I’m quite amused by the Op Ed piece here from the Boston Herald (link courtesy of a certain Congressional staffer’s IM away message). While some people’s sensibilities may be shocked by this sort of thing, I simply see it as Bush blowing off steam (!). If I wanted to make Bush out to be really clever, I could attribute it to his appreciation of the dual and contradictory natures of President qua powerful leader versus President qua normal human being. It’s possible that that IS at the root of this sort of thing, but more likely it’s an unconcious manifestation of this apparent social oxymoron.
Reading this also makes me wonder if there is a difference in how Democrats and Republicans view this sort of thing from the ‘leader of the free world.’ Are Democrats (with their larger conception of what the power of the President should be) more likely to frown on seemingly ‘unpresidential’ behavior like this? You wouldn’t want someone you wanted to give a huge amount of power to to behave in a way that suggested that he was a fallible human being. Of course, the danger of that would be that you could lose sight of the fact that the President was indeed human and fallible, and likely to screw things up sometimes. Anyway, I will leave the topic open for anyone who wants to comment on the whole ‘idealization and idolization of political leaders in a democracy’ topic. Or, you could just leave fart jokes.