The First Slacker President.

Wearing a hat with the number forty-one stitched on it, at a golf course near the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, former President George H.W. Bush gave his son President George W. Bush a matching hat with the number forty-three on it in celebration of the kid's fifty-fifth birthday. Reporters were allowed to take some pictures, but no transcript of the conversation between the Bush Presidents was released. Until now:

43: Nice drive, old man. Looks like it squiggled down near that bench over there. Oh, yeah, got to thank you for the hat.

41: Now, son, I'm just glad we're able to spend some quality time together. Vis-a-vis, you and me, one on one, that is.

43: Hey, look at that squirrel. Let's throw tees at him.

41: Now, George, pay attention here. It's important that you and I, you know, the two of us, talk about business.

43: Aww, Dad, you said Dick was supposed to take care of all that junk. Toss me that water bottle, I think I got him cornered.

41: I, unh, well, boy, you know this, unh, whole thing isn't turning out to be as easy as we thought. What with Dick having his heart problems and all.

43: You could say problems, yeah. You should see people freak out in Cabinet meetings every time he turns blue. Ashcroft especially. Gets all huffy. Thinks Cheney's mocking him. But that pacemaker is cool. Sometimes when he's nodding off and I have to leave him a note about something really heavy going down, I just clip it to a refrigerator magnet and pop it right on to that garage-door opener. Makes a nice snap sound. Snap! Snap! Snap!

41: We got to get serious here. We might have played the oil hand a little early. You have to get back out there for some more photo ops communing with nature.

43: Oh, man, I never saw you wading around in bear crap.

41: Yeah, and look what happened in '92. That's not going to happen to you, mister.

Did you see the way the Administration officials conveniently discovered $4.3 billion they claim they didn't know they had? Apparently, it was in the back pocket of their brown slacks hanging in the hall closet down on the ranch all along.

Actually, they changed an accounting column and took some money headed for Social Security and changed it to money not headed for Social Security. In the private sector, this activity is known as creative bookkeeping and can be rewarded with long stretches of quiet time in federal institutions where those perfume swatches in magazines are worth a lot of cigarettes.

Tuckered out from being so near the vicinity of actual work, George W. simply needed to escape back to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to get back to basics and remember what it's like to do nothing.

On the job for a scant seven months, and he needs a thirty-five-day vacation? Nice work if you can get it.

People, five weeks is not a vacation. That's a sabbatical. The only people who get five weeks vacation are German trade unionists, Parisian waiters, and Santa Claus, and the last two are fictional.

Before this period of vacating, Bush had already spent a month in Crawford. He'd been at Camp David for all or parts of thirty-eight days, and he'd spent weeks o'plenty gallivanting around reintroducing himself to various world leaders: "Remember me, I'm Pappy's kid. Sorry about trashing the guest wing last time. Rove's got a check for you."

So that means, since being on the job from the end of January, he's actually been at work, what, about a week? George W., the first slacker President. He truly is from Austin. "Dude, the job don't pay much, but the perks are egregiously righteous." President Keanu.

If Will Durst had a number, it would be 100. For bottles of beer on the wall.