Former President George W. Bush on the set of an interview, February 27, 2017. (Photo: Nathan Congleton / Flickr)
With Washington, DC, now transformed into a perpetual nonsense machine, it was easy to miss the George W. Bush Revisionist History Tour as it slid through the shallow plastic media trench last week on rails lubricated with old tears, but there he was. After eight years of almost complete radio silence, the former president was all over the place, yukking it up with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel to peddle his new book and flash that folksy smirk we came to know so well.
So what? Every celebrity does a book, especially former presidents, and it is noteworthy that Bush had the common decency to put some rigging tape over his mouth while President Obama was in office. It didn’t take long, though, for things to get weird. A lot of people who really should know better — in the print, network and online news media, on social media and other forums, and in “real life” — got all goo-goo-eyed over him. People I’ve known for years exclaimed over how funny and cute he was on Ellen! And how he’s friends with Michelle Obama! And isn’t he just so much better than Trump?
Full stop. We have just lost cabin pressure.
Let’s start with the book. It is a collection of some 66 Bush-painted portraits of the faces of men and women who got blown apart one way or another in Iraq and Afghanistan. The portraits of those maimed in Iraq specifically depict soldiers in muted agony delivered to their current damaged estate by the artist formerly known as George, who threw them into that meat grinder for money on a raft of obvious lies. If one had a soul, the act of painting the faces of your victims would seem like a fate worse than death, a sorrowful tour of self-loathing and regret as your brush rounded out the features of those laid low by your faithless greed. But no, there was Bush on the television, smiling and smiling with the book in his lap, utterly oblivious to the…