That title is actually relevant because this post is about George W. Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points. Gen. J.C. Christian, Patriot, was not impressed:
The presidential memoir serves an important function in our society. It provides a former president with an opportunity to shape how we will be viewed by history.
They aren’t easy books to write. Facts create roadblocks that the ex-president must overcome. Most attempt to do so by twisting and tearing at the facts until an acceptable truth emerges. My president, Our Glorious Leader George W. Bush, boldly took another approach. He tortured the facts until they confessed to their treachery. Then, He summarily executed them with a Hellfire-C missile launched from a Predator drone.
And the results are breathtaking. I stood up and cheered when I read His claim that waterboarding isn’t torture because He paid His lawyers to say it isn’t. That’s chutzpah, my friends. It’s a zen kind of chutzpah, one that is only achieved when self delusion and a supreme lack of self-awareness come into perfect balance.
I was also very moved by His recounting of His childhood encounter with the Bush family fetus jar. It was very vividly written. I can almost see Barbara Bush standing there in her blue gown, arms outstretched as she presents the fetus jar to young W. “Hold him, W,” she screeches, her pearls rattling angrily, “kiss your little dead fetus brother; kiss him now, you little mistake!”
Now that’s parenthood. It’s no wonder He became what He is today.
Since I have not read Decision Points and have no plans to do so, I had to Google “Decision Points fetus jar” to see what this was about. I mean, the Bush family kept a jar with a fetus inside it? I mean, what? I admit it, my disrespect for all things Bush is second to none, but even I could not convince my imagination to conceive of fetus jar as family heirloom.
That was, of course, solely a measure of my own mental limitations:
The Daily Beast reports:
Undoubtedly the most startling moment in Matt Lauer’s conversation with George W. Bush came in the first five minutes of the interview, when Bush recounted his mother’s miscarriage—and how she had showed him the fetus in a jar.
“She says to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s a fetus,’” Bush recounted to Lauer, referring to himself in the third person. “There’s no question that it affected me,” Bush added.
During a mostly friendly back-and-forth on the younger Bush’s time in office, it was a bizarre revelation, and Lauer quickly steered the former president to the more policy-related question of what bearing the episode might have had on his pro-life position while the oddity of the story itself was left unexplored.
The episode helped him bond with his mother, Bush insisted on NBC’s Today show Monday. In his memoir, Decision Points, which Lauer read from, Bush wrote: “I never expected to see the remains of the fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital.”
Bush’s recounting of the incident was brief, and Lauer did not press for logistics, leaving some questions unanswered, including who put the fetus in a jar? Where is it now? And why did Barbara decide to preserve her unborn child in a jar—and then show her son?
Bush reportedly got permission from his mother before writing about the horrifying event in his autobiography, which comes out today. “The purpose of this story was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship,” he told Lauer.
I can add nothing of value to the power of that quote.
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