Attaboy, 43!
by Ora Shay

Ed. Note: Ms. Shay, our token Republican, agreed to write for us only with the stipulation that no editorial hands touch her words. Thus we publish this, her third column, exactly as it came in over our email transom.

Midland, TX, October 1.  Some of us out here in the great Permian Basin of West Texas which once supplied our country with most of its oil till our intrepid geologists gave the world the gift of the Middle Eastern ocean of petroleum, some of us, though proud of Our Hometown Boy, now our Hometown President, were just a mite nervous, we can admit now, when he took the reins of Democracy in hand January 20, 2001.

After all, "43" (as we who are in close contact with Karen and Karl and other White House Insiders have learned to refer to him to easily distinguish him from Bush pear, who of course is "41" among those in the know), had always been a mama’s boy, and everybody in Midland knew that. How would he do 2,000 miles away from Mrs. 41, the inimitable, magisterial Barbara? Would her apron strings stretch that far?

Now that we are well into the War on Terrorism we proud Midlanders have busted many a button every time 43 appears on our HD-TV’s (which we all have now thanks to a year of oil at $30 a barrel, PTL). Because we see so clearly that early our nervousness was shamefully misplaced.

How many presidents, I ask you, have vowed that they are going to "eradicate evil from the world"? You can’t get much un-wishy-washier than that, can you? I mean, even President Lincoln (another great Republican president) never set himself a goal any higher than preserving our Sacred American Union, did he? There's already talk in these parts that 43, if he keeps going like he is, will be the hands-down choice for outstanding leader of the 21st century and maybe the entire 3rd millennium.

43, Our Boy, has taken onto his slender, attractive, youngish shoulders (have you ever noticed how well suits hang on him--that boy could've been a real clothes horse fashion model if he hadn't set his sights on the highest office in the land) the End-Times task of cleaning up our tired old planet once and for all.

Not only that, this is no mere secular, humanist, post-modern war he has promised us. No sirree, Bob.

This, by his own words, is a Crusade. I will save you the trouble of finding your dictionary and tell you right now that that word is based on the Latin word for ""cross".

700 years after the last, sadly failed crusade, Our Midland Boy, is, by his own words, taking the cross Unto All Nations. Here we come, ready or not. And about time too, all of us out here in the heartland of the homeland say.

In all honesty, before 43 revealed to the world that the War on Terrorism is in fact a new (and hopefully the last) Crusade, there were still a few doubters about the depth of 43’s Faith here in Midland. Stories still circulate in the West Texas desert about some of young George’s alleged hijinks when he was just a young strip of a lad, stuff he got into when he should’ve been sitting beside his well-behaved siblings at Wednesday Prayer Meeting in the 5,000-seat Midland Valley Verde Baptist Temple & Desert Found Christian School.