Our Crying, Paranoid, Ghost-Seeing President:
No, no, no. Oh, fuck no. The Rude Pundit doesn't wanna know - doesn't fuckin' care that George W. Bush cries like a beaten bitch puppy nearly every day, as Robert Draper writes in his book Dead Certain (unpublished subtitle: "Alas, America, We Are So Very Fucked"). Bush told Draper, "Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency. This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity. I have got God's shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot. I do a lot of crying in this job. I will bet I have shed more tears than you can count as president." There's your picture: the Leader of the Free World sitting in the Oval Office weeping. Goddamn, that's some inspirational shit.

As Paul Begala said on CNN's Situation Room yesterday, "[F]orgive me if I don't join in his pity party. The tears he shed are nothing compared to the tears of the moms and the dads and the wives of -- of the men and women who have been killed in combat because of this god-awful war that I believe and most Americans believe that he lied us into. It's a really unseemly thing for him to be whining about how hard he's got it."

It's such a manipulative, bullshit thing for Bush to say, too. Like a white guy who says, "Nigger" and then talks about how he's got black friends. How are we supposed to react, huh? "Oh, shit, he's not so bad 'cause he cries? How can anyone hate a grown man who admits that he weeps on the invisible shoulder of a magical sky wizard?" Not that he'd give a happy monkey fuck how we react, 'cause, see, Bush says repeatedly to Draper, he doesn't listen to polls: "I understand you can't let polls tell you what to think."

Now, check out this next quote and decontextualize it for just a sec - think about some random guy at a neighborhood bar telling you this: "When I'm out in the public...I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me." However much of it may be true, although the Rude Pundit doesn't really know many "people" and even less soldiers who give a fuck what the President is doing day to day, that's some kind of demented cocktail of massive ego and shit-yourself paranoia the President is sucking back.

In the same interview, Bush tries to offer insight into his decision-making process: "I know it's difficult. I do know—y'know, how do you decide, how do you learn to decide things? When you make up your mind, and you stick by it." Reading what Bush has to say about things when he's trying to be profound is not unlike watching a severely mentally disabled man with a raging hard-on run around his uncle's barn trying to fuck whatever animals will stand still long enough for him to thrust a few times. The goat won't stay still? Then move on to the donkey. Donkey's wiggling around? Head over to the cow or the chickens. It ain't pretty, and everything's just gonna end up covered in drool and semen.

Much has been made of Bush's malignant political pronouncements in the book, like "I'm playing for October-November" when it comes to the Iraq War, so that the candidates for President will realize they're gonna inherit the war. But surely we've always known that everything Bush does is just for cynical self-preservation and powermongering. Hell, at this point, it seems like he's just "playing" to get as high a speaker's fee as he possibly can once he's out of office.

Just from the excerpts and reviews, there's enough repugnant shit in the book to fill Dick Cheney's man-sized safe, including that the reason Bush was so disengaged during his video strategy conference after Hurricane Katrina is that he had been mountain biking and swimming so hard in Crawford the day before, he was too "gassed" to ask questions. That means that the day before a massive hurricane hit the United States, the President was getting in his cardio to the point where he couldn't function the next day. Comforting, no?

From the excerpts the Rude Pundit's read so far, here's an interesting couple of tidbits: Bush tells Draper that he hasn't had a drink in twenty years. But Draper also relates a story that Bush told a friend: after exercising in the White House gym in 1992, when his father was President, Bush was near the Lincoln Bedroom and "he saw ghosts - coming out of the wall." This was a man in his mid-forties. Who says he wasn't drinking at the time.

But, then again, hasn't his whole life been about phantom images, of others, of himself.