"When I spend time with Barney, we bark together. We pick fleas together." Thus spake one dog of a president.

That scene, from an informercial within that huge Fascist Infomercial called the Republican National Convention, is meant to show us, no doubt, how much GWB is an ornery guy who loves his critters.

It was President Calvin Coolidge who said, "Any man who does not like dogs and want them about does not deserve to be in the White House." Which brings us to Wednesday night's world premiere of Barneycam III.

White House dogs of the order of Karl Rove, Andrew Carr and Scott McLellan starred along with Barney Bush in a four-minute featurette in which The First Dog is recruited by the White House heavies to shore up the canine vote for the Presidential election.

Carr: "But dogs can't vote."
Rove: "Well, why take a chance?"

Barney even engages in a dream-sequence debate, moderated by McLellan, against a French poodle puppet called Fify Kerry. It's all really quite funny. It's not every day you get to see the evil Rove ham it up with a manic Howard Dean impersonation. It's a shame his head didn't explode.

The full 4:07 clip of Barneycam III is on the Washington Post RNC section (in Real Video format). Barneys Cam I and II are linked from the www.barney.gov homepage.

It is with a great deal of unease that, as the owner of a Scottish terrier, I share the same breed with a cretinous American president. Speaking of whom, I must confess that I honestly fell asleep during his one-hour speech which climaxed (in the most orgasmic context) the four-day Fascist Infomercial. Even though it was midday Friday here at the time.

For the full text of Bush's speech, I link yet again to the Washington Post.

Rahul Mahajan has done a personal annotation of Bush's speech in his Empire Notes weblog. Mahajan (who ran as the Green Party candidate for GWB's old job, Governor of Texas, in 2002) has no love lost for John F.Kerry either. As he notes:

For John Kerry, it[Iraq]'s just a distraction from the real issue: Vietnam.

In an op-ed in Thursday's Washington Post, Richard Cohen had this to say about The President Who Has Made The World A Safer Place To Live:

On the very day that George Bush changed his mind and said that the war on terrorism was in fact winnable, the following things happened: Suicide bombers killed 16 people in Israel; 12 Nepalese service workers (dishwashers, etc.) were massacred in Iraq; five Afghans were accidentally killed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan; nine people were killed by a suicide bomber at a Moscow subway station, and five more American servicemen were reported dead in Iraq. For worldwide terrorism, it was not a bad day.

And that was written before those monsters took over the school in Beslan.