BUSH’S BRUSHSTROKES George W. Bush’s Presidential Center located on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas has just unveiled an exhibit of 30 oil-on-board paintings that the former president has made since taking up the pastime in 2012 under the tutelage of noted Dallas painter Gail Norfleet. The paintings based on photographs are all of various world leaders he interacted with during his two terms in office people like Vladimir Putin Hamid Karzai Angela Merkel and the Dalai Lama.

For people who only know about Mr. Bush through the smudged lens of the media as an intellectually incurious swaggering cowboy the news of his artistic talent likely comes as something of a shock. But for those who know a bit more about the man — that for example he read voraciously on a wide range of subjects during his years in the White House devouring scores of books each year — his having taken up the brush and palette might not be quite as surprising.

What I found to be even more revelatory than the fact of Bush’s new avocation was a New York Times piece by Roberta Smith reviewing the exhibit and what it says about what she calls Mr. Bush’s “unsettling talent.” She writes: “His skill may be disconcerting for people who love painting and dislike the former president but still everyone needs to get a grip especially those in the art world who dismiss the paintings without even seeing them.”

What a strange statement to make when analyzed objectively. Ought his skill which Ms. Smith describes as that of a “decent amateur” really need be “disconcerting” simply because someone dislikes even loathes the president’s policies politics and personality? And how is the fact that someone “loves painting” relevant as if that would understandably cause one to take offense at the very fact that the former president has dared to show a flair for that which one loves?

Her words seem to provide a window into the mindset of those still afflicted with what was known until 2008 as Bush Derangement Syndrome a disease of the mind whose incidence has progressively diminished as we journey ever deeper into the Obama years marked by the unfolding mess that the current president has made of virtually everything he touches. She seems to be saying to herself as much as to her circle “Take a deep breath and get a grip.”

Speaking of the current White House occupant a thought occurred to me about why this exhibit might touch such a nerve in some after reading yet another review of the Bush exhibit. In the Wall Street Journal Willard Spiegelman a Southern Methodist University professor reviews the exhibit and toward the end of his piece he writes:

Whatever his Texas affiliations Mr. Bush is also a scion of an old preppy Connecticut family. He went to Andover and Yale. His social class used to pride itself on an easy dilettantism. It was encouraged to do many things cleverly and gracefully.

And I wonder: Could it be that what’s most galling of all to those who intensely dislike George Bush is that as the narrative goes it should by all rights be Barack Obama who “does many things cleverly and gracefully ” who is the left-wing Bill Buckley who sails and paints and plays the harp and oh in his spare time runs the country?

This is after all the fellow who told an interviewer “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

But unfortunately as Jonah Goldberg put it “The only thing Barack Obama knows how to do is be Barack Obama. He thinks that’s his job like a king whose only real responsibility is to be kingly. The problem is that the one person (who matters at least) who doesn’t understand this is Barack Obama... And no one will tell him.”

SUNDAY SCHOOL A federal appeals court ruling last week brought back memories of my own involvement in the early days of this very case over a decade ago.
The case is Bronx Household of Faith v. Board of Education of the City of New York and it has been in litigation for nearly 20 years now in the federal courts in New York. Back in 1995 a small Bronx church sued a New York City school district for denying its application to rent space in a local public school for Sunday morning meetings of prayer. The case has been in court for so long that the church for which it is named has managed to build its own building across the street from the public school into which it will move later this month.
The ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — that denying such use doesn’t violate the United States Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause — is of no small significance; more than 80 houses of worship regularly hold services in public schools around New York City some drawing many hundreds of attendees.
The ruling doesn’t prohibit the city from giving religious groups access to public school space; it only gives the city the right to refuse to do so. And indeed notwithstanding whatever other serious differences one might have with the city’s new mayor it ought to be said loudly and clearly that he has been squarely in favor of granting off-hours religious use of public school facilities unlike his predecessor Michael Bloomberg. After the decision came down Mayor DeBlasio said this for which he deserves our appreciation:
I stand by my belief that a faith organization playing by the same rules as any community nonprofit deserves access. You know they have to go through the same application process wait their turn for space pay the same rent. But I think they deserve access. They play a very very important role in terms of providing social services and other important community services and I think they deserve that right. But we’ll assess the court decision and we’ll look from there.
It was a little over 12 years ago during my tenure as associate counsel at Agudath Israel of America that I authored a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the plaintiff church at an earlier stage of this case in federal district court in Manhattan. Earlier that year the Supreme Court had ruled in a case called Good News Club that an evangelical student club could hold after-hours programs featuring prayer and scriptural readings on public school premises because this was not “mere religious worship divorced from any teaching of moral values.”
And so one of the questions before District Court Judge Loretta Preska was whether a church prayer service should be treated any differently from the student club’s activities and in her 58-page written decision she approvingly cited our brief’s contention that the defendant school district had failed “to provide any logical basis for differentiating prayer accompanied by song Scripture and sermonics from a pure prayer experience sans those other trappings ” which I noted was a “distinction without any discernible difference.”
Then again maybe Judge Preska just liked that our brief was alive with alliteration.