Next-level GW Bush diss: http://t.co/VXNfA4hWHj pic.twitter.com/0j96nYbAx2
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) December 2, 2014
Now that is how one commits The Review Direct. Christian Lorentzen, at the London Review of Books, on “Dad & Jr.”:
… Reviewers have welcomed 41: A Portrait of My Father like they miss father and son. Or maybe it’s ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’…‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial Times. ‘Bush Jr’s new memoir doesn’t feel ghostwritten: his low-key Texas swagger permeates every page.’ Actually it gives every indication of being ghostwritten, and there was never much ‘low-key’ about George W. Bush. As with Decision Points (2010), the ghost is Chris Michel, who came by his folksiness via California and Yale, where he was a friend of Bush’s daughter Barbara before joining the White House speechwriting team in 2003 and rising through the ranks during the lame duck years. This time around the intended audience seems to be 11-year-olds of all ages….
The ‘yo, Blair’ voice is gone, but there’s something of the Bush style of saying you’re doing the opposite of what you’re really doing. ‘He never complained. Self-pity is not in George Bush’s DNA,’ we read on the first page. We’re also told that Dad never brags. What follows is a litany of boasts and grievances…
The grievances take in Nixon, for the ‘putrid swamp’ of Watergate; Reagan, for his theatrical upstaging of Bush in a 1980 debate in New Hampshire; Dan Rather, the presenter who pursued a vendetta against both Dad and Jr (and lost his job the second time around); Patrick Buchanan, whose demagoguery in the 1992 primaries distracted the homophobic, sexist and racist elements of the GOP base; Ross Perot, an old friend whose conspiracy theories caused him to turn on Bush and tilted the 1992 election to Clinton; Saddam Hussein; and Nancy Reagan, who never in eight years invited Mother for a proper tour of the White House…
Late Night Open Thread: Old Times There Are Not ForgottenPost + Comments (66)