Darn It W, Quit Being So Adorable With All These Paintings

 
 Did you ever have a dog that sucked? Maybe it was always crashing into stuff like an idiot, and dripping poop all over the house because it ate some awful thing, and nobody could ever train it because it was especially dumb, even in dog terms?

Here's the weird thing about these dogs: even if they inspire near-universal disdain when they're around, as soon as they're gone people tend to think of them more fondly. Not everyone is like that. Some people never forgive the endless shitting and crashing. But a lot of people do.

Basically, George W. Bush is like the president version of that dog. Around this time last year, he was about as popular as Obama, having gained roughly 20 points since leaving office.

Well, get ready for more of that because W appeared on the  Today Show  with his visually appealing daughter Jenna to show and tell a bunch of new paintings of world leaders, and they're actually not bad! Goddamnit!

There's Tony Blair, Hamid Karzai, Vladimir Putin, and more. Check out the Dalai Lama!

More screengrabs are over at Gawker. 

Looking objectively at Bush's record in office, reasonable people can disagree as to whether he was good-hearted but incompetent and tragically manipulable, or whether he was at root a bad guy. Looking objectively at these paintings, otherwise reasonable people will forget all the times they yelled "Bad dog!" and come away saying, "Aw those are cute, didn't I used to hate him? I'm hungry."

Still, it's good to see Jenna Bush Hager beat the odds and make a nice media career for herself. This is a woman who's paid her dues. The way she asks her dad and grandmother questions like, "You think you got to the soul of you?" and "Was this one hard to paint?" -- it's just obvious that she was born to do this.

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[ WaPo / Today Show / Gawker ]