XMAS MAILBAG. At The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is posting letters about the death of Howard Dean's brother Charlie, who got whacked in Laos in the early '70s. One is from an "NRO reader in California" who claims to have known the Dean boys back in the day, and tells a heartbreaking story:

Charlie was a popular guy (much more outgoing than Howard), a McGovern worker, University of North Carolina, preppie… no chance he went into the CIA from that background... However, I am not going to criticize Howard for the controversy this week about listing Charlie as a possible POW. Charlie’s death was a terrible tragedy, and I know it had a huge impact on Howard... Any of us might wish that our brother died on a mission with some purpose, rather than just an ill-advised adventure, even if we know (as Howard himself has said many times) that the CIA theory is wrong. This theory perhaps lurks in Howard’s heart... To this day, the emotions must make it difficult for him to think or speak clearly about Charlie.

I'n't that nice? Don't you wish you had friends like this? Run well as a Democrat for President of the United States, and you'll find many such friends you never knew you had.

This has inspired me to share with my own readers a note I recently received on the subject of George W. Bush. I have as little reason to doubt its veracity as Goldberg, drunk as he is, has to doubt his own correspondent's.

You shouldn't be so hard on ol' W. He suffered greatly at Harvard. He pretended not to care about what people thought of him, but often expressed his hurt in quiet ways, like having guys who pissed him off blackballed in their chosen fields. There was this one brilliant business student, on scholarship I believe, who got much better grades than W but found himself unwanted by every employer he contacted after graduation. I suspect he went to his self-inflicted death never realizing the pain he'd caused our President-to-be.

Poor George never really got over the ribbing he took in school, which affected his relations with others for years. I recall talking with him in the executive offices of the Texas Rangers after Rafael Palmeiro got himself traded to Baltimore. "Mexican bastard never liked me," he said. "Well, I know a doctor down in Maryland that'll fix him up." I couldn't say for sure whether Rafael's erectile dysfunction had anything to do with this, but I do know that W would laugh maniacally whenever one of those Viagra commercials came on the TV.

This is not even to mention the time, right after the 1992 elections, when I came to the Texas Governor's office and found W stabbing a pillow with Saddam Hussein's face glued to the front.

When George stopped drinking, we all thought he'd turned a corner, but alas, we came to realize that he'd only replaced Scotch with horse tranquilizers, heroin, codeine, OxyContin, and some experimental drug his father's friends in the CIA shipped to him from Langley. "I tole that book-readin' bitch I'd give up the grain and grape," he'd tell me as one of his servants injected the light brown fluid into his spine, "but I never said nothin' about stoppin' this medicine for my 'stress'!" Then he'd wink at me, or rather, his eyelids would flutter spasmodically before he passed out.

So if ol' W says and does some things that don't quite make sense, I suggest you cut him some slack, lest he take a personal dislike to you, too.

Sincerely,
An alicublog reader from Texas