WESTEROS
— I VISITED HBO’s “Game of Thrones” set in Belfast last week, and after
watching Daenerys Targaryen in firelight for a couple hours, I learned
how to say “I have to go to the bathroom” in Dothraki.
I’ll never be fluent in that martial language. But I am fluent in mangled Bush-speak.
So
I must pull myself away from the Iron Throne and return to the Iron
Ass, trading one serpentine family tangle for another. I am here, my
puzzled readers, to help interpret the latest Oedipal somersaults of our
royally messed up Republican royal family.
Like
many uptight, upper-class families, the Bushes seem oddly unable to
directly confront tensions and resentments and talk to each other
candidly. With other families, the unsaid and circuitous end up
rupturing relationships. In the case of the Bushes, it ended up
rupturing the globe.
Like
Queen Cersei, old King George knows that revenge is a dish that doesn’t
lose its flavor when served cold. After more than a decade of publicly
keeping his lips zipped, Poppy Bush took his full measure of payback in
Jon Meacham’s new biography, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.”
While
W. used to say that what he liked about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
was their brass appendages, Poppy offered a dimmer anatomical
appraisal, calling each an “iron-ass.”
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