served, side by
side and in such numbers, in units engaged in combat. And troops
here appear to be making the best of that situation.
Male and female soldiers in four Iraqi cities were eager to
speak about what goes on when uniforms come off, but as sex at the
front remains such a taboo with commanders, most asked for
confidentiality, noting their careers were at stake. In the plywood hallways lining the spaces between the steel
shipping containers that serve as a dormitory, of sorts, for most of
the enlisted soldiers of the 146th Transportation Company, soldiers
meet and mingle and sometimes find a partner.
It is, they note, only natural for the teens and
20-somethings who make up the majority of U.S. forces in Iraq to do
what civilians of their age back home are doing.
"They can try to keep us apart as much as they want, but they miss the
point," said one female enlisted soldier, a Utahn.
It's about being young and having sex. "And that's what people this age do."
And a
spokesman said the military is not keeping statistics on the number of
women who return home from the battlefield because they become
pregnant. Though, in all commands, soldiers note, the military's
machinery does seem to understand that sex happens within the concrete
walls and razor wire that surround each forward operating base: Base
exchanges sell trashy lingerie, medics hand out condoms and, in some
places, have a supply of pregnancy test kits available.
[...]
By their
sheer numbers, most male soldiers are not regularly having sex, despite
some male braggadocio to the contrary. But testosterone-induced swagger
being what it is, word of others' exploits tends to get around.
Male soldiers figure anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of their
female comrades are accepting of sex while on deployment.
Perhaps
surprisingly, many female soldiers say those guesses are probably
low. "If you include all the girls who are having sex with girls,
it's much closer to every one of us," said one female enlisted soldier
from the 146th. The military still bans homosexual conduct,
but enforcing
that policy in a world where men berth with men and women berth with
women is a practical impossibility.
The same soldier boasts she's made no less than seven of her
comrades "feel a little less at war and a little more at home" since
arriving in Iraq about three months ago. Not everyone is simply trying to bolster morale, though.
"Some
girls here say, if you just flirt with a guy you can get whatever you
want from them," said Sgt. Emily Zike, one of two female soldiers with
the Utah-based 222nd Field Artillery. But such exploits have
consequences for female soldiers who do not make themselves available
for conquest. Zike, one of the senior soldiers in a barracks at Camp
Ramadi
comprising women from other units, says she walks to and from the mess
hall with her hat pulled low over her eyes. "You make eye contact with
them and they'll be all over you,"
says Zike, a resident of Indianapolis. "I try to look as unapproachable
as possible." Zike, who is married, feels fortunate to have
fallen in with the 222nd. "It's unlike any other battalion
I've ever been in," she says. "It's like I inherited 500 big brothers -
I've never seen that many happily married men in my
life." Married
women, on the other hand, are considered "up for grabs" until they
demonstrate otherwise, at which point, many female soldiers bitterly
say, they are considered to be "bitches."
[...] Even
anonymously, female soldiers are reluctant to speak about sexual
harassment. "They won't demote you, because that would be too obvious,
but you can forget about being promoted, or even treated like a human
being, if you make those kinds of waves," said one female soldier in
Mosul. The other choice to being a bitch, writes Operation Iraqi
Freedom veteran Kayla Williams in her recently published memoir, is
"slut." "If you're a woman and a soldier, those are the only two choices you get," Williams writes in Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army.
About 15 percent of the Army is female. "And that whole 15 percent is trying to get past an old joke,"
Williams writes. "''What's the difference between a bitch and a slut?'"
A slut will have sex with anyone. A bitch has sex with anyone but you. "So if
she's nice, friendly, outgoing or chatty - she's a slut. If she's
distant or reserved or professional - she's a bitch," she writes.
But, one female Marine officer stationed in Ramadi notes, this is not a
problem unique to the military. "What a lot of these women don't
understand, because they are
young or inexperienced with sex before they came out here, is that it
is the same back home, too," she says. "Men want a girl to be easy, but
they don't respect a girl who is easy. So whether we're in Iraq, or
Salt Lake City, or New York or wherever, this is our reality.
"You have two choices: You can keep your pants on and be
miserable and be harassed or you can take your pants off and you'll
still get harassed, but you'll be a little less miserable."
Kayla Williams, a former Army sergeant and author
of a new book, talks frankly about an often taboo subject relating to
the American experience in Iraq: sex. As for male soldiers taking an interest in her (she
is unmarried), “I just couldn't believe that guys would hit on me when
I was the dirtiest that I ever was in life.” In her book, she describes
soldiers tossing rocks at her, aiming for her breasts, but she points
out that they “also throw rocks at each other's penises for fun. It was
very strange to see.”