In an interview with Matt Lauer that aired in primetime last week on NBC, George W. Bush made it clear to us that he is just as happy as we are that he is not the president anymore. The hour-long TV spot was generally safe and good spirited, with very few contentious moments and a lot of the so-dumb-it’s-smart, grin-accompanied rhetoric from the man known as “Dubya.”  But despite the hour generally being a way for Bush to tell us all that most of his decisions were very difficult and that he often felt “sick to [his] stomach,” the interview served less for me to legitimize his politics and more as a way for me to get to know the guy as a person.  The general tone of Bush during the interview came off as one of carefree and content peace of mind, as if he was saying, “I’m glad to be done with all this crap, and I don’t care what people think of my decisions.”  Certainly, aside from his firm rebuttal to Kanye’s accusation after Hurricane Katrina that he “doesn’t care about black people”, he often responded to questions of whether he regrets certain decisions and accusations against his character with relatively carefree and non-combative statements.  Let me dismiss all the arguments for or against the “justification” of his political decisions and instead focus on the issues this man faced, and more particularly, how ill-equipped he was to face them.  The fact of the matter is, George W. Bush faced one of the most trying eight year stints in office of any president in recent memory. Given the terrorist attacks of 2001, the controversial wars that were to follow, and then Katrina and economic issues in his second term, there’s a certain amount of sympathy I feel for the guy.  Granted, many of his critics blamed him for the inefficient response to some of these events, and even some of the events themselves, most notably the Iraq war.  However, the American inside of me wants to believe that he truly is not hiding anything from us, and he actually was acting with our best interests in mind. The paranoid realist inside of me is not happy with that last remark.  Honestly, as I sat and watched “Dubya” have a nice chat with Matt Lauer, I thought to myself: “How could someone so simple in nature and intelligence that he was brought through high school on the benefits of his father’s name ever pull off anything so deceptive as the manipulation of millions of people for the betterment of his own situation?”  Often ridiculed for his stupidity, George W. Bush was afflicted by an irregularly tough stint as our president. But based on his kind and becoming rhetoric, I’m beginning to feel like he used all of his possibly limited brainpower to act in the best interest of the United States of America.