I'll Put My Money on Self-Pity

I’m late to the party over Bush’s tear after a meeting with the mother of a Marine casualty—Google Blogs records 35 hits for “Bush tears” within the last 12 hours, and the picture seems to be everywhere. But I’m not crazy about the analysis so far.

Seems to me there are three possibilities here:

• Compassion
• Crocodile
• Self-pity

Crocodile sounds like a winner for the cartoonists, but it seems to require a fairly sophisticated capacity for dissimulation—in Touchstone’s analysis, the “lie circumstantial,” rather than the “lie direct.”
Compassion is a hard sell for a guy who presided over 152 executions, finding a few giggles along the way. It is, of course, possible that is reaction was some combination of two, or three.

Still, I’ll put my money on self-pity.