You're in a Mexican diner in Dallas, Texas. You're sitting at a table, eating your dinner quietly. At the next table, there is a a couple eating with their four-year-old son at the table.

Suddenly, another man storms up to the small family. He is apparently drunk, and furious. "You fucking son of a bitch!" he shouts at the father. Everyone stops eating and stares at the man. You cringe when you see the young boy.

"I saw what you wrote," he rants on. "We're not going to forget this." You feel shock at this kind of drunken behavior in a public restaurant. You feel sympathetic fear for the man and his wife, being threatened in such an ominous way, as if the man were a member of organized crime and the family could expect thugs to visit them in the night with baseball bats or something.

You might fear the man who stormed in and raved, you might feel disgusted, angry, or perhaps, if you are more compassionate, you might feel pity.

But would you elect him president?

The above incident did in fact happen. It was early April, 1986. The drunk was George W. Bush, and the man and woman with the child were Wall Street Journal editor Al Hunt and his wife, Judy Woodruff. Hunt had written an editorial in which he predicted that Jack Kemp, not George Bush Sr., would win the GOP presidential nomination in 1988.

Think about this person, think about what he did. Drunk or not, could you ever respect a person who did this kind of thing? If someone you knew did something like that, wouldn't you feel like just not talking to them again? I mean, what kind of person does that kind of thing?

Apologists for Bush try to brush it off as another "youthful indiscretion," because he had a drinking problem then, and has since turned his life around. But his behavior did not really change.

Consider when bush was governor of Texas, long after he quit drinking.

The case concerned a woman named Carla Faye Tucker. Tucker was a convicted killer on death row, but she was also, like George W. Bush himself, a reformed drug addict and a born-again Christian. She plead for clemency, begged for forgiveness.

Bush, however, was not sympathetic. According to Talk magazine writer Tucker Carlson, Bush mimicked Tucker's plea for her life. "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'Don't kill me.'" (quote from Time Magazine) During the same interview, then-governor Bush reportedly used the word "fuck" repeatedly throughout the conversation.

Again, would you respect a person who did this kind of thing?

Remember when "character" was the issue in politics, according to Republicans and conservatives in general? It was all about character... but not, apparently, now. The Republican Party shut up about character the moment Bush walked in the door, and for a very good reason. He doesn't have any. Most people don't pay attention to what Bush did in his past--but these are not rumors, not fake smear attempts. They are documented facts, and these two are just a small sampling. If most Americans knew exactly who they had allowed take the presidency, they would recoil in disgust.

Posted by Luis at July 25, 2003 02:55 PM