He is universally condemned for his lack of candor, and yet how many reviews have you read to date that even mention his disclosure of a brief affair with Katy Perry, then high in the charts with her "I Kissed a Girl," in the last months of his presidency? “The thought of Katy with her tongue halfway down the throat of a [Dallas] Cowboys cheerleader made it so I could have driven nails with [it],” isn’t quite candid enough for you, lamestreamers? And how about the author's admission that when Brokeback Mountain was screened for him and Laura and the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds and the Powells in the White House theatre, he got so turned on watching Jake Gyllenhal and the late Heath Ledger kissing that he had to pretend to have just remembered an important foreign policy decision he had to make, and excused himself to take matters into his own hands, if you will, in the nearest gentlemen’s room.
Much has been made of his assertion that Kanye West’s remarks about his indifference to black people after the flooding of New Orleans was the most disheartening moment of his eight years in office — more disheartening, that is, than learning that another couple of dozen American servicepersons had been blown to pieces in Iraq. While ridiculing him for that, the lamestreamers conveniently ignore his having had the moral courage to nominate not only a black woman, but one with a weird (and not just Shaniqu'aa-weird!) given name, as Secretary of State. He was advised that Condoleeza Rice’s appointment would make America a laughingstock, but he stuck to his guns.
Anyone like myself, whose enthusiasm for sports has always far exceeded his aptitude, can feel the author’s pain when he talks about how, when he tried out for the Yale football team in 1965, the team’s coach, Solly Hemus, snickered at him openly and suggested he might be better suited to cheerleading. Of course that humiliation was nothing compared to that which GWB suffered in his boyhood, when he commonly overheard his mother and handsome former baseball and Navy hero father refer to him in conversation as either “the little dickhead” or Turdblossom, which scarring appellation he would famously repurpose later in life. Those of us who have grown up with a more charismatic younger sibling — former Florida governor Jeb Bush in his case, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick in my own — can identify all too easily with that particular brand of agony.
Having assumed that the only music he liked was by Republican shitkickers, I was intrigued, speaking of Turdblossom, to learn that GWB tried to commission Trent Reznor to compose something more contemporary than “Hail to the Chief” to be used for his entrance music, but that Karl Rove overruled the idea. The reader can certainly understand why GWB was thinking at one point of having Rove pushed out of Air Force One somewhere over the middle of the Antarctic, only for his state visit to Antarctica to be cancelled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
I have yet to see a single mention, laudatory or otherwise, of GWB’s having sent Aung San Suu Kyi a Sony PlayStation 3 in 2007 to make just a little more bearable her ongoing house arrest in Burma, or Myanmar, or whatever it’s calling itself this week, though the press would surely be all over New Zealand’s John Kay or the Bahamas’ Hubert Alexander Ingraham having demonstrated comparable generosity and thoughtfulness. What does this profoundly good man have to do for a syllable of lamestream approbation?
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