I get the feeling GW Bush doesn’t like games, not because he’s a straight-shootin’ Texan with a country to run, but because he seems easy to trick, to catch off-guard, to mercilessly swindle. He’s the kid who would draw the raised card from another player’s hand, or confidently hunker down to play Tic-Tac-Toe and get beaten with 3 O’s in the corners – the oldest trick in the book, or scatter his Monopoly real estate holdings all over the board.
But GW Bush ran his Administration like a game. He assembled a team of all his friends instead of the strongest players. He trash-talked, menaced the referees, played to the crowd, cheated.
And he played poorly, particularly the Stop the Proliferation of Nuclear Weaponry shell game. There’s three shells: Iraq, Iran, North Korea. Indeed, it’s an Axis of Evil Shells. Which shell has that nuclear stuff?
George didn’t hesistate: He picked the Iraq shell. It was, after all, the easiest shell to lift, having been cracked by his daddy a decade prior. And it smelled like oil. Unfortunately, the shell only contained a crazed despot presiding over a country already riddled with internal strife. George peered incredulously at the mess he created by upending the Iraq shell, dumbfounded, then claimed he wasn’t really playing the Stop the Proliferation of Nuclear Weaponry shell game, we were playing the Spread Democracy to All of God’s Children game.
Meanwhile, the Iran and North Korea shells became fearful that they would be the next shells overturned, and they flaunted nuclear ambitions to protect themselves. They didn’t need to worry though, because the Iraq shell exploded in Bush’s hand. He can no sooner pick another shell to invert than he can recruit a global coalition of a million strong to pick his nose. You lose!
(I have just learned that GW Bush does, in fact, like Tee Ball.)
