So now George Bush is a painter.

(This was actually a facebook status update, but it bears repeating.  My apologies for being a lazy blogger, for the three people who might read this!)

Enough about George Bush's "paintings"! Or maybe I should say..."George Bush's" paintings?

Let's think about all this logically for just a minute, can we? Please?

We should well know by now the Republican publicity machine we're dealing with, yet once again, we're allowing them to lead us around by our noses while we squawk about mediocre paintings supposedly painted by someone the rest of the world knows as a war criminal. Let's break this all down.

1. We first learned of ol' 43's little hobby via a "hacked email". Instantly, the national conversation turned to a bizarre pair of "self portraits", echoed endlessly in the media everywhere. (The angle on the one with the mirror makes it just as logically likely, based on the pictorial space, that it's GWB looking at someone else's ass in a homoerotic encounter, but we'll leave that aside for a moment.) Umm...since when is an ex-President's email being "hacked" not the national conversation we SHOULD have at that moment? It's a major Secret Service FAIL. Where are the articles indemnifying the lax security? Why aren't the Republicans foaming at the mouth to find out who would allow their former leader to be in such danger? What's wrong with this picture?

2. Just curious: where are the articles about the prosecution of Guccifer, the hacker who was caught in Romania back in January? Now, don't get me wrong: I find Guccifer's antics fairly hysterical. Hacking Colin Powell's facebook page? Priceless. Releasing Hillary Clinton's Benghazi emails in comic sans? Epic. I'm generally fairly pro-hacker, in part, because hackers make our systems more secure and often reveal wrong-doings. However...shouldn't that be front page news? And not on Gawker, but everywhere? Shouldn't George Bush be more than "annoyed", as he expressed following the "accidental" unveiling of his hobby?

3. George Bush paints a bunch of world leaders because they're his "friends", and instead of using the vast trove of photos available in both his personal and official collections, since every move he ever made was documented by officially sanctioned photographers...he goes to google. He does the same thing a fifth grader writing a report would do, he picks the very. First. Image. On. Google. Now: aside from being the exact same crime that Shep Fairey just lost a lawsuit over, it's so extremely unimaginative that one wonders why. It just begs the question: did he choose the pictures? Did he think about them? Because...that's how painters roll. Even painters that pull images off of google.

4. We all know Jeb Bush is going to make a run for the presidency. And we ALL know who his biggest liability is. Yeah. That one.

So, here's one possible scenario: Karl Rove aka Turdblossom hired some Michaels crafts painting teacher to make those and then "leaked" them via email to start this whole ball rolling, so that we could all sit back and talk about what a silly doddering old man GWB is, and isn't it cute that he thinks he's an artist, and clear the way for JebBro's run by humanizing his evil sibling.

Now: I'm not trying to start a big conspiracy theory here. I have no proof that happened, and no reason to believe it could aside from extrapolating from past experience with the trail of lies, tricks and games this team has brought us for the past 20 years or so. Have we learned anything?

What I'm trying to do is get you to think. Of course it's fun to debate the merits of sub-par paintings, and complain that they don't deserve the attention and we should be talking about real art instead. But we're being part of the problem in that -- we could, for example, just go on talking about real art and ignore the hubbub, instead of lamenting that we aren't.

I just want everyone to think about whether or not they're being manipulated and played here. Because let's face it -- it wouldn't be the first time. We can always work on creating our own national conversation instead of following the talking points and P.R. mavens' goals for our interactions. What's in the news is rarely newsworthy these days, and I look to my fascinating collection of friends for a different, much richer, conversation. We're better than this. Stop.