Bush ignores value of a straight face

COMMENTARY
Bush ignores value of a straight face
Jimmy Breslin
Newsday
October 3, 2004

If I made faces like that," Mr. Sleepout Jackie said, after watching Bush cringe and tear at his nose on television, "I would have done 900 years."

He knew what he was talking about. He has been in front of perhaps 250 judges and many juries.

Now Sleepout stood and showed his courtroom style, one that George Bush, in all his dumbness, doesn't have the slightest notion of how to do.

A prizefighter is taught to smile when he gets hit good on the chin.

A defendant acts like Sleepout Jackie. He had his head high. His eyes were fixed. His face was locked. Shoulders were squared. Hands were at his sides. If there is anything that can do you in, it is showing emotion.

"Probation!" he announces.

A person in a debate for a thing like the presidency of the United States should think deep thoughts before he moves an eyelash. If somebody claims you are an unrepentant liar, you display the same emotion as if he was reading the Manhattan phone directory.

The other night, George Bush hunched so low that he seemed to be using the lectern as a bunker. His eyes crinkled, his mouth opened like a trout's.

"First, you keep your mouth shut. If you got it hanging open, they give you six months," Sleepout observed. "Then you don't touch your face. Nothing. If you got an itch, you let it itch.

"Why don't you go oooohissss when the judge says something you don't like? Go ahead and do that. Watch what the judge gives you. He gives you a pound for what you done and six months for being a fresh punk."

Now he turned his face into ice. "Look at me. You don't know what I'm thinking. If I make a face, the judge makes me arrogant. See? I don't move my face."

He stands proudly. "Suspended sentence."

Then he says, "If you cry. You pity yourself. Two years!"

He learned this first maybe a hundred years ago in court because of poor use of a baseball bat on Knickerbocker Avenue. The judge was Samuel Leibowitz.

"Ten years."

The court officers pulled Sleepout to the door and Jackie wanted to let out a holler but something told him to shut up. He kept a straight face. Leibowitz called out, "Bring him back."

Then he shouted at Sleepout, "Sixty days."

"If they got you through the door, it was 10 years," Sleepout was saying on Friday night. "That's how I learned."

Nobody ever taught this to Bush. Or maybe they did, but he was too arrogant to lower himself to act like anybody else. George Bush revealed for all to see what a calamity the news reporting business has been for at least the last four years. Here we had a president who was aware of only one thing: that you have the gall to ask questions about himself. A member of the Bush royalty. He got in the White House with minimal votes and thought and a maximum of thievery.

From that day on, neither television nor newspapers nailed him for what he is. I remember Tom Brokaw going through a day in the White House with Bush, and it all seemed so pleasant and wonderful, we two guys enjoying all of this. Then I remember Tim Russert had a big interview with Bush, and all these Washington Pekinese of the Press said it was such a marvelous interview. He might as well have stayed home. If you can't get Bush to show himself as a dangerous dolt, you've done nothing. These are only

two of an industry full of abject failures.

And this Bush, this shaky dimwit, as seen on Thursday night, got this country into a war where we lose the lives of young people, and many thousands lose their arms and legs and private parts, and we bomb children in Iraq. Not one person in this American news industry stood up and screamed that this man putting us in war is probably the one dumbest man we ever had as president.

"We're makin' progress. It's hard work. We're makin' progress. It's hard work."

And in all the days and nights and weeks and months, this guy went around with a smirk on his face and not a thought in his head and until Thursday night, not one person in the business stood up and called George Bush what he also is: a liar.

And now, in the middle of a frightfully close election, I pull a guy off a saloon stool, not a Washington Pulitzer Prize writer obligated to tell the people what to look for when they see Bush. And my guy Sleepout says:

"He really don't know nothin'."

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