King George

One of the most interesting aspects of the Showtime series The Tudors is its depiction of Henry VIII as a youthful spoiled brat. Most treatments of the story of this king who is almost as familiar to Americans as the Burger King king treat him as this roaring despot, but don't focus on the spoiled child within. By portraying Henry as a youthful king, an all-powerful king who can order beheadings or forgiveness or banishings at the drop of a hat, who changes alliances the way most of us change clothes, a king who doesn't even have to pick up his own knife to cut a pomegranate, the writers have created a far randier, far more intelligent, and certainly more attractive version of George W. Bush. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' Henry VIII has the lip-curl and the romantic soul of Elvis, the inability to use his brain instead of his dick to run the ship of state of Bill Clinton, and the religious delusions and narcissism of George W. Bush.

Sidney Blumenthal's column today made it mandatory to do the above Photoshop:

Loyalty has always been the alpha and omega of George W. Bush's presidency. But all the forms of allegiance that have bound together his administration -- political, ideological and personal -- are being shredded, leaving only blind loyalty. Bush has surrounded himself with loyalists, who fervently pledged their fealty, enforced the loyalty of others and sought to make loyal converts. Now Bush's long downfall is descending into a series of revenge tragedies in which the characters are helpless against the furies of their misplaced loyalties and betrayals. The stage is being strewn with hacked corpses -- on Monday, former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty; imminently, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz; tomorrow, whoever remains trapped on the ghost ship of state. As the individual tragedies unfold, Bush's royal robes unravel.

Loyalty to Bush is the ultimate royal principle of the imperial presidency. The ruler must be unquestioned and those around him unquestioning. Allegiance to Bush's idea of himself as the "war president," "the decider" and "the commander guy" is paramount. But the notion that the ruler is loyal to those loyal to him is no longer necessarily true. While he must be beheld as the absolute incarnation of kingly virtue, his sense of obligation to those paying homage has become perilously relative.

Those who feel compelled to tell the truth rather than stick to the cover story are cast in the dust, like McNulty. Those Bush defends as an extension of his authority but who become too expensive become expendable, like Wolfowitz. And those who exist solely as Bush's creations and whose survival is crucial to his own are shielded, like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

If I had more time this morning, I'd draw parallels between Wolfowitz and Wolsey; between Alberto Gonzales and Cromwell, and arguably between James Comey and Sir Thomas More. But Blumenthal's points are well-taken. I've given a lot of keystrokes to the notion of Bush-as-dictator, but dictatorship can take many forms, and the Bush family's methodology is far more that of an American dynastic royal family with a sense of entitlement to lead the nation and plunder its riches for the benefit of themselves and other well-placed families. George W. Bush himself has repeatedly said he'd rather be a dictator, but what he really wants is to be king, because dictators tend to be upstarts -- guys who emerged from humble beginnings to become the despots we know and hate. For George Bush, it's not about the absolute power -- that's just the manifestation of the entitlement. It's about the entitlement; that himself as Supreme Leader, as "commander guy" if you will, is just the natural order of the universe, to be accepted without question.

All serve the king, and when they cease to serve the king, whether through standing up for the truth, as James Comey did on Tuesday, or by embarrassing him, as Wolfowitz has done, they suffer the modern-day equivalent of public beheading -- they are thrown under the bus; allowed to resign "to spend more time with their families."