Doubleyood

After all the angst – not to mention acid reflux – George W. Bush has inflicted on many of us over the past eight years, as we tried to figure out what in the hell he thought he was doing, a pretty canny explanation comes from Adam McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live:

"He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him," McKay said, calling him "a good-time Charlie" who was "just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

"He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld."

This is what McKay told Maureen Dowd when she went to see Will Ferrell in “You’re Welcome America,” co-written and directed by McKay and now playing on Broadway. In the end, Bush may be kind of sad, perhaps, but all the more exacerbating for his clueless self-indulgence, not to mention genetic gangrene and the senseless consequences of his reign of error.