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Saturday, November 11, 2006

At last, maybe now we can start talking about how Dim Son's daddy issues got us into this mess
Posted by Jill | 9:51 PM
I've been saying for years that George W. Bush has been on a lifelong quest to prove that his penis is bigger than his daddy's. It's clear that his loathing for his father has made him a chronic fuckup and the Designated Family Shithead at the same time as he desperately craves his father's approval. Why anyone thought that this guy, who had failed at every endeavor he'd ever tried and ended up having to be bailed out by the friends of the father he both loathes and craves, would be a good president, I have no idea.

But people are finally beginning to talk about the Bush family psychodrama that most have ignored the last six years.

First it was Patti Davis' commentary at Newsweek online, and now it's the U.K. Times:

THE White House was in no mood this week to discuss President Bush’s psychological state after an election defeat that he himself had described as “a thumping”.

Tony Snow, Mr Bush’s press secretary, said: “The President is not a guy who — he doesn’t get on the couch — what he does is [say], ‘What it is, is what it is’ ”.

But if the President ever did lie down on a therapist’s couch, any psychoanalyst worth the name would begin by asking about his relationship with his father, George H. W. Bush. The 41st US President is a figure that his son, George W. Bush, the 43rd President, has variously ignored, clung to, sought the approval of and competed with. Some commentators have long since taken to describing an oedipal struggle between them.

“You want to go mano a mano right here?” Bush Jr demanded after being told off by his father for drink-driving in the Seventies, after an incident when he had dragged a neighbour’s rubbish down the street behind his car.

His brother, Jeb (always regarded by his parents as the brighter one and more likely to succeed in politics) tried to defuse the row, telling his father that George had got into Harvard Business School. “Oh, I’m not going,” said the wayward son, “I just wanted to let you know I could get into it [he did go].”

When he first ran for Congress (unsuccessfully) he would pull out his birth certificate at campaign appearances to prove his full name was not the same as his dad’s.

But Bush Sr has always been there when times are bad. And the father’s inner circle from his White House years now appears to be riding to the rescue of the son. The appointment this week of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, together with the looming report from James Baker’s commission, are together supposed to be signalling a new direction for the Iraq war.

It was ever thus. When the attempts of Bush Jr to follow his father into the oil business were floundering, it was the friends of Bush Sr who bailed him out. In 1986 Harken Oil & Gas bought out Bush Jr’s holding in Spectrum oil in an over-the-odds deal, an apparent favour to the son of the Vice-President’s son. “His name was George Bush,” said Phil Kendrick, Harken’s founder, and “that was worth the money they paid him.”

Such kindly interventions must inevitably include a stab of humiliation for his son, not least because Bush Jr, whose fiery impetuosity is thought to come from his mother rather than his father, has tried so hard to beat his father, in politics and in war.

[snip]

As he approaches the final two years of his presidency, it may be time to reflect how Bush Jr has more in common with his father in failure than he did when it was all going so well. Both men have a rigid belief that they are right, even when those around them tell them they are not.


The Bush family dynamic, and indeed George W. Bush's whole life story, is the stuff of Greek tragedy. It's just a shame that they've been given an entire country -- twice -- in which to act out their little drama.
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