With his presidential library opening on Thursday, George W. Bush reemerged this week to begin the task of rehabilitating his image. (The museum should help with that task, as a “Protecting the Environment” display gets more space than the 2008 financial collapse and Hurricane Katrina combined.) On Nightline, Diane Sawyer asked the former president if he has “one word for the Republican Party today.” Bush responded with six — “you will exist in the future” — prompting Sawyer to explain she was setting him up to say “Jeb Bush.” “He would be a marvelous candidate if he chooses to do so,” Bush answered, adding, “He doesn’t need my counsel because he knows what it is: run!”
Unsurprisingly, the man who’s embraced joking about his alleged illiteracy seems similarly unperturbed about a hacker exposing his bathtub self-portraits to the world. “By the way, that’s not that easy to paint, water hitting water just so, you know, and the perspective … It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” he said. “It may reflect my precocious nature, me painting myself in a bathtub.”
