(a) & (b) definitely.

But I think that looking at it in context, it was a piece that maybe liberals should have read. During the Bush years everybody liked to point out the gaffes Bush was doing as if intelligent college educated people never messed up a word in a speech.

The fact is that Bush is indeed smarter than the bulk of people who really relished in laughing at his gaffes, and in hindsight all that sniggering did nothing to stop the surge of increasingly radical right wing ideas.

Even from my very left-wing perspective I found the constant mocking of Bush worrying and elitist -- the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.

It wasn’t really elitist. He was an elite (e.g. refer to his paternal grandfather) with folksy affectations.

But you are right that a person’s actions (and policies in this case) is much more important than whether they happen to say silly things.

What I meant is that making fun about how silly he was is elitist, meaning people like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert did nothing to help the liberal cause.

George Bush himself does indeed come from political royalty, which is why he did his best to present himself as the exact opposite, an average person.

> the first thing that should come in people's minds when they think about Bush should not be silly & almost endearing gaffes, but Gitmo, Irak, Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousand of corpses he left behind.

Isn't this the case? Maybe less so at the time but this is his legacy and the first thing I think of is the wars he left and the evangelicals he mobilized.