A friend just turned me on to the Bright Eyes (Conner Oberst) performance of “When the President Talks to God” on The Tonight Show in early May I think, which you can see here, courtesy of ifilm. The lyrics are quite hard-hitting, and I find it somewhat remakable that this was even broadcast.
I have just one comment to add to all the online discussion of this vid. I found only a handful of references to this. The last lines of the song go:
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?
I doubt it
I doubt it
What Bright Eyes/Conner sings next is, “Fil mishmish, fil mishmish.” None of the sites on the web which post the song lyrics include these words. “Fil mishmish” is an Arabic expression, meaning literally, “in the time/season of the apricots” or “when the apricots bloom” (“mishmish” is Arabic for apricots). The colloquial meaning is, roughly, “probably never” or “when hell freezes over” or the like.
The fact that Bright sings a phrase in Arabic is even more amazing then his full-out attack on Bush in English.
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