I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and while flying through Washington’s Dulles airport, stopped to snap these admittedly too blurry photos from a presumably duty-free gift shop.
The first, above, celebrates the end of George Bush‘s presidency. Not that Dubya would have occasion to ever glimpse it, but it has to be somewhat weird when the city in which you live (when you’re not clearing brush) has racks of T-shirts calling you out and celebrating your scheduled departure.
The second is more of the celebratory-populist vein. The natural, consumerist extension of the get-on-the-love-train affection for Barack Obama I somewhat get (“Barack & Roll,” it says above), but… referenced in the form of an AC/DC visual gag? Very strange, indeed. Oh, and not pictured, from the same storefront walkway: the 16-inch, disturbingly lifelike Hillary Clinton nutcracker. (Seriously.) When I think about China manufacturing stuff like that, and what sociocultural conclusions they must draw from it, it amuses me to no end.
Bush is lucky that there are ONLY T-shirts celebrating his last day — he’s lucky not to have been impeached, b/t lying us into Iraq, Katrina’s aftermath, cronyism, warrantless wire-tapping and othrer incompetence.