Dowd: Bush Descended Into Slapstick

Maureen Doud reports that the “once disciplined and swaggering Bush administration has descended into slapstick” as she makes fun of both their suggestions for energy conservation, and of Karen Hughes:

Air Force One costs $83,200 to fill up and more than $6,000 per hour to fly. Then there’s the cost of helicopters and a 2006 Cadillac DTS limo that gets less than 22 miles per gallon.

Karen Hughes, the Bush nanny who knows nothing about the Muslim world and yet is charged with selling the U.S. to it, wasted even more fuel this week flying to Saudi Arabia to tell women covered from head to toe in black how much she likes driving even though they can’t.

She knows so little about the Middle East that she looked taken aback when some Saudi women told her that just because they could not vote or drive did not mean that they felt they were treated unfairly.

One thing Saudi women like even less than not having certain rights is to have hypocritical Americans patronize them.

Dowd provides several other examples to demonstrate her final line: ” W. doesn’t really need to worry about turning down the lights in the White House. The place is already totally in the dark.”