Bush Looks Good Compared to the Yayhoos He Surrounded Himself With

Sully writes HERE something I mentioned a while back, about how much saner George Bush now looks when put up against Cheney, Rumsfield et al.

His heart seems so often in the right place, and then he defers to thugs and cowards. Maybe he was just out of his depth. But my feelings about him remain much more complicated than about Cheney, Rumsfeld and Yoo. And when you see him again relieved of the burden of office, you realize how he got elected twice to the White House. He'd rather have been cycling.

All those are good points. He never really wanted the job and was out of his depth, and while not as much of an idiot as we like to caricaturize him for laffs, he was juuuuuuuuuust not smart enough to be comfortable surrounding himself with smarter people, instead being so easily mislead by opportunistic losers.

I've previously rather brilliantly laid this out:

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.

Also in Dubyanuts' defense, he sure did like eating himself some pussy.