One of the more telling revelations about Bush from that weasel McClellan's book:
'You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.'
Bullshit.
And the way he chose to handle it tells us all we need to know about how he would handle adversity in the years to come.
He'd lie. He'd evade. He'd shift the blame.
There's no conceivable way he could have forgotten something that huge (although he did forgot about an entire city, New Orleans, for a stretch). You don't accidentally do cocaine. There's a great deal of preparation. You cut up lines. You put on some Clapton. You then put a lamp shade on your head. And finally you snort. You and you alone. Nobody is dropping flakes into your nose passively W. And you don't pass that Rubicon of substance abuse without so much as a memory of what transpired. I don't care how wild those parties were.
And that's not so much the point. I don't care if Bush spent his entire junior year with rolled up $100 bills in his nostrils and razor blades in his pocket, I care how he chose to explain it because it speaks volumes about the type of leader he would become.
An ineffectual president who would easily confuse power with strength, diplomacy with weakness and desire with necessity. A president who would tarnish our image worldwide, spy on his own citizens, demonize dissidents, destroy countries, stand by and watch as our cities are destroyed by natural disasters, stand by while our people lose their homes, lose their jobs, lose their health insurance, lose our goddamn minds. Stand by smug as fuck and never take responsibility for his role in any of it. Nothing is ever his fault. It's the liberal media's fault or Scooter Libby, or Brownie, or Rumsfeld or Tenet or John Yoo.
No accountability. Ever.
Americans can be a very forgiving people. Barack Obama admitted to cocaine use and most people didn't bat an eye. Bill smoked weed and people forgave him...though that could have been because he never inhaled. Maybe W. should just have said he snorted cocaine but he never smelled it.
People make mistakes, recognizing those mistakes and avoiding them in the future is a crucial part of progressing as a person. Fortunately for us Bush never makes mistakes...