Right Wing Nut House

The revelation today by the New York Times that an old family friend taped dozens of conversations with the future President between 1998 and the Republican Convention in 2000 reveal the private George Bush to be pretty much the same as the man Americans have come to know over the last 4 years.

So this is news?

Doug Wead, a friend and former aide to the President’s father taped the conversations for several reasons:

Mr. Wead said he recorded the conversations because he viewed Mr. Bush as a historic figure, but he said he knew that the president might regard his actions as a betrayal. As the author of a new book about presidential childhoods, Mr. Wead could benefit from any publicity, but he said that was not a motive in disclosing the tapes.

The White House did not dispute the authenticity of the tapes or respond to their contents. Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, “The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend.” Asked about drug use, Mr. Duffy said, “That has been asked and answered so many times there is nothing more to add.

The drug use refers to candidate Bush’s obsession with public reaction to his admitted wild ways prior to his becoming clean and sober in 1986. The only “revelation” on the tapes is the President’s apparent confession that he tried marijuana in the past. Talking to Wead about questions of drug use:

He refused to answer reporters’ questions about his past behavior, he said, even though it might cost him the election. Defending his approach, Mr. Bush said: “I wouldn’t answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”

And that’s it. Out of a dozen or so tapes Wead made available to the New York Times reporter, that statement is the only “newsworthy” bit to emerge. Even the Times admits that the conversations show that with Bush, what you see is what you get:

The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush. Many of the taped comments foreshadow aspects of his presidency, including his opposition to both anti-gay language and recognizing same-sex marriage, his skepticism about the United Nations, his sense of moral purpose and his focus on cultivating conservative Christian voters.

An amazing admission from an avowed enemy of the President and his policies.

So why publish transcripts in the first place? Clearly, these tapes are invaluable historical artifacts as they reveal the man behind the public facade of the Presidency. In that sense, the existence of the tapes is news. But considering that just about all of the information contained in the tapes has been reported on elsewhere, including Bush’s well known desire to foster a relationship with evangelical christians and his antipathy towards the press, one has to conclude that any impact the recorded conversations have on the President’s popularity will be favorable.

The most interesting thing I found in the conversations was Bush’s refusal to engage in gay-bashing not only because he believed it would hurt him politically but also because he thought it to be wrong:

But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: “Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”

Later, he read aloud an aide’s report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: “This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It’s hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however.”

This is something the libnuts will never acknowledge and don’t understand; that homosexuals as an interest group are a threat to values and traditions, not homosexuals as people. While there may not be a “gay agenda” set in stone or written down on paper, there is clearly a move afoot within the more radical elements of the gay community to stifle dissent from the religious right to their lifestyle. Not only that, but to actively promote that lifestyle and try to sell it like soda pop to impressionable, lonely, confused teenagers is outrageous.

What the conversations show is a rarity in politics; a man whose public persona matches up rather well with who he is in private. This is just about what we’ve come to expect from George Bush. So in that sense, the tapes aren’t news at all but a confirmation of something most people know: That with George Bush, what you see is what you get.