In lieu of a prison cell, George Jr. deserves a historical poke in the eye with a short, historical stick, even five years onward: Fifty percent of Americans say Bush is more responsible for the country’s current economic problems than President Obama, the Post-ABC poll shows. Just 38 percent hold Obama more responsible. Seven percent assign equal blame.

What’s to be expected when this happened (via CBS Jan. 16, 2009): President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent.

The boy has skated his whole life — easy-smooth transition into a creepy watercolor enthusiast and just rolling through life as if nothing had occurred for eight, long, nightmarish years.

(Illustration found here).

Anyway, I came across the news item this afternoon from the Washington Post on George Jr.’s poll ratings, and it pricked by mental facilities because coincidently, I’m now reading Larry Beinhart’s 2004 novel, ‘The Librarian,’ wherein one of the fictional characters is a spitting-image of our beloved Texas boy.
Although Beinhart has been around awhile — his ‘American Hero‘ (1994), became the movie, ‘Wag the Dog,’ for an example — but I’d never read any of his stuff until I picked up ‘The Librarian’ at my local thrift store this past weekend.
Right now, I’m just under the half-way point, and so far, an entertaining, good read.
The plot is about this naive librarian who becomes engaged in a research/cataloguing project for this way-old, mega-rich land developer, who as it turns out, also has a nefarious political history. So far, there’s not enough clues made available to figure the bottom line of the narrative — yet.
One aspect, though, a lot of people are worried about the president, Augustus Winthrop Scott, who seems nauseatingly familiar:

First of all, he had the gift of being comfortable with all his good luck. That was more unusual than it seemed.
A lot of kids, for example, would not have felt that they were really, really winners after their dad put the fix in.
Even if they were happy with it as ten-year-olds, normally,, when they got to be thirty or forty, and looked back, they would feel, somewhere inside, that the achievement was diminished by the knowledge that it was not earned.
Not Gus…
…
Second was that other people took care of things for him. His father first. Then strangers like Byron Tompkins. And the fellows who got him into the National Guard, instead of going to war.
After that, the men he went into business with who saw to it that he made money even when the companies he was involved in went bankrupt (a vacation time-share company, a soybean futures syndicate, and a Yugo dealership).
Then, when he went into politics, more people threw money at him.

At this point, I can’t tell how Gus will eventually end up — water-coloring his naked ass, or locked in a federal pen.
Fictional non-fiction.
The only book reading I do is in bed, just before sleep, and usually it’s pure escapism — the book before this one was a Clive Cussler, so this is a different evasion from reality.
Not as much a thrill as Dirk Pitt, but a well-versed, librarian can be handy.