Oil Patch Sage
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 fifth column, exactly as it came in over our email transom.

--Midland, TX. Plant-wise, the desert soil around Midland may not be good for raising much besides prickly pear cactus and the occasional creosote bush, but let me tell you, this land produces MEN.

How long has it been since we had somebody sitting up there in Washington who knew right from wrong, who knew puredee Satanic Evil when he saw it and said so?

Yes, the Revered Reagan made noises in that direction when he talked of the Evil Empire but then he got completely sidetracked with Star Wars and Nicaragua and now what people mostly seem to remember from THAT eight years is Nancy’s red dresses.

And of course George I had his moment of glory when he liberated Kuwait from the improper tyranny of Saddam I and gave it back to the proper tyranny of its tiny clutch of oligarchs. No matter, really, because now we know that George I’s true, important historical role was to provide a model for George II to study and learn from the mistakes of.

Which, we can see now, he did so, so well. George II may not’ve been any great shakes in school but in the school of hard knocks called life he’s turned out to be a kind of latter-day Abraham Lincoln who nobody expected much from but when push came to shove could it turned out stand up there in the pulpit of the National Cathedral with the best of them and match even the Especially Revered Reverend, His Eminence Billy Graham in letting inspiring tropes and metaphors roll off his tongue about the greatness and purity of America with its absolute equality for ALL citizens no matter what odd non-Christian religion they may profess and no matter how many media outlets they control and distort to their own quasi-heathen ends.

Not only has this modest Midland product of two transplanted Yankees stocks turned out in our time of direst need to be an orator and rhetoritician of truly Ciceronian magnitude. Our very own George has now revealed himself as a diplomat and manipulator of geopolitics the likes of which the world has seen since the days of Cardinal Richelieu—and serious students of history know that’s saying quite a bit.

So impressed was I by George II’s masterful, distanced, extremely cool handling of the Sharon-Arafat face-off that I made local inquiries here in Midland amongst a few of his old high school buddies to find out if they had seen any clues in the youthful George W. to indicate what was to come.

Sure enough, one of them, speaking anonymously, revealed to your correspondent that as a teenager young George II was a well-known entrepreneur in pit bull circles. My source says that Georgie-porgy (as he was known to intimates then) was noted for repeatedly saying, "When you got two crazy pit bulls going at each other, best thing to do is stand back and watch till it’s over."

There, of course, you have the origin of American foreign policy under George II vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine in a nutshell. In these parts we call it "West Texas Wisdom." Or "Sage-brush Sagacity."