Post-presidential Bush

Henry Rollins, writing in Vanity Fair, reflecting briefly on George Bush’s future life as Citizen W.  says, in part: 

Bush was never a man I hated. I always thought that he was perhaps not the worst person in the world but was surrounded by earth scorchers who played the hardest of hardball.

 

…my mind wandered to thoughts of George and Laura Bush and what their lives will be like weeks from now, when they leave Washington. I wondered if it will be a stoic and resigned life, walking condominium hallways, the ghosts of thousands of dead soldiers quietly shuffling by. I wondered if their marriage will last. All that time to think about the carnage of those eight years, all the death and destruction, the waste, the ruin, and the misery. The horror.

 

Bush is no doubt a moral person and on those long, quiet Texas evenings, he will have time to contemplate what he is—the ultimate patsy. The product of privilege, power, and an agenda he did little more than sign off on. He is a man-child who left his humanity at the crossroads when he sent young men and women to be mutilated and killed in a foreign land. Their blood permanently stains his hands.

 

George W. Bush is about to start the longest single term of his life. 

 

My own feeling about Bush is that while he’s not consciously evil, he is intellectually and morally indolent.  Because he either does not have the ability to think for himself or is too lazy to do so, he has allowed himself to be manipulated by stronger personalities.  These people are, as Rollins said, hardball-playing scorched earthers.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et al found him to be very malleable putty indeed.  

I doubt he’s going to be troubled by any feelings of guilt for all the suffering and mayhem and death he’s caused because he totally lacks empathy.  For his own purposes, that’s probably a good thing. 

I think his post-presidential life will be an absolutely wretched existence.  The man has lived in a special, privileged bubble for the last eight years, constantly fawned over by sycophantic courtiers reinforcing his belief that he is a Very Important Person.  Those who manipulated and exploited him did it very deferentially, I’m sure.  

But on January 20, 2009, he will begin to discover that he is, in a sense, a pariah.  The only people that will show him deference will be those who are paid to do so.  The neocons will dump him faster than you can say PNAC, and the mainstream of the Republican party will do its very best to forget he ever existed.  Nobody will trot him out as an elder statesman.  Nobody will seek his advice or his views.  And as he said of himself earlier this year when he was disparaging Bill Clinton, he won’t be hanging around the lobby of the UN.

I imagine he'll lead a sort of OJ Simpson-like existence – OJ Simpson pre-prison, that is.  I don't think Laura will leave him, but I don't think any woman would want to be in her shoes.  It’s hard to believe that Bush will bear the change in his circumstances with stoicism.