Sympathy For the W?

In the end, a new portrait of Bush as tired, misunderstood, ruined

by Mark Morford

You have to go deep. You have to scrape and dig and plow, hunt and dive and sigh and even then it might take so long and cost so much invaluable energy and ultimately prove to be so damn near impossible, you will wonder if it's even worth it and why the hell I am even trying because, well, sweet Jesus knows he doesn't deserve it in the first place.

But if you're so inclined, if the temperature of your temperament is just so, if that fourth glass of $10 recession-defying wine is making you feel unusually generous, maybe, just maybe you can muster a bit of sympathy for George W. Bush.

Possible? Insane? Blasphemous? Damn straight.

It's already happening. I've read a number of pieces and a few strange, sepia-toned articles of late (like this one) that, while certainly not daring to paint Bush with any sort of gushing, rose-colored, wasn't-he-an-unrecognized-genius brush of overt kindness, still attempt to give him a far larger dose of humanity and pathos than which might sit well with your very soul.

It's certainly not uncommon, this soft-focus retrospective thing. Every president gets it right about now -- the benefit-of-the-doubt overview, the look back in wistful pondering before the battered chief steps away for good and history gets hold of the whole package and makes it into various flavors of reconstituted mincemeat.

Writers of such pieces invariably comment on how tired and old the president now looks, how exhausted and beaten down, how eight years in office under that kind of constant pressure absolutely destroys your health, your marriage, your skin, your hair color, and by the way what about that legacy?

But with Bush -- the worst-regarded, least popular, most ethically offensive president most of us will ever know -- things are just little bit different. His is that most peculiar and disquieting of exit portraits, a slumpy little guy initially thought to be a middling and relatively harmless puppet, suddenly thrust into history's limelight by the most dire of events, who then squandered every drop of global goodwill and violated most every international law and whored away the very soul of the nation with far more dazzling, efficient success than anyone could have ever imagined.

The upshot is as painful as it is undeniable: Dubya is, whether we like it or not, one of the most extraordinary and influential presidents of all time. Imagine.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/01/02/notes010209.DTL