Bush The Slacker and Reality-Testing for the MSM

 
The Washington Post is on it, making sure you know how lazy this President is. So how lazy is he? Get this: he surpasses that other do-nothing Republican, Ronald Reagan in amount of time spent on “vacation” in Crawford.

These sojourns to Texas burn the Democrats. Every August they complain about his move to Crawford. This time they claim he’s just trying to avoid the Rove scandal —that Deomocratic trumped-up, in-your-dreams “scandal.” Can’t blame a disorganized and demoralized party for clutching at straws.

But you sure can point the finger at their MSM camp followers. Here’s the WaPo’s snarky take on things —

President Bush is getting the kind of break most Americans can only dream of -- nearly five weeks away from the office, loaded with vacation time.

Sure he is. During this down time he will visit seven states, sign legislation and host a state visit by the President of Colombia. And, of course he’ll be trailed by his Secretary of State and by Donald Rumsfeld, not to mention the staff migration that accompanies him or the teleconferences with Washington.

Some dream vacation. Sounds like he gets weekends off for good behavior. Nonetheless, he’s just a shiftless sort:

The president departed Tuesday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a stretch of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. By historical standards, it is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.

The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.

Here’s another way to consider this bit of "news." Where did our last President have to go? He was a government employee his whole professional life, living in government housing in Arkansas for the years previous to his election to the White House. What was he going to do, go visit his Momma’s house? Drop in on the in-laws? Mr. Clinton simply didn’t have a homeplace to go to when he wasn’t at the White House. But government work being as lucrative as it is, now both the Clinton’s can afford their own homes. Planning ahead, Mrs. Clinton parked them in New York before buying her own mansion closer to the seat of power.

Now when Hillary is in the White House it will be a short commute home for vacations, won’t it?

And another thing. Do you think the MSM gets the fact that they deepen their already precipitous slide to irrelevancy when they print trash like this? In his series on PC and Reality Testing, Shrinkwrapped quotes a New York Times book review by Richard Posner:

The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages will remain, much more comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in particular than the current elderly are.

Isn't it amazing how an intelligent person can read the writing on the wall and not be able to translate it into self-preservation?