I didn’t vote for Bush, don’t ever plan on voting for Bush, and find myself smacking my forehead in embarrassment when listening to him speak, so I’m not offended by the jabs taken at President Bush. In fact, I figure any American that didn’t vote for Bush in 2000 has just as much of a right to make fun of him as the next person. After all, we do have freedom of speech in the U S of A and mocking the leader of the free world is something that falls into that category. But a 21 year old man living in England, never to have voted in an American election? I’m not so sure it jives the same way.
For starters, I really can’t stand the layout of the site. It’s hosted by Lycos, so all the annoying ads they throw on the site are placed in a frame on the right hand side of the site. It looks like background was originally supposed to be white, but the background of the actual weblog text is black, as is the space around the header image. It’s pretty distracting to say the least.
There are several links at the bottom of the site that you have find only if scrolling the past 17 entries. The format and layout of these links appears to be provided by an automated script from another site, but the script doesn’t seem to be too accurate, as the same series of links are listed four different times.
I have no idea how the archives are set up. There are a couple of months of archives listed on the front page to read through initially. The titles of other posts are listed down the right side of the main blog area. Clicking on those titles takes you to a separate page, where you’re greeted by huge red text on a black background. Sure, I could use the options of my browser and shrink the text temporarily, but if I’m going to have to go back and forth between text sizes while visiting a website that has a lot of text to read, I’m not likely to come back.
The writing on the site is good. Some entries are a bit too trite and, in my opinion, some can be quite tasteless. Comparing the young boy that American soldiers maimed and murdered his parents to the likings of Spiderman and Batman isn’t exactly something that I would consider a rant or anything that has something to do with George Bush, which is what this site is geared around. It’s a casualty of war, perhaps something that could be blamed on the former Iraqi leader and not American soldiers that are trying to defend and protect.
I found some entries to be very funny. The “Diary of a Bodyguard“, which is a mockery of a fictitious journal kept by one of Bush’s bodyguards is a prime example. Modeling the majority of the entries after this one would be beneficial to the site. It’s funny, it’s satirical, but it’s not going to offend anyone or throw blame into somewhere it doesn’t belong.
Writing a weblog that focuses on someone you hate, as mentioned in the FAQ of this site, is a task that can’t really have any other point or focus other than bashing that particular person. Adding some humor in the entries would be a great plus with this site if that humor was just prevalent in each entry. Instead, it turns into the author berating every move that Bush makes, every word that he says, and blaming every negative action in American news on Bush. I think the only people that would benefit from this site or even enjoy coming back more than once would be those that, like the author, have an extremely deep hatred for Dubya. Otherwise, readers aren’t missing much.