OPINION: "I'll Give Some Speeches, Just to Replenish the Ol' Coffers."

The Guardian:

Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life after the White House to conflict resolution around the world. Presidents George Bush the elder and Bill Clinton have campaigned together on behalf of communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina. So how does President George Bush junior imagine spending his retirement years?

"I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch," he says. He also has big plans for making money. "I'll give some speeches, to replenish the ol' coffers," says Mr Bush, who is already estimated to be worth $20m. "I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75 [thousand dollars a speech], and "Clinton's making a lot of money".

Jerry and Joe Long: Just when you feel impenetrably numb to the delusional ravings of our Punk In Chief, comes a sentence so multilayered in obscenity, so richly textured with arrogance and solipsism as to make Ayn Rand look like Albert Schweitzer.

Let's put aside the coffers of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis now eternally empty. Let's put aside the refugees who left their coffers behind when they fled. Let's put aside the amputees at Walter Reed who can no longer grip their coffers. Let's even put aside that his major domestic initiative centers on denying health care to children whose coffers exceed twice the poverty limit.

No, for any student of the career of George W, the true cause for projectile vomiting can be found in the word "replenish". This is a man who, from buying tropical plants to specializing in dry holes to responsibility-free board appointments to being given his own baseball team, has never done anything to plenish his coffers in the first place.

And... wait for it... he is going to give speeches. Speeches! Charitably, he has had perhaps three thoughts in the past seven years. And he has used them in every lip sucking spittle-encrusted yammer. Smugly flipping through his sentence per page binder, finding it "interesting" that Japan is now an ally and "fully" understanding that war is "tough". Ahh the comatose stares around the Carlyle Goup's banquet hall, as member's struggle not to pass out in their omelets during the brunch speaker's power point presentation "Oceans Don't Protect Us".

LSB: When I read The Guardian story I was dumbfounded. Just like the Longs, I thought I'd heard it all from the numbskull in the White House, but... SURPRISE! The Longs have said what I was thinking - only they have said it so much more brilliantly and without the string of four-letter words I included.