Join With Google Earth and Send George Bush Back to the Ranch

The Bush Ranch, Crawford, TX, Where he wants to be right about now (credit: USGS)

In an interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, Mr. Bush said he did enjoy using Google Earth, which shows satellite images of selected areas. “I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes,” he said.
—New York Times

Oh how we look forward to sending you there, Mr. President–permanently! I bet right about now he’s pinin’ for the old ranch every time he hears from his generals in Iraq or from Ken Mehlman about those Congressional races goin’ south.

It is reassuring though that the man who first discovered The Internets gets the general hang of using Google Earth (unless, that is, Josh Bolten does the president’s surfing for him).

Not so with e-mail though:

“I don’t e-mail, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president,” he said. “I don’t want to receive e-mails because there’s no telling what somebody’s e-mail would show up as a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, ‘Well, I didn’t read the e-mail.’ ‘But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about e-mailing.”

Yeah, it would be inconvenient to have say, an e mail from President Cheney telling you that Joe Wilson’s wife was a covert agent who he planned to ‘out,’ or that e mail from Jack Abramoff thanking you for that personal invitation to the White House. So the question is: is he Internets-challenged and a technoidiot; or do his handlers keep him away from the hard stuff because they know he’ll only get himself into trouble using it.

By the way, I thought it’d be cool to try to find the Bush Ranch using Google Earth. After doing some online research to identify its location & then trying unsuccessfully to find it using Google Earth, I have a sneaking suspicion that either Google has removed the buildings from its images or that I’m just not able to find them with my meager navigational/map skills. I’ve substituted a USGS image of the Ranch instead.