The perfect excuse

TIME was when boys turning up late for school would blame it on something called a traffic jam. On the evening of Monday, June 12, President Bush told his advisers that he was going to bed and slipped out to Iraq. The hoi polloi might wonder why the most powerful man in what the Americans see as a unipolar would at all need an excuse to slip off from a meeting with his own advisers and visit Baghdad, considering that the Bush administration occupied Iraq under the pretext of preempting the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which did not exist! However, the Bush visit has given an opportunity for this weekend’s BBC News online quiz to pose the question as to what excuse Bush had made when he slipped out of the Monday evening White House meeting. The other two options given in the quiz were that he had said he wanted to go biking or that he had to visit a book club with wife Laura. It’s not too difficult to get the right option. Despite what has been said by the likes of Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore in his book Stupid White Men And Other Excuses for the Sorry State of the Nation, not even Bush would bike in the dark. And the President who prefers watching ESPN Sports is not exactly the kind to spend his evenings at a book club, with or without his better half who used to be a librarian!
Some might say that 7.45 pm is a bit too early for Bush to be going to bed, considering that the unilateral decision to occupy Iraq with a little bit of help from friends like Blair has given sleepless nights to many, not just in the US but Iraq! However, even Bush’s worst critics cannot accuse him of pulling a fast one, at least on this occasion. All he said was that he was going to bed. He did not specify that he was going to bed either in the White House or on Air Force One or Baghdad. Maybe Karl Rove, whom authors James Moore and Wayne Slater profiled in a book titled Bush’s Brain, also thought up the latest excuse to go to Iraq!


-- The Economic Times Editorial