BUSH DANCES AGAIN

Yes, again -- this time in New Orleans. I haven't seen it on YouTube yet, so I think you'll have to go to ABC to watch the clip. Here's a screen shot:



This is in addition to his dances in Liberia in February, in Riyadh in January, on the White House lawn last April, and in Sao Paolo a month before that, not to mention his soft shoe last month before his endorsement of John McCain.

One Drop at Too Sense says the right thing:

...It's not wrong because Bush does the Stiff White Man Dance. Almost all tourists do that dance when they come to New Orleans. It's wrong because it's a slap in the face to New Orleans. Here we have a President who utterly failed in his duties when responding to the aftermath of Katrina (with most of the disaster having been caused not by nature but by the incompetence of the Federal Government); a President who has repeatedly made promises about rebuilding the city, but hasn't done anything; a President whose administration spent more time trying to blame Kathleen Blanco for the lack of military troops in the disaster area than it did actually helping people affected by the crisis.

Bush has failed New Orleans in every way that a leader can fail, and he has the nerve to come here...and dance? Get his White Guy Groove on, as if everything is good? As if nothing happened? HOW...DARE...HE?!?...

I agree, and yet I also find myself disgusted by the dances in the abstract -- or not the dances so much as the emotionally desperate way he steps front and center every time, seemingly begging the camera to follow him as he shakes his groove thing. He's demanding that the world say, "Yes, you're a very engaging and fun-loving man!" As One Drop says, he doesn't care enough to do what needs to be done. Beyond that, he sometimes seems to want to treat the last two years of his presidency as one long Senior Skip Day. But it's more than that: he wants people to love him for it.

(And when he's not dancing, he's cracking jokes at inappropriate occasions.)

And you know what? He'll be like this for the rest of his life. We'll get him out of office at long last, but he's not going to go away. He's going to spend the rest of his life chasing the approval he craves.