Posted by: Jason
Posted on: 06/23/2004 at 8:05 AM
In Category: Fahrenheit 9/11
Lawroark has done an excellent job of debunking the Fahrenheit 9/11 claim that President Bush spent 42% of his first year in office on vacation, and he's got pictures and more to prove it:
It's obvious that these "vacation days" include weekends. (You can do the math: 250/x=42/100; x=595 days=1.63 years). Okay, 42% is a lot of vacation, but weekends account for 29% of our time. I'm sure that a lot of this "vacation" time is just Bush going to Camp David for the weekend. Can we really fault the President for going to Camp David on weekends? If you take out weekends, you get 42%-29%, or 13% of the time that Bush was on vacation.
Okay, this is still a lot, although 13% looks a lot better than 42%. Over a year, 13% is about 6.76 weeks of the year--which is still much more than most of us. But we know that Bush's vacations are generally working vacations. For example, he has hosted visits from leaders like Putin, Fox, and many others there. This hardly seems like a real vacation.
(the hat is tipped to Andrew Sullivan.)