President Bush's monumental error
in the Cres(c)ent City

Error-filled tombstone shows the world
just how in touch Bush is regarding New Orleans

By Michael DiBari

The Levee presidential metaphor writer

Just as secretly as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently gutted his nationally hyped state ethics reforms, President George W. Bush has surreptitiously defiled what had promised to become New Orleans’ next, great tourist attraction.

For a short while, beginning on Tuesday, April 22, and remaining for two days, the city had President Bush’s domestic legacy quite literally enshrined in granite.

It was carved in stone as boldly as the president’s now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, which was just two months and 139 American casualties into the now-five-year and 4,000-Americans-killed Iraq conflict.

So what made this 4-foot-by-2-foot piece of rock so special?

It wasn’t that the three leaders of North America surrounded it on April 22 – Earth Day – to dedicate their ceremonial planting of a Shumard Oak tree in Lafayette Square in the business district during the last day of the two-day North American Leaders’ Summit that was brought to New Orleans as a consolation prize to a presidential debate.

It wasn’t any profound wisdom from the 43rd president of the United States that was carved into the granite for some future species to learn from long after mankind has vanished from this Earth.

As one spectator said, “Let’s get real, this is George W. Bush we’re talking about.”

Actually, the words on the monument are rather mundane, with little more than the names and titles of the three leaders and that they did the following: “Planted a Summard Oak tree on April 22, 2008, in honor of Earth Day and the Cresent City’s hosting of the North American Leaders’ Summit.

In a hard-to-believe metaphor to the president’s response to and handling of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and the catastrophic failure of the federal levee system that caused the horrific flooding of New Orleans, President Bush dedicated to the Crescent City a White House-ordered monument with the word Crescent misspelled.

All this, of course, took place in the presence of national and international media.

Not only was Crescent misspelled as “Cresent,” but the inscription said the leaders were gathered to plant a “Summard” Oak tree, which is actually spelled Shumard. There is no such thing as a Summard Oak.

“It’s a monument to stupidity,” one onlooker said.

Even Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s name was missing its accent mark, which denotes the correct pronunciation of the president’s name.

Even as the Times-Picayune and the rest of the local, national and world media missed or ignored this historic faux pas, “Cresent City” residents could see little else.

Residents were seen throwing drinks and dirt and even spitting on the insulting monument. One woman took a bottle of water, put it between her legs and let the water out as if to urinate on it.

Workers were at the monument on Thursday, April 24, replacing it with a version that corrected “Cresent” back to the rightly spelled “Crescent,” but this time changing the misspelled “Summard” Oak tree to “Shummard,” instead of the correct Shumard.

The company that produced the corrected version of the monument told The Levee that the White House insisted that the updated version was correct.

And the Mexican president still didn’t get his accent mark.

Workers replacing the monument told The Levee that the orders to change the monument came “straight from the White House.”

Residents who asked to remain anonymous for fear of warrantless wiretaps or surprise calls from the IRS were even more upset at the newest incorrect version of the monument.

They complained that had the original been left alone, it would have become as popular as buggy rides and beignets.

They envisioned visitors taking the St. Charles streetcar to Lafayette Square to take pictures of the metaphorical slab of granite just as surely as they would snap pictures of breasts on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.

“We are also celebrating the comeback of a great American city,” Bush said of New Orleans a day before the tree planting, sounding confident that the mission had been accomplished despite continued devastation in most areas of the city.

As for that tree, The Levee has learned that it was not a new tree added to Lafayette Square, but rather one that had been planted two weeks prior and dug up for the staged ceremony.

Residents busy peeing on the Bush monument said that reminded them of Bush’s Jackson Square speech during which the White House brought generators and lights to light up the square and show the president saying his administration would “do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild,” before leaving the square pitch black while the failed federal response continued.

To show that this New Orleans trip was entirely altruistic, the president ended the leaders’ summit by heading to Baton Rouge to headline a private fund-raiser on behalf of state Treasurer John Kennedy, a Democrat-turned-Republican who plans to challenge Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu in the fall election.

Bush praised Kennedy, the most horribly named Democrat-turned-Republican in history, who also ran for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2004 and endorsed Bush’s opponent, John Kerry, in that year’s election, as “the kind of senator Louisiana needs.”

He cited Kennedy’s newfound support for issues including the conflict in Iraq and the president’s preference for warrantless eavesdropping.

While the president left New Orleans a small monument that misspelled the city’s famous nickname, the president left Baton Rouge after Kennedy’s private fund-raiser, where people paid a minimum of $2,000 a plate to see Bush and a minimum of $5,000 for a photo with him.

For Bush, it was a mission accomplished.

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