Observation

Warning -- if you're planning on reading Executive Orders, this contains some spoilers.

I've been rereading Executive Orders lately. I don't have much insight into why the book appeals to me -- certainly, some of it is the classic 'guy fiction, good guys vs bad guys, seriously high technology that works all the time, or close as makes no difference' -- but I like it, and there are times when I just want to read something that relaxes me. By comparision, I'm also reading a book I had given my daughter, who said its a bit dense for her -- The Ruby in the Smoke, by Philip Pullman; I thought she'd like it, as he wrote the Amber Spyglass series, which, though a bit odd, was excellent -- and as it turns out, its a bit dense for me, too -- and I'm also reading Count Belasarius, a novel about a Roman noble back two thousand years ago; its good, but I have to work to remember who's who, and whats going on. With EO, that doesn't happen, so its my default reading for the moment. The other night, leafing through it, I realized that this book more or less describes the presidency that George Bush wishes he had.

There's the President - tall in the saddle, jes' folks but dogged, forthright, and scrupulously honest, purer than anyone else around. He has the warm friendship and slightly awestruck admiration of military men and women from the lowliest grunt who lends him a cigarette at Camp David to the people in the Secret Service who've seen 'em all, and genuinely like this guy and his family. There's a lethal, truly evil bad guy and his amoral minions -- an ayatollah, yet; no one's liked that sound since the Iranian hostage crisis thirty years ago -- as well as a host of other slippery international types, most of whom are Not To Be Trusted. He has a Congress that was decimated by a terrorist attack, not to mention most of the heads of agencies, and so he gets to rebuild them, either directly, appointing right-thinking people who, dammit, just want to cut to the chase and get the job done, no bureaucratic folderol, or indirectly, by encouraging people to elect replacements who are not professional politicians, but real people like them who want to come in, get the job done, and go back to the plough. His wife is a brilliant surgeon, his kids are to die for, and even the people who dislike him, at least inside the country, do so with a rueful admiration of his grasp of the common touch, startled by the fact that he seems to be a genuinely humble man. And at the end, he not only gets to use a combination of intrepid secret agents, stealth aircraft, and precision weaponry to blow the ayatollah and his immediate minions to kingdom come, and on national TV, yet, but he also gets to grimly promise that unless the people who executed some particularly heinous acts are delivered to him in twelve hours, he will order a nuclear attack to level the city. Don't think I won't, he says, staring into the camera, because I will. Count on it. You can just see the steely glint in his eye. Don't mess with this guy.

Wow, George must say. That's me!