...Motherfucker that ever strolled about on the face of the earth?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/washington/02book.html?hpIn Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy
By JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — When President Bush is asked what he plans to do when he leaves office, he often replies curtly: “I don’t have that much time to think beyond my presidency” or “I’m going to sprint to the finish.”
But in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”
Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”
-snip-
As Mr. Draper described it, Mr. Bush began the interview process over lunch last Dec. 12, in a week when he suddenly had free time because his highly anticipated announcement of a new Iraq strategy had been postponed.
Sitting in an anteroom of the Oval Office, he eschewed the more formal White House menu for comfort food — a low-fat hotdog and ice cream — and bitingly told an aide who peeked in on the session that his time with Mr. Draper was “worthless anyway.”
But as Mr. Draper described it, and as the transcripts show, Mr. Bush warmed up considerably over the intervening interviews, chewing on an unlit cigar, jubilantly swatting at flies between making solemn points, propping his feet up on a table or stopping him at points to say emphatically, “I want you to get this” or “I want this damn book to be right.”
-snip-
“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”
In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”
And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.”
-snip-
Mr. Bush conveyed a level of sanguinity with his unpopularity. Mr. Draper recalled that in their last meeting, in May, Mr. Bush pointed outside to his dog, Barney, and said, “That guy who said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog, knew what he was talking about.”
He otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.
“I’ve been here too long,”Yeah, Motherfucker, seven years too long. Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper. “Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.”
But he said he saw his unpopularity as a natural result of his decision to pursue a strategy in which he believed. “I made a decision to lead,” he said, “One, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance, and that may be true. But the fundamental question is, is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”
Very short answer, Motherfucker, fuck no.-snip-
It did not, but soon enough, somebody else will make the decisions on Iraq. And then, Mr. Bush said, he would still be pursuing his “freedom agenda” at his institute, modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where young democratic leaders from around the world would study.
“Sixty-two is really young,” Mr. Bush said, “and yet I’ll be through with my presidency.”
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