The Real W

Ten feet behind my right shoulder, W is on CNN marveling over a new George W. Bush elementary school. He’s rattling on about how wonderful it is to see children learn, how proud he is to see his name in such a context, how much he looks forward to telling Laura blah blah.

All over America right thinking liberals are saying: boy what a lying weasely creep.

I offer an alternate theory: I think he means it. Recall that aside from being a lying, weasely creep (and a rich one, at that), he is a deeply flawed human being. He’s not very bright. He may have some kind of learning disability. He got into Yale on fake papers. He’s had to put up with years of humiliation knowing that he’s a doofus and a fraud.

He has developed some, shall we say, unwholesome, devices for acting out his despair (and our grandchildren will be paying the bills). But this is also a guy who married the school librarian. I think at a moment like this, you just may be seeing him at his most vulnerable and exposed.

Fn.: Back in the Pleistocene when I was in college, my girlfriend gave me a copy of an essay called, I think, “Nightmares of Eminent People,” by, I believe, Bertrand Russell. Stalin’s nightmare is that he dies and goes to hell and is committed to the company of Quakers who feed him cocoa and read him tracts…