George W. Bush Paints Himself Taking a Shower

As some of you may remember, I did not think very much of George W. Bush’s presidency. Since he yielded the office to a (somewhat) better man, he has faded from the limelight. For one thing, he has taken to painting. As Hrag Vartanian wrote at Salon.Com:

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the man who brought us a vision of compassionate conservatism would turn to art to express the angst of a crappy presidency that got us into two wars; used homophobia, racism, and sexism as an electoral tool; crashed our economy; and made the world hate America. This is a man who is obviously feeling his mortality. He sits in the bathtub alone. Nothing to contemplate. Nothing to see beyond reflections of himself and his body. There is almost a melancholy in these images, with their grays, and he is not presented as a strong, heroic person — in fact, quite the opposite. This is not the George W. Bush of Fox News or Sunday morning talk shows. This is Bush the old man, with lots of time on his hands. Once the most powerful man in the world, Bush is now alone, exploring his immediate surroundings in these spurts of introspection. If only he had done this all along, maybe he would’ve been a better leader.

Above is one of his paintings, showing the artist taking a shower. Below, he is sitting in the bathtub:

Dubya in the Tub

Curiously, these paintings were part of a hacker’s raid into the Internet connections of the Bush clan. There was never an attempt by Bush to promote himself as an artist—although he has nothing to apologize for. In fact, his work seems not all that bad. This is one of those rare cases where an attempt to make the hacking victim look bad has backfired.