In His Father's Shadow, a Son Charts His Course -LA Times

[Rose Siding]

NEW YORK — By the time he arrived at Yale University in 1945, George H.W. Bush had been the Navy's youngest pilot and was a decorated combat veteran. He made Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the baseball team. A famous photograph captured him, dressed in his college baseball pinstripes, shaking the hand of Babe Ruth.

When his son George W. Bush landed at Yale 19 years later, he quit baseball after his freshman year, calling himself "mediocre." A hellion of a fraternity president, he earned average grades and became known for such pranks as tearing down Princeton's goalposts. When his name appeared in the New York Times, he was defending the practice of branding fraternity pledges with red-hot coat hangers.
...
Doug Wead, an aide in the first Bush White House and a close friend of the current president, has seen up close how the son was formed by competition with his father. "The word that keeps coming to me is irritation — maybe positive as well as negative — the way a pearl is formed with a piece of sand," he said. "It's very much a love-hate relationship." The Bush camp rejects efforts to explain the president, 58, by analyzing his relationship with his 80-year-old father.

"It's a spurious and specious story line," said Mary Matalin, who has been a campaign advisor to father and son. "I think this whole thing is a press creation … this whole Oedipal nonsense, like life is some kind of Shakespeare," said Matalin. "This is not fiction, this is not a Broadway play."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-fatherson29aug29,1,5036137.story?coll=la-politics-pointers

[Pirate Smile]

1. I'm glad they included the sicko, psycho branding history of W. It just

fits too well with his demented death-penalty mocking.

[smirkymonkey]

2. W is obviously his mother's son.