Dear Leader is probably going to have another temper tantrum, real soon, because of the
cover story of the new issue of Newsweek.
Here's the cover:
(couldn't find a bigger version, but I think the layout is clear) Found a decent-sized version
The article, which I'll excerpt below, basically boils down to "Daddy has come to save Junior's ass, again." Think Junior will take this well? I don't.
In Houston the phones started ringing, and Bush 41 staffers were pulled away from their pizza. Reporters were calling and e-mailing: would 41 talk about 43's shake-up? The answer was no, though two perfunctory statements were issued (one for the College Station Eagle and one, as the former president put it, "for everybody else"). Still, the reality spoke for itself. Dad's team was back--a remarkable course correction in the political life of the son and, quite possibly, in the life of the nation.
The Bush family psychodrama is the stuff of perennial speculation but little information, since the two people who know the most about it--the father and the son--speak of it so infrequently. Yet its complexity, its blend of love and rivalry, is rich analytical territory. (Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, an unlikely e-mail pal of 41's, has spent so much time contemplating the generational drama that she ultimately published an excellent book on the topic, "Bushworld"; it ran to 544 pages.) In perhaps the most revealing on-the-record remark about their relationship made by either man, the son once told Bob Woodward that his father is "the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."
[...]
Given the midterm reaction to the son's inattention to alliances and to the details of postwar Iraq, it is clear that many Americans are nostalgic for the skills and sensibility the first President Bush brought to the Oval Office--a reversal of historical fortune that has come, sadly for the father, at the expense of his son.
A second article, in the same issue, is called The Rescue Squad, about Bush the Elder's set of fixers that he's sending in to pull Junior's bacon out of the fire. Just one paragraph from that:
For one thing, Baker still has to convince George W. Bush. At his post-election press conference, the president looked like a base runner trapped in a rundown, unable to go forward or scurry back. The president is probably stuck--he will have to embrace some kind of compromise approach on Iraq. He didn't look too happy about it. As he japed and mugged and fidgeted, he seemed worried by something more than Iraq or the election returns; his whole character appeared to be wrestling with some more personal, inner demon. Last week Bush's aides were resisting the story line that Bush was caught in a cosmic episode of "Father Knows Best." The president himself was said to be indifferent to the press chatter. "I don't care," he told his advisers when they asked him, the morning after the elections, how he wanted to deal publicly with the suggestion that he was picking one of his father's advisers. "He doesn't think the neocons ran him over a cliff and now he has to go to Dad," said a senior Bush aide, preferring to remain anonymous while discussing Oval Office conversations. "It's not the way he sees this. He wants the best and brightest."
So, one of the biggest weekly newsmagazines has just run a major set of articles calling the President a failed man who needs to have his Daddy save him from himself. Assuming that Bush sees these articles (a big if, I'm sure), the resulting temper tantrums would be wonderful to behold.
-dms