Bush

Although you gotta roll your eyes re: yet ANOTHER book rushed outta the Bush White house looking to wash it's hand of any guilt, I actually kinda liked what Bush said through the years. Not that I agree with him, obviously, but his candor made me think of what Andrew Sullivan mentioned earlier - time will show Bush to be the sanest person in the room during those 8 years.

Which is a shame - I wrote back HERE how history will begin to show Bush as a LIKABLE guy. As THIS READER OVER AT SULLY writes, Bush was a guy that never wanted to be president anyway; backing up something I've said here countless times about Bush really wanting to be the Commissioner of MLB, not president.

The problem is that W. never liked the position he put himself into and obviously was never comfortable around the howling teabaggers that made up his voting base. Thus, he checked out, and the running of the country fell to unhinged lunatics like Cheney and Rumsfeld or corrupt hacks like Gonzales.

I know you're not a baseball fan, but I am a big one.

The opening night of the 2008 baseball season was at the new Nationals Park in DC, and during one inning, Bush joined the broadcast team in the booth. I was stunned at how articulate, confident, and engaged he sounded while speaking about baseball. It occurred to me that he was finally talking about something that he likes and for which he feels a passion. Bush loves baseball, but he despises politics.

Thus, we had a president who hated being president lead the country to the brink of socio-economic collapse.

It's a shame because we allowed ourselves to be convinced that ignorance and lack of ambition were virtues when it came to electing a president (remember Michael Goodwin HERE, annoyed that Obama wasn't baffled?), which meant that once in office, someone as disinterested in the job as Bush was more than happy to surround himself with a bunch of idiots, as I remarked HERE:

It's fun to call Bush an idiot, and compared to many men who have been in the Oval Office he might be an idiot; but in any room of ten people at any given time filled with the people that voted for him cause he's "just like them," he's probably the smartest guy in the room. I mean, even as a legacy, even as a part of the super-elite upper-crust you can't float through Yale without having ANY brains. I assume he's smarter than me, which doesn't necessarily make you smart enough to run the country.

But Bush's problem was that he was just smart enough to know that he's not REALLY smart. Very smart people have a tendency to want to be around people as smart or smarter than themselves; kinda-smart people don't wanna spend all day being reminded they're not the smartest person in the room. So what happens? You sign up someone like Dick Cheney, who had pretty much been a failure at everything and lasted a month in an Ivy-league school some family friend got him into. Then you surround yourself with US Attorneys and Cabinet members et al who are simply thrilled to be there and have no problem nodding their head at everything you say. And before you know it, you're off and running to a terrible presidency. All because you're JUST smart enough to be threatened by really smart people.

Mostly, I'm pissed the search function is fucking up and I can't find one of the half-dozen instances I wrote Bush wanted to be commissioner of MLB. Also, I have zero faith in our ability to NOT one day slide back into the "hey, I'd have a beer with him!!!"-ocracy that drove us for a decade. But it is kinda exciting that Bush himself might actually turn into an interesting individual to one day read about, be it Shakesperian or Wagnarian or reptilian. It's just a shame that such a fascinating story came at such a large cost to all of us. Maybe all big stories do?

UPDATE, 10:12PM - just to be clear, Bush was still a shitty, shitty, unbelievably bad president - so shitty in fact, that hopefully there will be regulations put back in place so that it becomes virtually impossible to be as shitty as he was. He simply SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PRESIDENT. And the aria of those 8 years might one day be at least somewhat interesting to read, inasmuch as those years are far enough removed they can't actually affect anybody.