Hovering And Wheedling

by digby

Modo has an entertaining column on Georgie’s Big G8 Adventure. I thought this was particularly good:

He treated Tony “As It Were” Blair like the servant in “The Remains of the Day,’’ blowing off his offer to help with the Israel-Lebanon crisis, and changing the subject from substance to fluff at one point, noting about his 60th-birthday Burberry gift: “Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you.’’ Then he razzed the British prime minister, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife: “I know you picked it out yourself.”

(I’m pretty sure the servant to whom she’s referring was the one played by Emma Thompson, not Anthony Hopkins. Like her, Blair has such expressive hands.)

She didn’t mention Bush’s obsession with pig meat. I think it was a matter of space. There were just so many outrageous behaviors on this trip that it takes more than one column to cover them all.

Update: I had vaguely remembered this and finally tracked it down. Bush has always had such bad manners that he couldn’t be trusted to behave properly in the White House when his father was president.

Even as an adult, George was so out of control that his mother, then the president’s wife, removed her eldest son to the opposite end of the table at a state dinner for the Queen of England. Although sober by then, the First Son had introduced himself to the Queen as “the black sheep of the family.”

George W. Bush was then 44 years old.

He’s almost 60 now.

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