What worries me most: I don’t find this hard to imagine. There’s Bush with that goofy smirk winking at Condi: How about them cajones! he shouts. Stone-faced Condi covers her ears, rushes by.

Later that day, he’s still amazed. At the Cabinet meeting, Rummy is talking “shock and awe” while kids are being blown apart like confetti, and Bush elbows a nodding Cheney: “Can you believe them cajones?”

Bush likes to say cajones because it’s a Spanish word and we all know how much he prides himself on his language skills.

Almost a year later, Bush is still reminiscing about it with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. He says he couldn’t believe Blair’s cajones, but he really did appreciate them. In that non-sequitur way of his, Bush says he doesn’t think the Queen could have had such cajones. On the other hand, he continues, Margaret Thatcher probably could!

Mercifully, Woodward keeps this off the record. He’s a master of discretion. After all, he made his reputation talking secrets with a guy named Deep Throat.

Bush is a great believer in trickle-down economics. Before he got sidetracked by a nasty war he really wanted all along, he’d go around the country touting the virtues of trickle-down. Some bum in the audience asked Bush if trickle-down wasn’t an excuse for the rich to piss on the poor? Bush said he loved freedom.

Recently, oil prices, Halliburton profits, and death and destruction have spurted-up and we don’t hear so much about this.

On the other hand, Bush’s language skills have trickled down to his field commanders. Apparently, as a condition for the now failed truce in Fallujah, the U.S. was to allow 50 Iraqi families to return to their devastated homes. Seven families got through and the U.S. closed the gates. “It’s tit for tat, we’re not seeing tat,” Marine Lt. Colonel Brennan Byrne explained to the baffled 43 families.

A jaded, embedded reporter asked if the Colonel was seeing too much "tit" and not enough "tat," or if there was some other sort of calculus at work here: one "tit" for one "tat" or a portion of one for a sampling of the other? For that matter, was the Colonel speaking literally or metaphorically? Was he using “tit” as a singular noun or as a singular-plural noun the way “fish” might be employed?

The Colonel huffed that when he said “tit” he didn’t mean “fish” and he thought that was pretty obvious. He’d have to get back to the reporter about the other stuff.

Somehow this news spurted up to Bush. He was seen chuckling down the corridors of power. “What cajones!” he gushed. “Toro! Toro!”

Gary Corseri’s dramas have been performed on Atlanta-PBS and in five states. His articles, fiction and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Village Voice, Common Dreams, Intervention, Redbook and over 100 other publications in the U.S. and abroad. He has published two novels, two collections of poetry and recently edited the anthology, Manifestations. He can be reached at corseri@comcast.net.  

Other articles by Gary Corseri

* Who’s on First? The Bush-Cheney 9/11 Dog & Pony Show
* “Out, Out Damned Spot!”