The REAL Evil Genius

Ladies and gentlemen, we have been wrong from the very beginning. George W. Bush is proving himself to be, not the dumbest, but the smartest President our country has ever had. But as Maxwell Smart used to say, "If only he had used his powers for niceness, instead of evil ..."

While Karl Rove is a very shrewd political mastermind who has guided Dubya to victories over Ann Richards (who, at the time she lost, had the highest popularity rating of any governor in Texas history), Al Gore (by orchestrating the hostile takeover of the Florida vote count) and John Kerry (who, let's be totally honest here, imploded under pressure), Dubya turns out to be the brains of the Dubya Administration after all.

(And make no mistake. Dubya IS evil. But that's only my opinion. Let's get back to the hard facts.)

It was Dubya who nurtured his own image as a stumbling, bumbling country fool to disarm his enemies. (Does anyone really think that a Yale-educated man whose father was a career diplomat before becoming President, is honestly incapable of pronouncing the word "nuclear"?)

It was Dubya (with the help of "Dead-Eye Dick" Cheney, who really is evil -- who else could shoot somebody and have the VICTIM apologizing to the shooter?) who entered his first presidential term knowing that he would invade Iraq, and simply needed an excuse to do so. Al-Qaeda provided him with that excuse. The Taliban in Afghanistan rolled over so quickly (suspiciously so, in fact) that America's bloodlust was not sated.

So, when Dubya set the table for his attack on Iraq, We The People were only too eager to create the justification for him: Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Dubya NEVER said this publicly. Nobody in his administration said it publicly. WE (meaning a majority of polled Americans) convinced ourselves of it, and Dubya did nothing to correct our misinterpretation.

It was Dubya who, once elected for his first term, surrounded himself with all of his dad's minions and sycophants from 41's administration. But -- and this was overlooked at the time -- he froze his dad out of the administration. Now, before he was Reagan's vice-president, George H.W. Bush was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was arguably the most powerful man in the world. Certainly the elder Bush knew more about the state of the world, and what was going on in it, than anyone else did.

When Dubya was elected, he was smart enough to let in all of his dad's influential friends, but kept out the one man with the knowledge to discourage Dubya from doing what he wanted to do all along. Why?

Because the elder Bush would NEVER have kissed Dubya's ass. He would only have interfered in Dubya's plans. And Dubya was smart enough to recognize this, and banish his father to live out his days hosting hurricane-relief fundraisers and sitting in "Diamond Club" seats behind home plate at Astros games.

And now ... it is Dubya, we find out, who approved the declassification and leaking of sensitive intelligence information that indirectly led to the "outing" of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the media, in order to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (an ambassador, it bears mentioning, appointed to the post by ... George H.W. Bush). This is the revelation that caused me to realize just how clever Dubya really is.

Comparison has been made of Dubya's activities to those crimes authorized by the Nixon Administration (including having former Nixon staffer John Dean go to Capitol Hill and essentially say, "What Dubya is doing is MUCH worse than what Nixon did, and we kicked Nixon out of office"). But there is one significant difference between what Tricky Dick did and what King George has been doing.

Nixon broke the law. There's no proof that Dubya has done so.

What Dubya HAS done is exploit every single loophole in the system of "executive orders" that the president is authorized to make, and to further exploit his "war powers" (during a war with no clearly-identified enemy, in no specific location, and of no certain duration -- in other words, a "war" against somebody, somewhere, indefinitely) to get things done that no previous tenant of the White House would have ever had the balls to attempt. Dubya has committed all sorts of reprehensible, manipulative, dishonest, and (again, just my opinion) evil acts during his six years in Washington.

But by all appearances, and until the Conservative Media (I have previously debunked the notion of a "Liberal Media" in only three paragraphs) chooses to dig something up, DUBYA HAS DONE NOTHING ILLEGAL ... or at least, nothing "illegal" in a literal, by-the-book sense. There is no proof that he has violated the letter of ANY law (although he has laid waste to the spirit of hundreds of them). And there is almost no question that, if someone can prove illegal activity, Dubya has laid the foundation for somebody else (probably a low-level staffer) to go to jail.

That, folks, takes brilliance.

And even if "Evil Puppeteer Rove" is orchestrating everything, Dubya is smart enough to follow through and make them look like his decisions (which takes the heat off Rove and transfers it onto someone who, thanks to his own executive orders, is nearly above the law).

George W. Bush is actually pretty smart. Who knew? (And is he smart enough to keep us from trading "nucular" warheads with Iran?)