[NYTr] Leaving the White House: 386 days to go (and counting) - Countdown Calendar

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The best-selling Countdown Calendar is here:

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The Independent - Dec 31, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3295869.ece

Leaving the White House: 386 days to go (and counting)

Those looking forward to George Bush's last day in office can cheer
themselves up with a calendar that helpfully counts down to the day of
departure. It has become a best-seller, part of an industry dedicated
to marking the historic date 

By Rupert Cornwell 

For the millions of Americans who are ticking off the days until
deliverance, it is the perfect present – a 2008 calendar countdown
until George Bush leaves the White House, its every page adorned with a
quote from the President who has mangled not only the country's image,
but also the English language, as no other in the history of the
Republic.

Novelty calendars are always a staple of the holiday season, but this
one is a best-seller. The Bush Out of Office Countdown, it is called,
January 2008 Through the Bitter End. Priced at $11.99 (£6) it includes
some of the verbal gems that have adorned the past seven years.
"They're edgy and a way to mark the days, so it's a perfect tie-in," a
spokesman for the distributors Calendars. com says. "The intensity of
dislike [for Bush] is driving these sales."

Predictably in the land of the free its not just calendar makers
cashing in on Bush jnr's unpopularity. Digital counters, ribbons and
obviously badges complete your countdown options.

Indeed, no other president has been subjected to such treatment – but
then almost none as been as unpopular for so long. Not Ronald Reagan,
not Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton, nor even George Bush Snr, whose
verbal idiosyncracies were celebrated in their time. But where the
father specialised in dotty malapropisms (and was not unloved for it),
the son goes for ungrammatical gobbledygook.

"You've also got to measure in order to begin to effect change that's
just more – when there's more than talk, there's just actual – a
paradigm shift," he opined for instance in 2003. Go figure. But it'll
cheer you up as you turn the page to Tuesday, 1 July 2008 (just 203
days to go).

At another moment, he excoriates terrorists who strike "at the whim of
a hat". At yet another, he promises his country a "foreign-handed
foreign policy. Or, when he was discussing the difficulty of being
commander-in-chief, "Make no mistake about it, I under stand how tough
it is, I talk to families who die."

But, just occasionally, there comes an unintended little nugget of the
truth. "You know," he told the CBS interviewer Katie Couric, "one of
the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."
Did he ever wonder why?

However, the last entry for the slightly stretched 2008 diary – for
Tuesday, 20 January 2009 when his successor will be inaugurated –
perhaps best sums up the preceding eight years of incoherence. Thus the
43rd President of the United States at a 2004 campaign event in Oregon:
"I hope you leave here and walk out and say, 'What did he say?'"

For the compilers of these calendars, finding sufficient content was
never a challenge. More difficult, surely, was choosing which of
President Bush's multiple manglings stood out above the rest. Couldn't
they, for instance, have found room for the following, uttered during a
trip to Indiana in November about the hazards of heeding pollsters on
Iraq: "If you've got somebody in harm's way, you want the President
being – making advice, not – be given advice by the military."

And, a few weeks earlier, he said this at his ranch in Texas: "I don't
particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the
way, unless I say it." Other people's words in his mouth might often
have come out better, but never mind.

Eventually, 21 January 2008 will arrive and the Bush haters will be
made bereft of the calendars that will have pepped up their spirits
each morning for nearly 13 months and of their favourite target for
bile and ridicule. The "Impeach Bush" signs and decals will have to
come off their window panes and be peeled off their car bumpers.

And no longer will they have the bitter joy of watching their leader
stand at the podium outside the White House and pronounce "nuclear" in
a way that only he knows how. (Isn't there a speech coach somewhere who
could have taught him the correct way to say it?)

It is just possible that some folks out there – the political comics
for certain – might actually miss the guy.