Not Like McSame Wanted To Appear Like He Was Taking Dubya's Lead: Latest Shots From "43's" White House Scrapbook

And "W's" next page here.

McCain’s First Stop: An Embrace from Mr. 32% (NYT Editorial Board)
The Warrior King (Digby)
McSame as Bush (Campaign to Defend America -YouTube Video)

(image 1: Jason Reed/Reuters.  White House.  Washington. March 5, 2008.  image 2: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters. image 3: Ron Edmonds/A.P.  Reuters caption: U.S. President George W. Bush (R) welcomes presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), to the White House in Washington Bush. endorsed McCain on Wednesday as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, capping his comeback just months after his campaign had been declared all but dead. Via YahooNews)

Comments

[black dog barking]

The First Whatever's bearing in that last image awkwardly recalls the iconic 60's Keep On Truckin'. Forty years later Truckin' is now Stay The Course; or Surge: Stay The Course, Harder™. Plus ça change, n'est-ce pas?

Of course Bush, being Bush, has kinda got the arm and leg to-and-fro thing all in-combobulated — reminding us of his high school exploits on the athletic field. Glory days.

[MonsieurGonzo]

: “Keep On Truckin'! ” oh, man ~ you had me laffin' 'bout that buried old brain cell memory this mawnin', frère chien noir. Waaaay back when many of we young woofers were doin' the Summer of wuv thing in San Francisco ~ oh, my! all those wonderful, newly libido-liberated via ThePill women {sigh...} We quickly realized that "the Truckin' walk" was how everybody looks, and if properly potted : feels... when they be walkin' down one of The City's steep hills.

Wiki, fwiw, re-directs "Keep on Truckin'!" to Counterculture: ie., the myth persists, it being many times more romantic than the mundane; though the metaphor is the same message : gettin' down.

Were Dubya to be on the level his character gait might be described as Der Stechschritt :

“...Orwell said in his 1940 essay The Lion and the Unicorn : [Goose-Stepping] is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me", like the bully who makes [smirking] faces at his victim... Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.”

[Megan]

Dude. The surprising thing about this is that they found someone even less dominant than Bush.

[Trevor F. Smith]

Ok, that's funny. In the last image it's like GWB is dipping his toe into the water of the White House pool.

[lucy]

Why don't they just hold hands and be done with it?

(I just de-lurked there, so hello! and thankyou for this fascinating site)

[jtfromBC]

re: today's NY city bombing ~

- the mayor and police commissioner stressed that they had no evidence of any *outside terrorist connection*

how many incidents, will preemptive 'W' ponder, before declaring martial law across the nation ?

- now that's a a scary First

[MonsieurGonzo]

ref : “Keep On Truckin' = Stay The Course”, referring to ‘The Mission’ = being the American agenda to Occupy IRAQ, Afghanistan, etc.

You know, in a very weird way (imho) Mr. McCain is uniquely positioned, even moreso than say, TheClintons or Mr. Obama, to invoke a kind of "Only Nixon could go to China" CHANGE of status quo. Of course he dare not speak of "changing course" now, but after becoming the President, it would be one heluva lot easier for a leader with bona fide military cred to state:

“Acting as Commander In Chief, I have today issued the order to re-deploy our armed forces, to better meet the threat of Global Terrorism. To that end, these Brigades here will be re-deployed there... yadda yadda.”

wink-wink, nudge-nudge, re-deploy being a handy euphemism for "withdrawal" (before our military entirely breaks down: our once-proud and professional assault troops i daresay now being dumbed-down to defensive GreenZone bases and convoy supply-line security guards; their Military Patrols being nothing more than unwanted Military Police actions responding to ungrateful participants engaged in TurfWar = tribal feuding domestic disputes).

‘Occupation’ is a damn waste of fine infantry; WAR becomes perpetual whenever it is waged "to achieve Peace". Though Rumsfeld did manage to purge our Officer Corps of many sane intelligentsia, most of them Army general staff, we do appear to have retained A Few Good Men & Women ~ in particular, our Admirals.

Not unlike Stalin's purges, or Hitler's soil-centric lebensraum, Mr. Rumsfeld et al had little understanding, and no vision apparent for the Navy, other than serving as 'mobile bombing platforms' to support the grounded forces, or as supplements afterthought to ground-based air forces ~ so much of our NAVY general staff survived the purge, and the surge, and some of them appear to be sensible.

And Mr. McCain, as well as his father, and grandfather, are Navy. IF he is elected, we can at least cling to this faint hope, despite his hype, that our President McCain can manage to sell the American people the idea that "re-deployment" is reasonable, when in fact it is a rescue.

. . . And in that regard, i will always wonder why Mr. Obama, in response to TheClintons' the RED PHONE IS RINGING political ad, did not respond with the same RED PHONE RINGING ad, but with the obvious counter-message : “ Do you want to wait for your leader to answer the phone, or... [cut to his beautiful black hands in action] ...Do you want your Commander-in-Chief to pick up the frigging phone ~ before the s___ hits the fan ~ and MAKE THE CALL that will STOP A WAR from happening ? ”

[lytom]

"Smiling faces," I wonder what is on their minds?
Scary, I agree...

[black dog barking]

We quickly realized that "the Truckin' walk" was how everybody looks, and if properly potted : feels... when they be walkin' down one of The City's steep hills.

Of course! I've been looking at that image for decades and always felt a faint middle ear discomfort. It was those hills hidden in the warp of time and space, flat if you cocked your head to exactly the right angle.

Regrets, M Gonzo, but IIRC Sen McCain isn't just a proponent of the Surge, he was calling for a Double Surge — sending more additional troops to Iraq than we had available to deploy. Cynics pointed out by setting the number impossibly high he was innoculated from failure. If the Surge didn't work he'd argue it was because it wasn't big enough. Wily (in the straight-talking sense of the word).

[jtfromBC]

bdb,
whatever McCain is, hes not suicidal, i suspect he'd like to have that '100 year old war' and 'bomb bomb Iran' struck from the record, but to save the army he must declare victory in Iraq, re deploy sounds good ~ just look at the terrorists sprouting up in Latin and South America and Africa could be the cry. Gunboat diplomacy is the strongest trump card of empire and McCain will use Americas impressive armada. How effective this might be is unknown, but as Teddy said walk lightly and carry the big stick ~ rather than wildly misusing it like "W"