George W Bush Is Worried about His Hamstrings

Reuters Image via The Telegraph

There is no wingnut on the face of the earth that we want to keep talking more than GW Bush, who's George W. Bush Presidential Center, Steve Benen notes, opens on May 1st, 10 years to the day after the "Mission Accomplished" moment. May the first is also May Day, which has pagan roots, but in this context is best remembered as International Workers Day, this year in honor of the millions of workers who lost their jobs in the Little Bush Depression. Irony abounds.

In 1958, Eisenhower, worried about the communist influence of May Day, decided to make May 1st "Law Day, U.S.A." It's the day we contemplate the importance of law in our society. You know, laws like anti-fraud statutes that the Bush administration ignored while letting Wall Street stamp crap paper AAA so they could sell it to their unsuspecting customers (your retirement fund) while they shorted it. Like laws against torture, war crimes, lying to congress, and other fun conventions that Ike thought were important.

"Laws are silent in times of war."--Cicero

All those pesky laws were "just a spring clean for the May queen" George Bush, who, to be fair, was simply following the if-the-President-does-it-it's-not-illegal Nixonian logic that's been screwing us for decades. In Bush's case, it led to justifications for hypothetical child testicle crushing. Talk about compassionate conservatism.

Reuters image via the WSJ

But we're here to let Bush do the talking, which he did in length to the Dallas Morning News.

"People ask me, ‘What about the economy?'" Bush said. "My answer is, 'Why don’t you go hire an economist? Or hire five economists and get 15 different opinions?'"

W with the defensive misdirect!

Bush's monthly job creation average in non-recession months was 68,000. When Obama's monthly total dropped to 80 some-odd thousand, the right wing went nuts.

That was the commie Ezra Klein being nice to the former President. Let's see what the nice folks at the conservative Wall Street Journal had to say about the George W Bush Memorial Crater Economy:

The current President Bush, once taking account how long he’s been in office, shows the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.

Seems liberals and conservatives agree. We could ask 13 more economists about the Bush economy, which ended in the biggest recession since the Great Depression (bigger than the previous four recessions combined) and we'd get the same answer. Bush's final GDP, in 4Q2008, was negative 9%. We were shedding jobs at about 800,000 per month when Obama took over. No economist worth his weight in bullshit would try to make that disaster look good.

"My only point," Bush said, "is that when there’s an objective analysis of our fiscal record, people will say, 'Well, that’s different than I thought.'"

AP image via Maddow Blog

I hope that's not his only point, but even wingnut economists tend to frown on negative 9% GDP.

The great thing about the quote "Or hire five economists and get 15 different opinions?" is that it tells us that GW Bush is either bullshtiting, or he thinks economists all give three answers to every question. If that's the kind of economists he was listening to (Glenn Hubbard, et al) then that certainly explains the Little Bush Depression.

The quote is classic Bush, blaming the fact that Bushonomics didn't work on his economists, who apparently could never give him a good marketing strategy for explaining their systematic looting of trillions of dollars.

Wearing a light blue, open-collar shirt, Bush, 66, said repeatedly that he’s "comfortable" with both life and legacy. Among his most pressing concerns was whether his hamstrings were ready for a mountain bike ride later that day.

Bush "repeatedly" saying that he's comfortable is a tell that he's not comfortable, but he wants us to think he is. He wants us to think that his contemplative self portrait from the shower isn't guilty self reflection. He wants us to think that painting his feet in the bathtub isn't some kind of sign that he feels guilty for all the Iraq war veterans who lost their feet. His eagerness to assure us of his comfort is oddly reminiscent of how the God of the Bible seems really concerned that we might not believe in him.

I like to think that any human who lied his country into a $6 trillion dollar war that maimed and killed millions would have more pressing concerns than hamstrings. Either GW is bullshtiting us, or he really does worry about the persistent violence in Iraq. Maybe he does feel guilty about the millions of people whose lives were ruined by the war.

Or maybe he's just a sociopath.

"Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn't necessarily want to have happen," he said.

I think I actually missed the guy.

He didn't necessarily want 9-11 to happen, but he didn't do much to stop it. In fact, he didn't listen to the people who were trying to warn him it would happen, having famously said to the CIA operative who gave him the daily briefing, on Aug 6, that Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US: "You've covered your ass, now." He didn't necessarily want 9-11 to happen, but since the PNAC was saying we'd need a "new Pearl Harbor" to get involved in the middle east the way the neo-cons really wanted to, well, it was convenient.

GW Bush being greeted as a liberator, image via The Telegraph

And he didn't necessarily want a housing bubble that would ruin the world economy, but it's not like he did anything to stop it. He didn't necessarily want to ignore Afghanistan for most of a decade, or let Bin Laden get away from Tora Bora, or waste trillions rebuilding Iraq and making his war contractor friends rich, but, you know, he's comfortable with it.

He likewise reiterated his support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying that he’s "confident the decisions were made the right way."

That's Bushian code for "we did exactly what we wanted to do and you guys can all suck it if you don''t like it."

"I’m comfortable with what I did," he said. "I’m comfortable with who I am."

I'm comfortable with letting him talk. After all, there's no better advertisement for voting for Democrats than this war mongering, veteran ignoring, economy destroying, upward redistributing hamstrung wingnut who, thank goodness, will probably keep talking until the day he dies, which, with any luck, will be a long time from now.

That's right, you just heard me wish GW Bush a long life. After all, if he died young, he wouldn't get to worry about his hamstrings, which must be torture.