February 26, 2006 |  Print | Send


Many years ago, back in 2001, on a moist Spring night, there sat an innocent young president mere months into his term, future glories stretching out before him like a trail of golden snails. He would be the bestest president ever, he told himself. He would find the right people to govern and the right allies to support, and the future would take care of itself and it's friends, one of whom was surely George W Bush - the man, the legend, the man.

On that night - and it was a night, a fact that I did not previously mention out of fear of making the first paragraph too rich with detail - the president watched without expression as a small, beady-eyed man in a brown suit slowly approached him. 'He looks inscrutable', thought George Bush, and this was good, for this president loves a challenge. "If we are not challenged, we can never excel," he once told me, but that was long ago, when he was a major league baseball owner, and I was but a young ball boy.

The inscrutable Russian former KGB man let a small dangerous tick curl his upper lip into a tilde, and he uttered four American syllables - "Try it, cowboy." The young president suddenly locked eyes and held on, thirty seconds, forty, forty-five. At forty-nine, the break caused a gasp from both man.

"You may think of yourself as inscrutable, Vladimir Putin," George Bush said, "But I have drunken deeply from the waters of your soul, and found it to be rich and satisfying. You and I shall work together well." The tilde broadened into a smile, but deep within his heart, Putin wore a sneer.

Two things became apparent on this fateful night - Vladimir Putin was nothing but a devious Ruskie hyper-tart, and George Walker Bush was a naive babe in the woods. Yes, it's true, this president is reluctant to acknowledge shortcomings, but it has to be conceded that he indeed has one. He trusts people too much, scoundrels who have no fonder wish than to crush his heart and destroy his faith in all that is good and fair. He is, in a word, too good for this world, and until he learns to recognize the baseness of his fellow man, heartache will always be around the very next bend.

Ronald Reagan understood that Russia truly was an evil empire, a fact that the current president simply does not understand. Have the dastardly Ruskies truly evolved into a civilized nation? Can a tiger change his stripes? No, he may not, although it is possible that a tiger may get newer and jazzier stripes. Gone are the mangy stripes of Khrushchev and Breshnev, gone is the fetid feline fur of Boris Yeltzin. In Vladimir Putin, we have a different cat entirely.

Never mind the fact that Putin has been consolidating power in the country at a breakneck pace. Never mind the fact that his government has been stamping out internal dissent and personal freedom at a speed which turns the head of even the most devout neo-con. Forget the fact that he is embarrassing this country by playing host to the G-8 convention in a land where a good filet is more difficult to find than rubies on a Des Moines sidewalk. Pay no attention to the news that Russia is now working hand in hand with our sworn enemy Iran on their uranium enrichment program.

No, the important consideration is getting back to the grand tradition of having an enemy that looks just like us, only eviler. US vs. Russia is a rivalry that Americans can relate to, in the tradition of the Yankees vs. the Red Socks, or the Cowboys vs. the Redskins. And just like Cowboys coach Bill Parcells, Vladimir Putin is a man who cannot be trusted. Just look at those eyes - why, he could be straight off the set of 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'. Yes, he has learned to wear a clean suit and to shave, but beneath that well-groomed exterior is a man who cannot even sit up straight, a man who longs for the day when he can screw America six ways to Friday, a screwathon which can only be averted by a tidal surge in our preemptive paranoia.

So I call upon President Bush to end this madness in the Middle East and bring our boys home where they can prepare for the inevitable march with Moscow. We need to get back to the good war - the cold war - where everyone wears nice clothes, and you get a whole lot more bang for your buck.