Former President Nostalgic for Hollywood

The Bush family toboggan affectionately known as das boot 

Expressing disappointment at his son's command of the English language, former president George HW Bush today confided to Unconfirmed Sources that plans were in place to go back to using Hollywood actors to fill the role of President of the United States in 2008. The aging Bush, who served his country as head of CIA, where he got extensive experience with the rigging of elections all over the world, before spending twelve years in the White House himself, confessed nostalgia for the days of Ronald Reagan. "He was a moron, too, but he could memorize and deliver the lines we gave him like he meant it. We had the world by the short and curlies back then," Bush reminisced. "Jr. can't even handle the teleprompters when we give him a bouncing ball to show him where to pause, and when he tries to ad-lib his press conferences, well, it's just embarrassing."

First on the list of prospective successors to the office is Arnold Schwarzenegger who will have completed the term as Governor prerequisite to being cast as a legitimate presidential candidate when the younger Bush leaves office. Bush Sr. conceded that it would be necessary to rewrite the Constitution in order for the Austrian born actor to be installed, but he insisted that it would be "a damn sight easier" than engineering the recall that put him in the California state house. "The Constitution's been rewritten over twenty times," said Bush, "usurping political office between elections is something you can only get away with once—unless you luck into some Polaroids, or a plane crash," he added with a wink.

Comparing Arnold's acting talents to Reagan, Bush declared that the bodybuilder was even worse than the late president on screen, but noted that his thick accent obscured his lack of comprehension and emotional range allowing him to pull off roles as robots and stony faced Russian spies fairly convincingly. "If you're going to put somebody up there at the White House podium who doesn't understand what he's saying and can't speak proper English, you're better off with a foreigner that has an excuse than with an Ivy league native speaker that people can see is an idiot," the elder Bush observed. "there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief involved in creating the illusion that people are listening to a man of great personal conviction, and that's something Hollywood actors understand. They know how to take direction and to get into different characters for each particular audience." Bush admitted that Schwarzenegger could only manage about a character and a half, but claimed that "that's all you really need for the role of president."

Asked why he had chosen the current governor of California to succeed his son, the former president was evasive. He did, however, confess a personal affection for him. "My father, as you probably know, had numerous friends and business partners in Austria during the Second World War, and Arnold is just the type of guy he would have tried to help. I guess I'm a chip off the old block." As to whether he thought the American people would not realize that the Constitution had been changed just to make Schwarzenegger's installation possible, Bush remarked that "even Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time and some of them all of the time. You only have to fool most of them some of the time in a Democracy, and not even that when you own the voting software."