Say it ain't so, Schmo -- has Chimpy the Ex-Prez abandoned the old prop ranch in Crawford?

The former Yellow Rose in Crawford, TX, one of four souvenir shops that have gone belly up since the town's former First Rancher decamped

"'Ever since he got that new place in Dallas, he hasn’t been around much,' said Carter Blenden, the waiter at the Coffee Station who served Mr. Bush a cheeseburger with jalapeño fries on July 28 last year, his last trip to the local restaurant. (The ticket is preserved on the wall of the kitchen.)"

-- from James C. McKinley Jr.'s Monday NYT report,

"Texas Town Adusts to Life Without Bush"

by Ken

Remember how being a president always seemed to be a distraction for poor George W. Bush, taking him away from his never-an-idle-moment chores on the ol' ranch? There was always another vacation to take, some riding around in his golf cart to do, and of course his mountain bike to fall off.

All bunk, of course. His Chimpiness was as much a rancher as, say, PeeWee Herman. But an awful lot of gullible Americans swallowed the act whole, cheering him on as he set about destroying the country, and any other county he could get his grubby mitts on. And it seems no sooner did he drag his sad carcass out of the White House, relocating to his $3 million pad in Dallas, than he lost the need to play rancher. James McKinley reports:

He still comes to his 1,400-acre ranch on holidays and on some weekends, but he does not arrive with the thwap-thwap-thwap of helicopters anymore. He slips quietly through town in a black sport utility vehicle and leaves just as quietly, townspeople say. . . .

Mr. Bush has seldom appeared in Crawford, where he bought the ranch from a local family just before becoming president. He still comes to the ranch to ride his mountain bike over trails, and he likes to fish for bass in two ponds he had created behind his house.

Last August, he held a barbecue for about 100 local ranchers, some neighbors said, to make amends for all the traffic headaches they had dealt with during his presidency, when peace protesters regularly clogged the road to his land. The former president himself flipped burgers for the guests.

"Most of the former president’s energy," McKinley reports, "has gone into starting up a conservative research and policy center, the George W. Bush Institute, and planning his presidential library at Southern Methodist University." It's a shame they don't call the "conservative research and policy center" a think tank, which would set up the same joke as the idea of a Bush library.

Just because Chimpy has given up play-acting his role as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan doesn't mean, though, that he's permanently abandoned Crawford. It appears, by his own testimony, that he never will.

"I asked him how long he was going to keep that ranch, and he said, 'As long as I live,'" recalled Newt Westerfield, 86, who owns land next to the Bushes’ place.

After all, sometimes a fake cowboy's just gotta git out in the open spaces and air out the ol' golf cart. Plus, it's such a long way to the Bush family homestead in Paraguay. (Besides, they've no longer got that friendly fascist regime down there.)

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