Maureen Dowd: President Bush Needs a Spanking

Here's a snip from Maureen Dowd's "Junior Needs a Spanking" (funny, Martha Stewart said the same thing on her show several months ago after the elder "Poppy" Bush said he had never spanked his son, which prompted Martha to say, "Perhaps he should have" to much audience applause):

The Old King put the Boy King over his knee yesterday and gave him a good thwack with a lobster-shaped paddle.

O.K., that didn't happen, but don't you wish it had?

Junior certainly deserves it, with recent attempts to blame his dad for policies that led to 9/11 and the rise of Osama and Middle East terrorism.

As with so many things about this byzantine, Shakespearean relationship between father and son, reunited here at last for a wedding, a christening and a funeral this weekend, it's an ironic turn of events.

The son was furious when the father was painted as a wimp in the 1988 campaign, and now he and his spinners are painting 41 as a weak leader. W.'s pain at what happened to his aristocratic dad with "the wimp factor" led him to overreact in the other direction when he became president, embracing a West Texas-tough, muscle-bound foreign policy that shunned diplomacy, nuance, compromise, multilateral treaties and allied coalitions as measures that reflected impotence.

And now it has led him to scapegoat his own father, and Bill Clinton, for sending signals of weakness that encouraged the terrorists — even as many Middle East experts say it is W.'s culturally obtuse, diplomatically averse and morally simplistic style that has spurred terrorism and made the world more dangerous.

The Bush spokesman Tony Snow recently told reporters that "when the United States walked away, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn't stay the course, and that led to September 11th."

Afterwards, questioned by furious Bush I foreign policy types, Bush II officials tried to claim that Mr. Snow was talking about President Clinton running away from Somalia, but clearly the spokesman was referring, as he originally confirmed, to the truncated end of Desert Storm.

In Crawford recently, the president also criticized previous administrations for policies that indicated that "stability is more important than form of government."

Translation: Dad cuddled up to the corrupt Saudi monarchy and other Middle East dictators and let Saddam stay in power and was tough on Israel. I got rid of Saddam to establish a democracy and uncritically sided with Israel, a democracy.

Of course, now W. has now been reduced to pleading with dictatorial Mideast leaders to help him quell the violence engulfing Iraq and Lebanon, and with the military dictator Musharraf to help him capture Al Qaeda members.

Someone noted yesterday - not sure whom - that Bill Clinton has actually paid more visits to the Bush Kennebunkport retreat than Dubya has.

Considering what a complete and huge ass "don't clutter my beautiful mind with thoughts of war-dead body bags" Barbara Bush has been, I question the former President Clinton's taste in companionship.

At least Monica Lewinsky used her mouth for better purposes. ::cough::cough::