Here at Coagulopath dot com we pride ourselves on staying up to the minute, so let’s discuss the presidency of George Bush.
Bush was a popular and well-liked man who presided over a largely peaceful epoch of American history. Little of note happened in his Presidency.
Yes, he made some mistakes. (Like you’re perfect). He might have meant well when he signed the so-called “No Child Left Behind” Act into law, but I think it’s clear by now that some children should be left behind. Most children, if we’re honest with ourselves.
Bush had a totalizing stranglehold on the entertainment world from 2000 to 2007. He was The Issue. I remember Bush jokes going through a cycle: first they were funny, then they were lame, then they went beyond lame and became funny again, because you assumed the person was attempting ironic anti-comedy. (“That Gilligan’s Island show, huh? If they’re so smart they can build a radio out of a coconut, how come they can’t fix the dang hole in the boat? Who writes this shit? George Bush? Wacka wacka!”)
In 2000, a celebrity’s street cred hinged on one thing: can I find a quote of them threatening to bloodily disembowl Bush on the front page of a Google or AltaVista search, yes or no? Midriff-baring teen pop chanteuse Britney Spears sealed her fate as a ditz when she said “I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.” Conversely, every moribund rock band from Ministry to Green Day resurged to a minor comeback by being willing to say “fuck Bush” on record—comebacks that usually burned out years before Bush left office. He tended to outlast his critics.
Bush’s influence on the internet has waned significantly. In 2025, his main legacy to pop culture is the internet meme below: an expression of polite concern while someone (White House Chief of Staff Andy Card) whispers in his ear.
Bush is a fascinating case of how internet memes tend to devour their subject. Call it Bugs Bunny Syndrome. Bugs was a character designed to be charismatic, cool, fun, and interesting—a trickster God, a fast-talking smart-aleck, Loki fused at the medial lobe with Clark Gable. A character designed to survive the ages and never diminishing to anything less than his whole. It didn’t work. The internet swallowed him, then shat out a disgusting corpse. Bugs Bunny’s existence has collapsed to a single frame from a 1941 Bob Clampett short where he looks fat and weird. That’s it. See what time makes of us.
So you’ll have to trust me when I say that Bush was more than a pretty face. He was reknowned as an orator. The speeches he delivered will be stared at—not read, *stared at*—for generations to come. He declaimed fearful, awe-inspiring words over the American project. Words to be written in letters as deep as a spear is long on the firestones on the Secret Hill. Words to be read by flickering torchlight on the crumbling walls of an ancient Mayan temple, while the camera pans onto the explorer’s shocked face.
He was a 9th-dan blackbelt of the “Bushism”—a unique rhetorical style that I don’t think anyone else ever mastered. You can Google Bushisms for complete lists. A “just the hits” playlist would include:
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
“Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?”
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.‘ Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Bush spoke earnest yet odd sentences that were both incredibly funny and uniquely malformed.
“Just like Donald J Trump!” That’s where we part ways, friend. Trump is funny but not particularly earnest. Bush meant every word he misspoke. Also, I’ve often heard people do successful impressions of Trump, but have never heard a successful off-brand Bushism.
Why do I like Bushisms so much?
I think it’s the delivery. George Meyer (writer for The Simpsons) once observed that a true fan of comedy laughs at the setup, not the punchline. You don’t laugh when Homer Simpson knocks over a stack of wineglasses, you laugh when the wineglasses get stacked in the first place (you’re thinking two steps ahead, and know that Homer will soon come blundering into the room.)
Bush is a man who knows 1) what words he should say 2) how they should be said. All the pieces are there…but then the words just come out wrong. Maybe he’s nervous, or maybe he’s mentally retarded. But it’s this mismatch of intent and outcome that makes Bushisms hilarious. You sense the furiously noble intent behind them…and then he fails. He probably stayed up late practicing his speech in front of a mirror, and it still did no good. He furrows his brow, clenches his hands to the stand…and then spews out nonsense. His frustration and failure is palpable, and (to me, at least) hugely relatable.
This is another area where he differs from Trump. Most of Trump’s words provoke a reaction of “what was he even trying to say?”
I do not understand Trump’s words. I do not even think there’s even that much to understand: it’s all just blurted out top-of-the-head shit. He does not plan his speeches, and feels no shame when he misspeaks. You’re kind of a sucker for reading anything into them. Spend thirty seconds thinking about anything Trump says, and that’s half a minute more than Trump did.
When Bush mangled a sentence, you could always see the unmangled version of what he was trying to say, pure and unsullied and unspoken—like a puppy playing in heaven while its Earthly body lies mashed into the road by an eighteen-wheeler. There’s always a smart, dignified version of Bush’s words. This seldom the case for Trump. Take his comments about John McCain to Frank Lunz.
And I supported him, I supported him for president. I raised a million dollars for him. It’s a lot of money. I supported him. He lost, he let us down. He lost. So I’d never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers. He’s a war hero. (…) He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?
A fairly offensive statement. But what’s interesting is that there’s no possible way it could have not been offensive.
The statement is predicated on Trump’s personal preference being the thing to care about. It’s not a discussion of John McCain’s qualities: it’s a discussion of whether Trump “likes” the man or not. That’s the important thing here at stake here—Trump’s likes and dislikes. He sounds like he’s talking about ice cream flavors.
“He’s a war hero with sprinkles. And I like war heroes without sprinkles. I like war heroes with a chocolate topping, okay?”
There is literally no way Trump’s words could ever not have been a trainwreck. In George Meyer’s The Simpsons metaphor, it’s like if Homer stumbled through a bunch of glasses that were already smashed when they came out of the factory.
Imagine if he’d said the opposite of what he’d said. “I like John McCain, even though he was a loser. He got captured, but I still like him. I like all war heroes equally, even the ones who got captured.” …It’s still barely less offensive!
I find it difficult to imagine Trump’s brain. It must be a scary place. Thoughts get ripped from dendrites and flung screaming into the world like baby birds catapulted out of their nests before their feathers have even dried. Few people are like him. His brain is truly alien. I can’t even compare him to ChatGPT, which has been known to solve high level math problems occasionally.
I find George Bush far more relatable. Donald J Trump is an alien, but George W Bush is the ur-human. Few of us have his gift of rhetoric, but we all know what it’s like to have amazing thoughts and have them come out a disgusting slurry.
Bush is inside us all. We’ve all spiritually looked awkward in a cowboy hat, haven’t we? We’ve all painted a malformed dog or two, metaphorically speaking. We’ve all been figuratively elected by nonliteral hanging chads in some allegorical Palm Beach County of the soul.
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