Dubya puts his thumb in it
Oh, George, to your many critics you didn’t sound that much more coherent after drying-out and freeing yourself from your two best friends until the age of 40 — Bourbon and 7-UP.
The memoir starts in alcoholism and ends, literally, in dog shit — along the way we get 9/11, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the financial meltdown — but there is no admission of mistakes and precious little sense of the real George.
Instead of self-awareness, we get self-absorption. George goes out of his way to testify how much he “adores” his father and how all those stories about the intense rivalry between the father and son presidents is nonsense. But he protests way too much and it is evident the defining relationship in his life is with his steely, domineering mother, Barbara.
In one bizarre episode she gives her 14-year-old son a jar to study after he has just driven her to the hospital, it contains a foetus she has just miscarried.
After boozing his way through Yale like some dumb-ass frat boy Republican jock straight out of National Lampoon’s classic movie Animal House, young George sets out to live free and “find himself”.
He tries to paint it as a freewheeling, experimental phase in his life, but it comes across like he was just drifting, boozing and having fun lurching from job to job with daddy’s friends and daddy’s money always looming in the background before he was pushed into Texas politics in the 1980s on the back of daddy’s vice-presidential coat tails before quitting the booze in 1986 and gaining a major league baseball team two years later.
Though he doesn’t go into too many details, reading between the lines it is quite clear he was often an obnoxious drunk, and when he did finally quit, he became what is known as a dry-drunk, substituting one addiction for another, this time an obsessive pursuit of power which saw him chew-up and spit out anyone who got in his way.
George is very close to the Almighty, judging by the guidance Our Lord has given him over the years, and isn’t it great that Jesus is clearly — despite biblical evidence to the contrary — a right wing Republican? And surely the hand of the Creator was evident when George was feeling unworthy of trying for high office — then, suddenly, he listened to a sermon about how Moses had overcome his own shyness and self-doubt to lead his people to the promised land — George didn’t need anymore hints, God wanted him to run for Texas governor in 1994 and that was that.
From there he was persuaded — reluctantly as ever — to seek the presidency in 2000.
George was always lucky in his opponents, both presidential runs should have ended in defeat, but both times the Democrats put up a patrician, aloof, nerd against him. And both times George just shaded it with a mixture of appealing to the lowest common political denominator coupled with the lowest form of attack politics.
Even so, George fails to mention that Al Gore actually got more votes than him nationally, as Bush scratches around to try and underplay the shenanigans in Florida — where his brother just happened to be governor — which handed him the White House thanks to a few hanging chads.
In 2004 George, dogged by draft-dodging allegations which this book does little to dispel, savagely ripped apart the Vietnam record of genuine war hero John Kerry.
One clear thing that does shine through these memoirs is that nothing is ever George’s fault, there is always someone else to blame, if not a person then the booze.
But he does admit that his 25 years of hard drinking helped shape his convictions.
Well, yes they did George, especially that conviction for drink driving in 1975 that you tried so hard to keep under wraps. The Democrats’ leaking of the story a week before the 2000 election was to blame for his lack of a clear majority in the election, not the fact he covered it up.
But George wasn’t lying, he was just trying to protect his girls, Barbara and Jenna. How could he tell them the truth after giving them stern lectures on the evils of drink driving, he muses in an incredible orgy of twisted logic, better to know dad’s a liar in the future, than find out he was a drunk driver in the past, eh, George?
Such bizarre contortions are also used to justify his defining legacy, the Iraq war. Saddam had to be taken out, he reasons at one point, because the dictator had used poison gas against his own people. But George’s selective memory is at play again, as he fails to mention that Saddam’s gas attack on Halabja in 1988 is widely believed to have been carried out with the connivance of the CIA, and it is a matter of record senior figures Bush appointed to his administration were happy to broker lucrative business deals with Saddam after the mass slaughter.
With Hurricane Katrina, Bush says the problem was not that he took the wrong decisions, just that it took him too long to make the right ones.
He fails to see the contradiction on 9/11, when he admits terrified Americans wanted to see their president leading from the front in DC, yet he fled half way across the continent to a bunker in Nebraska.
The image of the Bush White House is one of constant squabbling and rows amongst his top team.
Bush seems to have been like a presidential cushion — bearing the imprint of the last person to sit on him. A good thing when those dominating him are U2’s Bono over the need for massive aid and HIV involvement in Africa, and in the case of the economic realists who persuaded Bush to abandon his free market rhetoric and intervene to save capitalism from collapse in the financial crisis. But the results were chillingly bad and globally disastrous when his mind was controlled by hawks like Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney who led him to lead the US into awful war, torture and the suspension of the ideals of liberty it was founded upon.
Bush has long been labelled lazy and lacking in ideas and the fact that this book has already been accused of plagiarising many other accounts of his time in office, which the White House rubbished when they were first published, underline those charges against him in a tragi-farcical way redolent of the 43rd president of the United States.
In an admission more telling than he probably realises, Bush said the memoirs of post-civil war president Ulysses S Grant were an inspiration for his own biography.
Did he get the irony? Surely he must know Grant is generally regarded as probably the worst president in US history — the worst until George W Bush walked into the White House that is.
Bush closes the book by recounting his return to Dallas and taking his Scottish terrier Barney for a walk: “Barney spotted our neighbour’s lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years.”
Oh, George, at least Barney didn’t produce 477 pages of the stuff like you just have.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
