By MAUREEN DOWD
I was dubious about Will Ferrell doing his Bush impersonation one more time on Broadway.
As we lurch through the disasters bequeathed by W. -- the economy tanking, 17,000 more troops going to Afghanistan, Chrysler pleading for $9 billion -- would audiences still laugh at Ferrell's lovable fool of a president?
I was wrong. The audience for the Sunday matinee of "You're Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush" howled in delight.
I asked Adam McKay, the former head writer of "Saturday Night Live" who directed and co-wrote the show with Ferrell, why people respond this way to one of the worst presidents ever.
"He's so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there's something really kind of heartbreaking about him," McKay said, calling him "a good-time Charlie" who was "just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that's what his presidency was.
"He doesn't have Cheney's cartoonish need for power and greed that's so off the charts you don't even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld."
In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.
"He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it," Ferrell's W. said. "And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn't been spoken in a thousand years 'Pariff Go Lanerff!' And I just ran."
One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.
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