It often has been remarked, unerringly, during the past 24 months that the most significant distinction between former President Bush and President Obama is Mr. Bush’s classiness, an underappreciated quality found entirely lacking in his low-riding successor.
The gulf between the leader and the follower was revisited this week with yesterday’s publication of Mr. Bush’s memoir, “Decision Points.” Bouncing among high-powered television and radio interviews, the author has been the consummate gentleman, truly a self-made man who, in spite of being a Texan, restored himself from the deepest personal abyss, overcoming drugs and alcohol in his early 40s.
Mr. Bush’s many critics not only were surprised but petulantly put off when he wrote that the most “hurtful” moment of his Presidency was when the screwball entertainer Kanye West declared that “George Bush doesn’t like black people.” Even after sobering up, Mr. West, true to his lack of class, refuses, down to this morning, to apologize.
Hate-shlepping Enemies Abound
Too bad Mr. Bush is a Republican in a left-controlled media universe. Otherwise, his monstrously large accomplishments, personally and politically, would deem him a world-class hero who merits being modeled by boys everywhere. Instead, we are saturated, ad nauseum, by Mr. Obama’s MTV-level true-believing disciples who have labeled these dark years the Age of Obama. It is nigh onto impossible for Mr. Bush to have his story accurately relayed to the masses when the facilitators, the toxic left-wing media, almost uniformly suffer from three debilitating maladies:
• A disturbing lack of self-awareness,
• a paucity of even rudimentary insight and
• a streak of entitled anger that is unquenchable.
Mr. Obama refuses to let us forget his chronic disease of puerile pettiness, instinctively blaming his cascading policy and personal failures on President Bush — even though, quietly, he has adopted an overwhelming proportion of the most criticized policies of the Bush White House. That is not generally known, and emphatically not publicized by those truth-seekers on the left.
In the face of President Obama’s obsessive schoolyard-bully sniping at Mr. Bush, the former President has gilded his image of astute classiness by remaining silent, no matter how many lies or distortions pour out of the Amateur Hour White House. It drives the left crazy that their favorite political pin cushion won’t bite back, is too modest, to secure, too classy to surrender to the temptation to straighten out the insecure bully.
The Difference Is Difficult to Discern
When he left office — still, technically, less than two years ago, even though Mr. Obama putatively seized, and I do mean seized, control the day after the election — Mr. Bush was the second most vilified President of the past hundred years, after Dick Nixon.
The behavioral differences are scant and amazingly coincidental between Democratic politicians and the 98 percent of the media that is leftist. The left media and left politicians resembled two men inside a donkey costume. They take turns playing the tush-end and the front end. Both, you will notice, regardless of the channel you watch or the newspaper you read, suffer from a severe inability to introspect. Their single talent seems to be mockery. Measured evaluation, by default, has become the exclusive preserve of the other side.
In this morning’s Los Angeles Titanic, Tim Rutten, perhaps the newspaper’s least disciplined essayist, addicted to banshee behavior, takes subtle digs at Mr. Bush’s memoir in an unexpectedly restrained review. You can feel Mr. Rutten’s ruddy face growing redder as he bangs the keys more noisily than before. In the closing paragraph, he can hold off no longer, driving a rusty stake into Mr. Bush’s well-conditioned back.
Left-wing politicians or pundits, they have one speed, fast. They have one volume, loud. They have one mindset, obnoxious. They have one mood, angry. Like the mad bulls in Spain, they see only the red flag before them, vacantly unaware of the beautiful subtleties and nuances that truly shape and enrich our lives. Those are the main reasons we can’t have respectful dialogue with the other side.
