"Only sound methodology can ensure success."
- Bobby Jones

by Glynn Wilson

It is somewhat surprising no one has suggested this before. If body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger can be governor of California, and commentators can suggest a run for governor of Alabama by basketball player Charles Barkley, why not Tiger Woods for president?

Then again, why would anyone want to run for political office in these strange times when you can play golf for big bucks all day long every day?

Judging by their television ads during the British Open, even the corrupt Southern Company, parent company of Alabama Power, realizes that Bobby Jones was onto something when he talked about a sound methodology leading to success.

What I'm wondering is: What if George W. Bush had actually trained all his life for the presidency like Tiger Woods trained to be a great golfer, instead of fucking off most of his life?

Maybe now we would not be mired in ill-conceived wars in the Middle East if our dicktater-in-chief knew more about foreign policy than he does about eating peanuts, drinking Jim Beam whiskey, cutting brush and riding mountain bikes.

In flipping back and forth this morning between the British Open on ABC and "Meet The Press" on NBC, the juxtaposition of success and failure was striking.

Tiger Woods clearly prepared well for the British Open and had a successful game plan for approaching the links course at Royal Liverpool. The Bush administration quite obviously had an incomplete and bad game plan for fighting the war in Iraq and now can't seem to figure out what to do about the growing war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This neo-con crowd also doesn't seem to know what to do about the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea.

The plans and executions of the Bush administration have been so bad that Washington Post columnist Thomas Ricks has written a new book called Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.

In improvising a response to the insurgency in Iraq, U.S. forces frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored, Ricks says in his column in the nation's capitol newspaper today.

The other lessons from Vietnam, which have been taught at colleges and universities for years now, including West Point, are that you can't win a war in a far off country where the people do not support you. And you cannot continue to fight a war with mounting casualties and obvious failures when public opinion does not support you at home.

For all of Bush's claims that he doesn't care about public opinion polls, what that means is he doesn't care what the American people think. He is the president and "the decider" after all. Translation: We are all just peons in his empire.

If someone died and put me in charge, I would tell Tiger Woods to take his 2-iron, which has been so successful off the tee this week, and bash Bush over the head with it.

I would rather be playing 18 holes myself. Instead, I am watching in dismay as the world comes unraveled because of the fiasco that is our country's foreign policy.

So what about it folks? Tiger Woods for president?