From cowboy to cowed boy, W. crawls outta Crawford for yet another image re-do.

[babylonsister]

Bush Ditches His Ranch for Ritzier Digs in Dallas

By Leslie Savan, TheNation.com. Posted December 13, 2008.

From cowboy to cowed boy, W. crawls outta Crawford for yet another image re-do.


So it's official: George W. Bush is not a cowboy. We pretty much suspected he wasn't when we learned that, for all his bow-legged strutting, the man's afraid of horses. But last week, Bush let the other Lucchese boot drop: He and Laura bought a $2 million, fancy-pants house in Dallas's toniest neighborhood and will soon be high-tailin' it out of that eight-year-old stage set of a "ranch" in Crawford. Any uncleared brush can go clear itself.

Oh, the couple will undoubtedly drop by the old chuckwagon, do some weekends maybe (and it could well become the safe-house George retreats to when, and if, the long pent-up Furies finally claim his mind). But the move to Dallas is a 180 from what Laura told USA Today during a ranch tour in April, 2001, that she and George "want to grow old here."

Instead, the Bushes' old growth will take place primarily at a refurbished 1959 home in the upscale neighborhood of Preston Hollows, just blocks from other powerfuls, like Ross Perot, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Dallas Mavericks' owner Mark Cuban, and Texas Rangers' owner Tom Hicks, who bought the business from previous owner George, making him even wealthier. A Dallas realtor described the exclusive area (literally: until 2000, a neighborhood covenant deemed it for whites only, making an exception for servants) as one where many "older homes are being torn down and big new ones, mega-mansions, are being put up in their place."

Bush's Western White House was a bit like that too: a 1,583-acre McRanch, a former pig farm actually, bought in 1999 to de-Kennebunkport George during his initial run for the presidency. The brand new, one-story ranch house--with geothermal heating and other eco features that were good enough for him and his but not the country--was supposed to be finished by Election Day 2000. It's not clear whether it was plumbing or stolen-election problems that caused the delay, but the home wasn't ready until after the Inaugural.

Bush imagineers Karl Rove and Karen Hughes didn't exactly broadcast the spanking newness of the place, because the idea was to make it seem more like a homestead, handed down not by the Bush family (as Yale and Skull'n'Bones were), but as something distinctly W's, his true home, as if the switchgrass itself had curled its tendrils up through New England and around George's belt loops to pull him back to the east Texas soil where he rightly belonged.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/story/112437/bush_ditches_his_ranch_for_ritzier_digs_in_dallas/?page=entire

[opihimoimoi]

1. Cowboy My ASS, Smart President My ASS, Country First My ASS, Decider My ASS

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. All REAL Texans I know

have disowned him as the carpetbagger he is, and have done so since before he ran for office. But then the Texans I know are from DFW, and know what W did with the Rangers stadium deal.