5 WEEKS VACATION!

from Chaos Under Heaven:

After the London bombings and with the continuing chaos in Iraq -- no connections please ('Nonsense!' 'Discredited!' insisted Don Rumsfeld) -- it's hard not to feel that the Bush administration is summoning grim reality from somewhere deep in its wildest nightmares. Others might imagine that, under the circumstances, real policy alterations, actual changes in course, might be in order. And evidently the President now feels the same way. While squabbling over the definition of his 'war' and doing pro bono work to elevate the status of al-Zawahiri, he clearly sensed the need to take some meaningful action, to do something path-breaking, record setting -- and so he headed off on the most extended vacation of his two-term presidency, five weeks in Crawford, the longest presidential vacation in 36 years. It's the 49th trip he's made to his ranch and the 319th day that he's spent in Crawford, according to Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker of the Washington Post, 'roughly 20 percent of his presidency to date.' (And that's without even counting those weekends at Camp David or the summer visits with his folks in Kennebunkport, Maine.) This is a particularly record-setting moment because, by the time he returns, five years into his presidency, he will have bested his idol, Ronald Reagan, who in his 8 years as president spent 335 days on vacation.