Hat tip to the left-wing loon who haunts my alumni email lists, but this time what he sent around is true:

President Bush commuted the sen…

Hat tip to the left-wing loon who haunts my alumni email lists, but this time what he sent around is true:

President Bush commuted the sen…

I mean, let’s look at the life of the man who has done more damage to my Republican Party than either Clinton ever could: When we examine his lengthy parade of catastrophe, he does evoke some grudging sympathy. We have to wince for the man who brags he can dance, but then stumbles all over the ballroom floor. We are not embarrassed by him, but for him. There must be no mirrors in his house. He is so used to shouldering the backpack of failed expectations that he is no longer aware of the weight.

I’ve read several accounts of Bush’s time at Harvard Graduate School of Business. He obviously did not belong there among smart, high achievers, so, as one fellow student said, he sat in the back of the class dressed in blue jeans, spat tobacco juice into a cup and cracked jokes.

In prep school, he was the smirky towel-snapper who teased other boys, but who stood behind the football players when the going got rough. Of all the things he could have inherited, he ended up with the family tangle-tongue curse. Can you imaging the poor kid trying to deliver a talk in speech class without a teleprompter?

What does that say? Here’s a spoiled rich kid with semi-destructive behavior who doesn’t see it as risky because he knows he’s got the family feather bed below him to cushion any fall. He intuitively knows he’s of slim talent, and that gives him feelings of failure because he can’t live up to the family image. So, in the manner of a high school sophomore who can’t measure up, he engages in bratty behavior as a form of protest. Risk-free rebellion. And then he chooses easy, safe ways to minimize chances of failure while looking “bad.” Instead of joining the active-duty military, he joins the Vietnam-era National Guard where he can strut in a snappy uniform and defend Texas from Oklahoma. Then he puts on a cowboy shirt, jeans and boots and swaggers around his ranch, doing “cowboy things” but avoiding real cowboy work such as stringing barbed wire, castrating bulls, and mucking stables.

He decides to become a big oil man, and despite luxurious access to capital and contacts, he becomes a human dry hole. Then he becomes front man for a big-league baseball club. His handlers don’t expect much of him–just drop his name as needed to get taxpayers to build a stadium, and fuel his fantasies by playing catch with Nolen Ryan.

Whereupon, Carl Rove discovers him. He’s looking for a lump of clay to sculp, but when he meets Bush, he realizes he’s stumbled onto Carrera marble.

Why, then, did we choose such a wee man for our leader? Easy. Countries do it all the time. Always have. Mediocrity does not frighten us, challenge us, and does not ask things of us we would rather talk about than actually do.

So, when he makes horrendous mistakes, and even his own party rebels, he turns pouty and, stubbornly says “I’ll show you” as a form of politically spitting tobacco into a cup.

We understand Bush because he is one of us. We lifted him from the political-store shelf, bought him, and took him home. We admired the way he snapped salutes at Marine guards; the way he said “freedom” with such feeling. But most important, we liked his chosen route because it skirted steep hills.

However, we have to be fair–we cannot say he failed his potential. We simply failed ours.

In terms of making a mess, did he make a bigger mess than Woodrow Wilson? Almost certainly not. Yet Wilson was anything but dumb — why, he was head of the best college ever, for starters. Making policy decisions that turn out bad is an even worse criterion for evaluating intelligence, absent anything more, than equating it with glibness.

And it is so entirely beside not only the point of this discussion, but the big point.