Behind the Bushes
Bev Conover Online Journal via ProRev
“In a May 21, 2000, New York Times’ puff piece about the values Bush gained growing up in Midland, Texas, Nicholas D. Kristof quoted Bush’s childhood friend Terry Throckmorton: “‘We were terrible to animals,’ recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. ‘Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,’ Mr. Throckmorton said. ‘Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'”
On Sept. 12, 2000, Baltimore Sun reporter Miriam Miedzian wrote, “So when he was a kid, George W. enjoyed putting firecrackers into frogs, throwing them in the air, and then watching them blow up. Should this be cause for alarm? How relevant is a man’s childhood behavior to what he is like as an adult? And in this case, to what he would be like as president of the United States..” . .
In his Sept. 12 article, White House insiders say Bush is “out of control,” Mike Hersh wrote, “Some among Bush’s trusted White House staff fear what they are seeing and where Bush is taking us. His state of mind hauntingly reminds them of Richard Nixon’s Final Days. They fear Bush is becoming Nixonesque . . . or worse. Although Bush lacks Nixon’s paranoia, he may entertain even more dangerous notions.”
But their desperate late night phone calls to trusted reporters has not seen the light of day in the corporate media. Yet, some of us outside the Beltway have long had an inkling of what we are dealing with. More proof lies in Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary, Journeys with George. Pelosi, the daughter of incoming House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, was a producer for NBC when she wangled the assignment to spend 18 months as part of Bush’s campaign press corps.
From the surface, Pelosi’s “home movie,” as she calls it, seems to be nothing more than a love fest as George W. works to charm the pants off her and the rest of the press corps. The striking thing about this George, even though Karen Hughes is often seen hovering at his elbow, is that he isn’t tongue-tied when he is pumping up his ego, dishing out digs and being sarcastic and crude.
Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon and professor of media studies at New York University, who also sees the darker Bush, said in a Nov. 28 interview with the Toronto Star, “”Bush is not an imbecile. He’s not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he’s incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he’s a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss.”