George W. Bush’s Andover old boy attitude with an Irish interviewer, and Todd C. Murray’s comment upon it, reminded me of my second favorite piece of young Bush lore: the branding.

When I first heard that Bush had defended, and in the New York Times, the branding of members of his frat, it seemed like another hilarious example of the man’s astounding ability to manipulate his public image. How could an Andover/Yalie old-boy with a Connecticut Senator (and possibly Nazi profiteer) grandfather and a former President father position himself as a Washington outsider?

Now, after Abu Ghraib and post-Guantanamo it just seems revelatory.

Here’s the original article:

Not that it needs another blog post, but Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize has shocked my lefty brain. It was hard, so hard, to have lived through the chaos of the 2000 election and its aftermath. There was a general sense of deflation not so much at Gore’s defeat as Bush’s ascendancy. It was impossible to imagine where both men would end up in the year 2007.

Gore has, at this point, assured his reputation as a master of all causes true & pure and positioned himself as a force with which to be reckoned. It’s his game to lose, which is why, presumably, he’s not foolish enough to run for President. Gore’s triumph is as surprising as the complete self-destruction and perpetual humiliation which Bush will spend the rest of his life trying to live down. Frankly, in 2000, it was hard to imagine either men achieving much acclaim or ill-repute; both seemed like mediocrities running in the vacuum of an exiting Big Dog.

Bush appeared to be an idiot-savant heir apparent who was a little less racist and homophobic and classist than other men in his party and Gore was soft centre-left and incapable of campaigning. In his efforts to distance himself from any association with ideas Democratic or Clintonian, Gore was like a dog on its back, begging for the long hand of an imagined Middle America to scratch its stomach. They were, frankly, pathetic. It was inconceivable that one man would end up with a Nobel and the other would go down (at least for the next few decades) as the most unnecessary Presidential war monger in recent memory. (Shallow a defense as it is, let us remember that LBJ and Nixon inherited their idiotic conflict.)

This realization has dovetailed with my own recent thoughts about Boethius and his Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel has been hideously prostituted for television, but for centuries it had been a clever way of expressing the notion that once you’ve peaked there’s nowhere to go but down and once you’ve bottomed out you must also, inevitably, go back up. Both Gore and Bush make me think of– weirdly– Stalin. The Wheel of Fortune metaphor/image’s great flaw is that it ignores the impact of individual personality.

Which is to say, yeah, you might end up at the top of the Politburo, but how does an anonymous bureaucrat end up as an Iron Dictator who falls only upon death? How does a joke President end up destroying his reputation and the reputation of everyone who’s worked for him? And how does a guy best known for wearing too much makeup at a debate end up with a Peace Prize and the toast of the cognoscenti?

Or, to take another example of another candidate having his true nature revealed– would Gore have stood around, helplessly, as a deranged hippie was savaged by the police at one of his events?