George W. Bushâ€™s approval rating has now reached the political equivalent of absolute zero. Why, people are wondering all over the media, doesnâ€™t the man do something about it? At least make an effort, for Christâ€™s sake. Donâ€™t just stand there.

Fire Gonzales, for instance. Get out of Iraq, even. Anything. But no, he goes and gives a get-out-of jail card to Libby instead. Doesnâ€™t he care about his place in history?

Actually he does. Bush cares very deeply about that very thing. He just has a different place in mind than we do.

Most of us presume, very naturally, that the president must prefer success over failure. This is what makes it so puzzling, so incomprehensible, to watch the man cling so stubbornly to failed policies and people.

But this presumption ignores the entire arc of Bushâ€™s life. For him, success is failure. For him, victory never meant surpassing his father; it meant letting him down. The younger Bushâ€™s career can only be understood as a lifelong obsession with disappointing the father he so plainly hates.

Bush followed his fatherâ€™s footsteps through Yale, as a pilot, as a candidate for Congress, and as a Texas businessman. Unable to fill any of those footprints, he made each one seem unimportant by pretending contempt for it.

He got Câ€™s where his father got Aâ€™s; he dodged the combat flying that made his father a hero; he burned through the seed money his fatherâ€™s friends gave him; he failed in the oil business which had made his father rich. Time after time daddy bailed him out; time after time, he failed again until the last bail-out left him as the front man for the investors in a baseball team.

Then, with no effort on his own part, Bush was taken in hand by a sleazy political op who realized that the fatherâ€™s name and money would be enough to elect the wayward son governor of Texas. (In fact, a significant percentage of Texas voters thought the son was his father.) And next thing you know, Rove had hand-carried his meal ticket into the White House.

Take that, you old fart, junior must have told himself as he took the oath of office. You ainâ€™t so hot. Any asshole can get to be president. But that wasnâ€™t enough. Deep inside, where the snakes writhed in the wayward sonâ€™s unconscious, there was still work to do.

What better way to humiliate his father than to degrade the supreme office the old man had spent his life to reach? What sweeter revenge than to slime, like a slug, the presidency itself? And so he enlisted Rumsfeld and Cheney, his fatherâ€™s ancient enemies, to help in the symbolic killing of his father.

A successful presidency, the junior Bush must have known in his heart, was beyond his limited capacities. Just as well, too, since becoming a better president than his father would have had the wrong effect entirely. It would have made the old bastard proud.

The point had never been to make his father proud â€” that would have required effortâ€” but to make him sad and angry. His role wasnâ€™t the good son, it was the black sheep.

And now George W. Bush had been given the power to put his father through the greatest disappointment of them all. He would become, and nobody could stop him, the worst president in history.

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Jerome Doolittle

Bad Attitudes

http://badattitudes.com/MT/



About author Jerome Doolittle blogs at Jerome Doolittle blogs at Bad Attitudes . Former newspaperman and diplomat; speechwriter for President Carter; author of the Tom Bethany mystery series.