Dead Souls: Not Just A Pop Culture Reference

George W. Bush may be a douchebag but Vladimir Putin is a devil of a man. In 2001, Genius George revealed that he had sensed Putin's sympathetic soul after a face to face meeting. At the time the flap was all about the Bush ability, obviously on loan from God via Limbaugh, to peer into peoples' souls. A claimed psychic insight seen foremost as a manifestation of the President's guileless religious quackery. Yet the day Bush marked Putin as his democratic kindred spirit was the day he cemented his legacy as moron extraoridnaire. In a spell binding Vanity Fair article, Masha Gessen highlights Mother Russia's own misreading of Putin. Talk about rich comedies turned to horror. The very idea that this tiny man from the KGB could have been the successor to the Yeltsin's democratic leanings is frightful and the consequences both mind boggling and heart exploding. The Family mistakenly thought they could manipulate Putin but like Bush they were victims of the ultimate oxymoron, their own faulty intelligence.

The Proverbial Turd Blossom

Growing up picking hallucinogenic mushrooms out of cow patties, we took to referring to them as turd blossums to keep Gram and Gramps from wising up to our early morning forages amongst the heifers. When Bush nicknamed Karl Rove his "Turd Blossom" it definitely ungilded our psychedelic lilly a bit. Dubya must have recognized Rove's potent magic out on the West Texas plain and bestowed a nickname capable of bending reality and conjuring every possible Presidential grandeur. It was a helluva trip. Rove is gone now from the President's dreams and radio silence is the only thing emanating from the White House. With typical cleverness our favorite old time Republican, John Batchelor recognized this loss of vigor and explains how not having Rove's merry pranksterism at hand has left the Bush Administration as boring and blunt as Carrie Nation's hatchet upon a barstool.