How The Office is Like the Oval Office

In his editor's note this month, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter riffs hilariously on the striking similarities between the TV show The Office and the antics of the occupant of the Oval Office.

Question—who has the following characteristics, Bush or Michael Scott: smug, self-centered, and isolated; prone to inappropriate comments and malapropisms; fond of engaging in philosophical discourses that are spectacularly muddleheaded and self-mythologizing? If you answered both, you would be correct. And don’t forget the pathetic attempts at humor. Michael: the day he tried to boost office morale amid rumors of layoffs by giving Meredith (the boozy redhead) a birthday party, and then ruined the moment with a card that read: “Meredith, Let’s hope the only downsizing that happens to you is that someone downsizes your age.” Bush: his ill-conceived attempt to amuse attendees at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner the year after the Iraq invasion by conducting a mock search for weapons of mass destruction in the Oval Office. (The month of the president’s poorly reviewed antics, 52 coalition troops died in Iraq.)

Then again, maybe it's not so funny after all. Here's an earlier item about Graydon Carter.