George Bush and the End of the American Century

Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat. George W. Bush

That might just be my favorite George W. Bush quote of all time. It's not the funniest, by any means. There are no made up words like "suiciders" and no repeated contradictions that only a person stuffed full of lead paint wouldn't recognize. Nothing like that. He simply misquotes a popular cliché by replacing the word "drop" with "whim." He loses it at the end after prefacing his mistake with a quote that, by all rights, sounds like something FDR would have said at the height of World War II. Simple, eloquent, and beautiful.

Naturally, George's speech writer bears responsibility for the first part. The man whom Hunter S. Thompson called our "goofy child President" could never conceivably come up with such poignant tidbits like this on his own unless through sheer probability, something akin to 100 chimps sitting down to snort cocaine and pull all-nighters on their way to pounding out Hamlet or the equally minute (yet very real) chance that char marks on toast could form a silhouette bearing striking resemblance to white Anglo-Saxon renderings of the Virgin Mary--the probability that life, in this cosmic wasteland of dust and atomic debris, could somehow spring forth from the Darkness and flourish on this planet only to choke upon itself millions of years down the road.