Today, July 6, is George II’s 64th birthday. His mission accomplished, he no longer has to pretend to be a cowboy, and so has relocated from his Potemkin ranch in Crawford to a sumptuous home in Dallas, selected by wife Laura. “The Lump” runs things now, payback for the eight years she suffered in the 
White House, paralyzed by drink and narcotics, while George set about running down the world.
There runs through the life of George II a consistent thread of inflicting pain on other living creatures. While still a child, he delighted in stuffing frogs with firecrackers, and blowing them up. In college, he branded people, shrugging it off as “only a cigarette burn.” Serving as Governor of Texas, he publicly mocked a woman whom a week later he would put to death.
The presidency presents many oppor-tunities to inflict pain, and George II took full advantage of them. Informed by his CIA director, George Tenet, that War on Terra prisoner Abu Zubaydah was grievously mentally ill, of no intelligence value whatsoever, George II ordered that he be tortured.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a waterboard, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
It was after reading this that I decided that henceforth, whenever George II made an appearance anywhere, instead of being greeted with the traditional “Hail To The Chief,” he should instead be confronted with The Doors’ “The End.”
the killer awoke before dawn
he put his boots on
he took a face from the ancient gallery
and he walked on down the hall
So we’ll play “The End” for ol’ George, here on his birthday. In two parts, because that’s the way they do it on YouTube.
I’m pretty sure George II never saw Apocalypse Now. If he did, he surely didn’t get it. After accomplishing his mission, Willard, presented with the chance to reign as did Kurtz, continue the carnage, embrace the horror, lays down his weapon—causing all of Kurtz’ people to lay down theirs—takes American youth by the hand, gets back on the boat, and goes quietly home, calling in airstrikes on nobody.
George II chose a different path. He became Kurtz cubed.
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