Maybe he ought to work for a living, instead

By J. Kingston Pierce

This isn’t the first time--nor will it be the last, I predict--that I draw attention to George W. Bush’s luxuriously long annual vacations. Even the notoriously lazy Fred Thompson must be jealous of the time Dubya spends on his 1,600-acre estate-cum-“ranch” in Crawford, Texas, cooling his heels at taxpayer expense.

Just how much time has Bush spent away from the White House since he began occupying it in January 2001? Village Voice political blogger Ward Harkavy does the math:

Bush had taken 418 days of vacation in his first 6.7 years in office. That works out to 62.4 vacation days a year--a little more than 12 work weeks, which is probably slightly more vacation time than you get. On the other hand, think how much more damage Bush could have done if he hadn’t taken so much vacation.

Anyway, multiply 62.4 days a year by eight and you get 499 total days of vacation.

So, in other words, out of seven years he’s spent so far in the Oval Office, Republican’t Bush has taken more than a year off of work. I guess that’s what happens when you install a silver-spoon-fed, phony “Man of the People” in the presidency.

By comparison, workaholic Democrat Bill Clinton spent only 152 days on vacation during his entire eight-year presidency. That’s slightly over one-third as much time off as Bush has enjoyed thus far, playing with Barney and cutting wood down in Crawford.

(Cross-posted at Limbo.)