In his bizarre attempt at self-service Monday, President Bush couldn't avoid mangling his sentiment that the White House press sometimes "misunderestimated" him, and at that point it became patent, in an unsettling way, that part of him will be missed - that buffoonish, slapstick component of the 43rd president so warmly reminiscent of stumblebum hilarity... of the Bowery Boys, of Lou Costello.

We can expect few of those gleams of pratfall nostalgia tonight, when he gives what will be an expectedly hyper-rehearsed final address to the nation. This will probably wind up as Bush's own burnishment of the past eight years, so we'll see less channeling of his inner Curly the Stooge, and more of his dressed-up, well-spoken Defiant One - George W. Bush, would-be warrior, angry ex-cheerleader. Bring it on.

That side was on hand, too, at the "exit interview" for the press earlier this week. Nixon-like, Bush occasionally lashed out at the gathered media, blaming the fifth estate for his lack of popularity before dismissing the very idea he should be admired by the public.

"...In terms of the decisions that I had made to protect the homeland, I wouldn't worry about popularity. What I would worry about is the Constitution of the United States and putting plans in place that makes it easier to find out what the enemy is thinking."

Odd words coming from a man who had such little obvious use for the Constitution, and never mentioned the 4,300-odd American lives, plus hundreds of thousands of Iraqis' he'd thrown away. Those must be the silly travails of the reality-based community. They paid the price for Bush's arrogant crusades to... what?... spread democracy? Avenge 9/11? Play dungeons and dragons on a grand, irreversible scale?

For what, exactly, did Bush stand? He claimed to prize democracy to the degree he washed the Mideast in blood to plant it there - yet he shredded the Constitution at home, delivering Americans a secretly surveilled society and the world utter contempt for basic guarantees of justice. He promised to apprehend the masterminds of 9/11, then hijacked the calamity as grounds for launching a pointless war on a country not culpable in the crime. He promised prosperity, and gave us the lowest GNP and job growth of any post-World War II president.

Let's face it: Bush's popularity, his constant adoration by the media, hatched from the $1.35 trillion tax-cut he handed wealthy Americans early in his term. The word came down from owner to publisher, then editor to reporter: This guy's alright. Treat him good.

The press was never his foe, "misunderestimating" him. Up until the end, the press propped up Bush and his lurid missteps. And that continued right up until our financial blow-up/f*ck-me doll finally burst, until the very distended, non-regulated market schemes that created Casino America - and were so favored by the White House savant - flushed down the crapper the economies of this country and the world.

And now, the press seems genuinely surprised at the naked emperor before it. Once stripped of the office's potent mirage by his short-timer insignificance, Bush's ravings baffled them. Few cable news shows Monday night seemed able to cope with such stunning Miss Havisham-style cluelessness and mania, the exception being, of course, "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," in which the reliable host almost smacked his lips while raking over hot coals Bush's ass-backward hallucinations. Newsweek's Richard Wolffe was plainly still startled by the otherworldly performance of the president he'd covered so long, although he did manage observations like this:

Well, I suppose what really struck me was the lack of awareness that he displayed throughout, the lack of self-awareness, the lack of understanding about the impacts of his policy, his position in the world, but even just about himself.  I mean, it's very striking when you compare him to the incoming president who has this extraordinary capacity to look at himself and his surroundings.

...The whole point about Katrina, saying that, while they rescued all those people from the roof tops, as if the lack of law and order, the complete collapse of law and order, the failure to deliver basic supplies, water, food, communications, transport--all those things either not learned since and certainly not learned at the time, and no flicker of recognition from them.  Again, an extraordinary performance.

Leave it to the Brits to get it right. In his summation in The Independent, Matthew Norman notes, "In its nebbish way, this press conference made an intriguing study, as much for the reaction of the reporters as the reflective wisdom Mr Bush shared with them. So few had summoned the will to attend, in fact, that aides had to fill the seats with staffers and interns."

If that was a startling show of contempt in a country that venerates the office of president, even if not the individual, to the nth degree, equally striking was the boredom and discomfort visible on the faces of those who did turn up to hear Mr Bush flit from half-hearted admissions of mistakes (Mission Accomplished was a little premature) to insincere expressions of goodwill to his successor (Obama is a better orator, he bragged, as if mastery of the language is a fatal flaw); from laughable self-defence (he didn't land Air Force One in post-Katrina New Orleans because he didn't want to divert police from more urgent work) to a gloriously demented comparison with a predecessor.

...With Mr Bush, who has spent his final months blinking confusedly at the financial apocalypse that he ushered in but was powerless to contain, the shroud of ectoplasmic irrelevance descended while he was still technically running the show. For him, with that hideous preppy grin of casual malevolence, The Ghoul might make a better title. But the failure to stamp any stronger, deeper sense of himself on the public consciousness than the caricature is the same.

If there is a God, he gave us a nod this week, when this stuttering press conference almost coincided with the admission that this country did, indeed torture - a finding by the top Bush official overseeing whether Guantanamo detainees will see a day in court.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

That will just about wrap things up for all but the most fervent true believer clinging to beliefs that Bush is kind and just, Tinkerbelle loops through blooming cereus at twilight, and the sun, moon and stars around the earth do spin.

And, not surprisingly, the White House has softened its years-long denials of torture by adding the qualifier "it's not our policy" to torture. That's a huge shift, coming from an Administration that includes a vice president still linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda - and doing so in his own exit interview on PBS this week!

That's no shock: Like cheap hoods everywhere, these guys smell the prosecutorial coffee bubbling. That "not our policy" crap opens a yawning escape vent for an administration not notable for taking responsibilty for anything that goes wrong. Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez - the whole sorry gang that cooked up the idea and dictated its legal assent - are laying the foundations of their own defense. It wasn't their fault, after all. By "enhanced interrogation", they didn't mean torture. No... it was the "bad apples" down the line, like those hayseed de Sades at Abu Ghraib - remember them? With the snapshots and the degradation? Remember the "gotcha" gal, smiling and smoking? They're the one's we slung on the wall and imprisoned for crimes from above. It all worked, back then. As Scott Horton writes in a Harper's piece last month:

...This week the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a powerful report, released jointly by chair Carl Levin and ranking member John McCain, that received the unanimous support of its 13 Democratic and 12 Republican members. The report concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials of the administration consciously adopted a policy for the torture and abuse of prisoners held in the war on terror. It also found that they attempted to cover up their conduct by waging a P.R. campaign to put the blame on a group of young soldiers they called "rotten apples." Lawyers figure prominently among the miscreants identified. Evidently the torture policy's authors then enlisted ethics-challenged lawyers to craft memoranda designed to give torture "the appearance of legality" as part of a scheme to create the torture program despite internal opposition. A declassified summary of the report can be read here; the full report is filled with classified information and therefore has been submitted to the Department of Defense with a request that the materials be declassified for release. (Don't expect that to happen before January 20, however).

For Bush and his cronies, so far removed from the horror of their policies, that's the way the world should work. There is a world of Deciders, and a vast, removed "thitherworld" of flunkies. And, when thing go south, as they have so often for this administration, those flunkies become fall guys. "Brownie, I know I told you 'good job' on this Katrina thing... but now I gotta throw you to the wolves... sucker."

This is the brusque arrogance of aristocrats ravishing a world long ago, a Dark-Age boondock Bush apparently tried to recreate with torture dungeons and "chuck the key" confinements. But it also smacks of a pecking order closer to home: the strutting jock, the BMOC, the playground bully.

In another Independent story from October, asking "When Did Bullying Become Acceptable?", Terrence Blacker writes:

Everyone from primary schoolchildren to chief executives knows that bullying ranks high on the list of contemporary evils. Yet in the parallel universe of the famous, the bully is king. It is part of his or her (usually his) charisma, something which causes amusement and wins appalled respect. Here, the unkindness is not to family members or to colleagues but lies in the public humiliation of weaker inhabitants of their world.

There is a kind of perverse sanctification in cruel debasement of others. If I can make someone else appear stupid, I look smart. If they're low, I'm high. If I prove them weak, I validate my own strength. It is the self-obsessed delusion of every obnoxious eight-year-old. I can pour out my anger and frustration at the world on hapless scapegoats of my own choosing. It's my decision to make, after all: Since I have defined myself as good, my torments to others prove them evil.

And, most importantly, I can never be proven a coward if I have the power to frighten others.

If we apply this on a larger canvas, we see this play out in our treatment of Iraqis and Afghans, of Israel's outrages in Gaza - in every dynamic in which the powerful mandate their authority upon the weak.

Never in my memory has a presidency been so drunk with this aberrant exuberance.