"I really don't want to be in the public eye anymore," the former president told the Hoover Institute's Peter Robinson in an interview posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
"Look, eight years was awesome," Bush explained. "You know, I was famous and I was powerful, but I have no desire for fame and power anymore."
"I don't want to undermine our president - whoever is president," he added. "And a former president can do that. And I think it's bad for the presidency itself."
"I have found that life after the presidency is awesome."
Bush left office in 2009 with a 22 percent approval rate, making him one of history's least-liked presidents, according to CBS News. In all, 73 percent said they did not approve of the way he ran the country for eight years.
Watch this video from the Hoover Institute, uploaded to YouTube on July 17, 2012.
Quoted from pg. 320-1
"Thus, it is the mythographers and myth-mongers -- those who love to brand critics and
skeptics as paranoids – who are really the psychopaths. Chief among these is of course
Bush 43 himself, who has functioned as the leading propagandist of the 9/11 myth, from
a few days after 9/11 through the 2004 Republican National Convention and his fall reelection
campaign. The thesis of this chapter is the existence of a destructive dialectic
between the mass psychosis of 9/11 and the personal psychopathologies of Bush as a
media presence. In this dialectical relationship, the mass psychosis and the individual
pathologies of the (apparent) ruler become each other’s simultaneous cause and effect. To
make this clearer, let us turn to a discussion of the paranoid personality written twenty five
years before Bush became a fixture on the national scene: “The person most
vulnerable to a persecutory paranoid state is the tense, insecure, suspicious person who
has little basic trust in other persons, who has always found it difficult to confide in
others, tends to be secretive, usually has few close friends, and is addicted to solitary
rumination. These characteristics are sometimes hidden behind a façade of superficial sociability and talkativeness. Above all, there is a rigidity about such a person’s thinking
which becomes most obvious when he is under emotional stress. This may give an
impression of certainty and self-assurance, but actually it is based upon profound
insecurity, upon a need to be dogmatic because of an inability to tolerate suspended
judgment.” (Norman Alexander Cameron, “Paranoid Reactions,” Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1971)
FRANK: BUSH AS MEGALOMANIAC AND SCHIZOPHRENIC
This reads like a psychological profile of George W. Bush, and is coherent with the lucid
analysis of Bush’s mentality given by Dr. Justin Frank in his recent Bush on the Couch.
Frank describes Bush as a megalomaniac operating behind the hail-fellow-well-met
affability of a small-town philistine booster of the Babbitt type. According to Frank, “a
careful consideration of the evidence suggests that behind Bush’s affable exterior
operates a powerful but obscure delusional system that drives his behavior. The most
precise psychiatric term to describe his pathology is most frequently used to identify a
particular condition exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we’ll see, has broader
applications as well: megalomania. The psychological concept of megalomania refers as
much to a mental attitude as to actual behavioral manifestations….Freud calls
megalomania a protective delusion of power and greatness that serves as a defense
against fear, against paranoid anxieties.” (Frank 200-201)"