Vanity Fair: Damn You Hipsters for Making G.W. Bush an Icon

He paints, he loves cats, he’s awesome at the Internet, he writes consoling letters to football kickers who lose important match-ups for their teams and he takes selfies with Bono at major world leaders’ memorial services. And the hipsters are falling as hard for GWB as they did for PBR and Beats by Dre. 

According to the web-site Naked DC, the sophisticated glossy tome of old Hollywood, Vanity Fair,  who’s most recent achievement was a near-defamatory observation of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lack of reality in selecting cooking utensils, is old enough to remember when young whipper-snappers were all “Bush sucks!” and showing up at high school anti-Bush rallies with all manner of creative slogan apparel and diagnosing his apparently impaired cognitive ability in Huffington Post puff pieces. 

But now that he’s stumbled into something of an image revival, they would like you to please get your George W. Bush limited edition self-portrait lithograph off their front lawn.  

"If you are a liberal older than, say, 24—old enough to either hate Thought Catalog or not know what Thought Catalog is, is a better barometer—you know this. That George W. Bush is uncool, lame, establishment, square, and odious, etc., is a political fact as self-evident and unnecessary to argue as “Mitt Romney takes double-A batteries” or “Bill Clinton has an oiliness about him.” 

"But if you are younger than 24, you might not have attended anti-Bush rallies in high school and in college. You might not have pinned “SHRUB” buttons to your tote bag, and might not even remember Bush as a war-lovin’, vowel-droppin’, faux-folksy, ostentatiously religious Connecticut cowboy. This is because Bush has, quietly and wholly, ingeniously refashioned himself into an Internet-friendly, cat-loving, ironic-hat-wearing painter-cum-Instagram savant. Lately, George W. Bush is a hipster icon, and the Internet, unofficial Fourth Estate of the youth of America, is totally buying it....."

Thankfully, the author closed out her piece with an always-appropriate comparison of George W. Bush to Nazi sympathizers and accused murders, so at least she didn’t sacrifice every shred of intellectual capital she was tenuously grasping.

The response to the Vanity Fair piece is as muted as you would expect. At least one commenter suggested that perhaps George W. Bush himself was orchestrating a conspiracy in the site’s comment section, resulting in less “likes” that truly existed. And then there’s this (I usually don't link to these degenerates) which is an unabashed precursor to a small stroke.

So Damn you, hipsters, for liking George W. Bush, who is a generally likable guy when not actually Presidenting anything. How dare you. The Elizabeth de la Vega book says he’s a war criminal after all, and in case you haven’t noticed, he’s been secretly masterminding the decline of the Affordable Care Act from a Transylvanian castle using only his powers of thought magnified through Dick Cheney’s used heart valve collection.