Miss me? Yeah, you miss me.
It's almost time for the George W. Bush Presidential Reading Library and Discount Portrait Studio to open, and that means it's time for George W. Bush to begrudgingly stop painting slightly disturbing pictures of lap dogs and/or his own feet and start selling himself as a still-important man who is not at all an embarrassment to his party, his ideology, the country and the history books.
Oh, how exciting.
More than four years after George W. Bush left the White House — settling in Texas with a desire to leave politics behind — the former president remains reluctant to give up the liberation of “not feeling like I’ve got to be in the limelight.”
Most of the resulting interview is behind a pay wall, but you can find the story on Google and partake of it there. Long story short, he regrets very little and all his advisers say that history will absolve him. The economy? That's just some stuff that happened:
“People ask me, ‘What about the economy?’” Bush said. “My answer is, ‘Why don’t you go hire an economist? Or hire five economists and get 15 different opinions?’”
He's also approaching post-presidential life "differently," we learn:
“Bush is going to do it differently because he’s a different breed of cat,” said Midland oilman Joe O’Neill, one of Bush’s childhood friends.
That's the nicest damn way of defending someone's legendary laziness I've ever heard. I think Joe O'Neill might be Dubya's grandma.
Bush described the institute’s focus in broad, familiar terms: Freedom is universal. Free markets are fairest. Free societies are based upon good education. Those who fought for freedom should be honored. To whom much is given, much is required.
And a penny saved is a penny earned, and you can catch more flies with honey if you pull their wings off first, and by "much is required" we mean metaphorically because those people earned that money and if you make them pay taxes on any of it it makes the baby Jesus cry.
But we have this to look forward to, apparently:
Karen Hughes, a longtime adviser, said it’s been harder for the former president’s friends to hear the criticism. Bush alumni, she said, will make a renewed effort to clear up “some misimpressions in the public’s mind.”
Oh God, no. Anything but that. The only saving grace in that whole eight-year running fiasco has been that some of the most conspicuous accomplices have at least had enough good sense to shut their traps and scuttle off in shame afterwards. Let some poor contrarian suckers in the next century try to pretty up that cow pie if they feel up to it, but in the meantime, Karen Hughes, just leave us the hell alone already.