George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy (Village Voice)

[cthrumatrix]

George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy
by Erik Baard
September 28th, 2004 10:10 AM

George W. Bush is a fake cowboy. From media accounts, you'd reckon that the president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with $300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo, saying that he'll "ride herd" over ornery Middle Eastern governments and "smoke out" enemies in wild mountain passes. He branded Saddam Hussein's Iraq "an outlaw regime" and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' " Britain's liberal newspaper The Guardian noted that "such language feeds the image overseas of Mr. Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy cowboy."

But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a "cowboy" foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America's prime ennobling myths. Instead of ridiculing the myth exploited by George W. Bush, they may want to measure him against it.

"The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the chivalric knight," observes Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist in cowboy country. "The only serious difference is that your status doesn't depend on your social class." Editor of Arthuriana, the journal of Arthurian studies, Wheeler teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"Our president," she says, "is neither a knight nor a cowboy. He doesn't believe in taking care of the little guy, nor does he have the restraint or dignity of the cowboy."

snip

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0439/baard.php

[zoeb]

1. I heard he was afraid of horses...

or maybe it was bikes...:shrug:

[rniel]

4. or maybe it was pretzels...

:)

[VOX]

2. Good read, and very on the mark!

Thanks for posting, cthrumatrix!

:toast:

[izzie]

3. I loved Gene Autry as a kid

My father had a Friend in the record business and he would give me all the old large ad posters. Well I one day pasted them all up on my nice hard wood doors. I can still hear my father yelling at me about that. They came down but I keep them around for years. Now he was a real cowboy. Even Roy Rogers was not a real cowboy. Now that date me?

[wildflower]

5. In essence, he does not "speak softly and carry a big stick." n/t

[Vickers]

6. Excellent article!

Really deconstructs Georgie quite well.

:kick:

[nostalgicaboutmyfutr]

7. Find me a picture

of * on a horse.....he IS a cowboy, right?

[greekspeak]

8. He thinks he is Marshall Dillon

and instead he is the stable boy who cleans the shit up after Marshall Dillon's horse, and then tells all his freinds he is in charge of everything west of the Pecos.

Yippie Ki Yeah, Georgie...or, Yippie Ki "ayuh" as they might say in NEW ENGLAND where Georgie is from.

Aren't delusions of grandeur fun? I think Yosemite Sam is a bigger rootin tootin hombre.

[sweetheart]

9. Well, i guess a pig fucker is sorta a cowboy.. no?

And there bush is again, crawling around on his knees with leather
straps around their naked peckers. It seems, that pig fucking
has really taken off since he moved to texas. Nobody can deny
that pig fucking is the rage, as republicans the word over wear
their special gear... bush/cheney '04 -> THE WORLD's PIG FUCKERS!

Bush riding out on his big masculine pig, with his dick sticking
up like a saddle, waiting his favorite pleasure. Suddenly a
female pig is let in to the pen. Laura bush looks on with glee as
her man is about to make another republican baby. Bush rides out
as the manly man... and suddenly, he leaps on the back of the
female pig... and finally 2 hours later, the secret service pull him
off a dead female pig wallowing in the mud... "OH what a great
PIG FUCKER!" The world is deeply moved, that the president,
fucked a pig to death... what a hero. We're all deeply moved.

WHAT A COWBOY.