Who is Bush take two?

The American weekly satire show Saturday Night Live used to have a neat spin on the last Republican president to serve two full terms. First it showed Ronald Reagan as most people thought they knew him - a genial old buffer who was hardly the sharpest pencil in the box. But then, behind closed doors, there was a surprise. Saturday Night Live's Reagan was suddenly revealed as an energetic, high-IQ superman - conversing with Leonid Brezhnev in Russian, scolding the Iranians in Farsi, analysing military data at computer-speed. This Reagan, the TV show suggested, was the real president - hidden behind the bozo exterior.
With Reagan's heir due to be sworn in for his second term at noon tomorrow, the men around George Bush seem keen to give him the Saturday Night Live treatment. "Aides and friends" revealed to Newsweek that the image of Bush as the lazy fratboy, more at home on the Stairmaster than with his briefing books, is a gross caricature. On the contrary, they told the magazine, he is a "restless man who masters details and reads avidly". Chief strategist Karl Rove insists his boss sees the same papers as the rest of the team but "he'll inevitably have thought about three steps ahead of anyone in the room". Even with all that on his plate, Newsweek learned, the president manages to keep up with the latest literary trends, reading Tom Wolfe when he's not devouring fat tomes on the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Perhaps this is indeed the real George Bush who has, after all, built a career by exploiting his enemies' tendency to underestimate him. Or maybe it's wishful thinking, a clue to what kind of president his aides hope the second-term Bush will be.

None of this is entirely in Bush's hands. If US public opinion turns yet harder against the war in Iraq, he may have to cut and run, whatever his intentions now. The rhetoric will certainly be grand tomorrow, as it always is - but it will be reality that decides.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1393617,00.html

... * is like that, relative to his minions.

Somehow, I doubt it...I'm much more inclined to believe Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke than Karl Rove and Andy Card. Sad to see that Newsweek is turning into Pravda Weekly West.

It is funny that the Guardian UK article mentions that SNL skit...that was the FIRST thing I thought of when I read that Newspeak, um, Newsweek article.

...right after I posted this.

Is it just me, or didn't Bush seem restless, but without ANY mastery of details (and issues) at all three debates?

"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

Rove must be a closet Richard Pryor fan.

who reads tomes, he would seem to have the reading comprehension and retention levels of a kindergartener, given that he appears to know absolutely nothing about world history.

...where he points out that the Presidency is not like the Special Olympics, that is, you don't cheer for someone just because they participated. Except that he was much funnier when and how he said it.