Calvin Trillin - A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme

Contents

IN MEMORY OF ABE TRILLIN,
whose fondness for rhyme and disdain for meter
led him to write such couplets as

Eat your food, gently said Mom to little son Roddy,
If you dont I will break every bone in your body.

INTRODUCTION

Brownie, youre doing a heckuva job! From the moment President George W. Bush uttered that phraseto Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agencywe knew that it would be attached to his presidency forever, in the way The only thing we have to fear is fear itself is attached to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was instantly recognizable as quintessential George W. Bush: the nickname, the Deke-house bonhomie, the blithe disregard for the obvious fact that Michael Brown, perhaps the only federal official more dilatory than the President himself in rising to the challenge of Hurricane Katrina, had demonstrated stunning ineptitude in a job for which he had no qualifications. What tied it all together was heckuva, that preppy-on-the-range locution that conjures up just-folks but doesnt offend the sensibilities of fundamentalist Christians. The heckuva brought back to me warm memories of the Presidents father: during a 1988 campaign visit to a drug rehabilitation center, the elder Bush said to one of the residents, Did you come here and say, The heck with it. I dont need this darn thing? That, to George H. W. Bush, was depraved doper talk.

Yes, I said warm memories of the Presidents father. Ive often said that each presidential administration makes me nostalgic for the administration that preceded it. In this case, though, the family connection extended the nostalgia to two administrations back. These days, I sometimes wonder how I could have made ungenerous comments about that George H. W. Bush White House team I used to think of as a clutch of Protestant gentlemen in suits. I wonder how I could have failed to recognize, say, the intermittently dozing Brent Scowcroft as a man Id someday embrace as an ally. I wonder how I could ever have uttered an unkind word about President George H. W. Busha former Planned Parenthood enthusiast who was always suspected by the Christian Right of not being a true believer, a commander in chief whose idea of a country we could invade without first putting together a serious international alliance was Panama, a statesman who wrote (with my man Scowcroft) that continuing on to Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein in 1991 would have made us an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land, a president who was, blessedly, unafflicted with what he called the vision thing. We now know that having a cockamamie vision thing is not preferable to having no vision thing at all. In nostalgic moods, I find myself clinging to some lines of a poem I wrote when I was feeling most sympathetic to the first President Bush, as he was about to leave the White House:

Farewell to you, George Herbert Walker.
Though never treasured as a talker
Your predicates were always prone
To wander, nounless, off alone
You did your best in your own way,
The way of Greenwich Country Day.
So just relax, and take your ease,
And never order Japanese.

Often, Ive been snapped out of these reveries by some reminder that the man in charge is now the younger Bush, and that he may have inherited little from his father beyond a certain difficulty with the English language. Toward the end of George W. Bushs first term, I realized that Id fallen into his habit of giving people nicknames. I had taken to calling the then national security advisor Mushroom Cloud Rice, a reference to her comment in the propaganda run-up to the Iraq war that we dont want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. Given the number of color-coded terrorism alerts called by the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, Id begun to think of him as Orange John. I can still picture Orange John standing in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, where he had arranged to have the bare breast of the Spirit of Justice statue covered with a drape. In calling an orange alert, he would tell us, at one and the same time, that we were in mortal danger of being attacked and that we should go on about our usual business. I called the vice president Five Deferments Dick or, when I wanted to acknowledge his caregiver role in the White House, Nanny Dick.

In essence, youre doing a heckuva job is what Bush told Five Deferments Dick and the other architects of the Iraq debacle. Mushroom Cloud Rice was promoted to secretary of state. Paul Wolfowitz, who testified before the war that the Iraqis not only would greet us as liberators but also would pay for their own reconstruction, was made president of the World Bank, apparently for the financial acumen that allowed him to miscalculate the cost of the adventure to American taxpayers by only a couple hundred billion dollars. Donald Rumsfeld, whose insistence on invading Iraq with too few troops is now considered a central cause of the troubles that followed, was kept on for a second term, still conducting press conferences as if trying patiently to explain the obvious to a class of slow third graders. (Might you prefer to be briefed by someone less arrogant and condescending? Yes. Do we always get what we want? Of course not.) L. Paul Bremer III, whose dismantling of the Iraqi army made him, in effect, the recruiting sergeant for the insurgency, was given the Medal of Freedom, as was George (Slam Dunk) Tenet. Nanny Dick Cheney was back for a second term, of course, as presumably the only vice president in the history of the republic to come to the defense of wiretapping without a warrant, indefinite imprisonment without the right to see a lawyer, and tortureall in the cause of spreading democracy.

I can imagine the whole flawless crew someday at a heckuva job reunion. Theres the President, circling through the crowd with a pat on the back here and an encouraging word there. Wolfie, you did a heckuva job, he says, and Brems-babes, you did a heckuva job, and Rummy, you did a heckuva job. Finally, the crowd hushes for his remarks, and he says simply, All of us. We all did a heckuva job!

part 1

Speaking of 9/11...

I CANT APPEAR WITHOUT MY NANNY DICK

(George W. Bush Explains the Interview Arrangements He Has Made with the 9/11 Commission)

When called upon to testify,
I said I was a busy guy
So maybe we could do it on the phone.
They really want a face-to-face.
I said, OK, if thats the case,
Im certainly not doing it alone.

I cant appear without my Nanny Dick.
For Nanny Dick Ive got a serious jones.
I cant appear without my Nanny Dick.
I love the way he cocks his head and drones.

Cartoonists show me as a dummy,
With voice by Cheney (or by Rummy).
I am the butt of every late-night satirist.
But I just cant go solitaire.
I need the help thats due an heir.
I need a dad, and Dads a multilateralist.

I cant appear without my Nanny Dick.
He brings along a gravitas I lack.
I cant appear without my Nanny Dick
The one who knows why we attacked Iraq.

Yes, Condi Rice is quite precise
With foreign policy advice
On whos Afghani and whos Pakistani.
I like to have her near in case