Former President George W. Bush “will be showing off his new painting hobby at his presidential library in Dallas starting in April,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The exhibit is called ‘The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy,’ and the show sounds as if it will feature paintings other than the ones Bush made depicting himself in the bathtub and in the shower, which a hacker obtained and blasted all over the Web last year.”

“I obviously get slightly emotional talking about our vets because I have an emotional — I’m in there with them.”

— Former President George W. Bush, tearing up in an interview with ABC News when speaking about military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“As George W. Bush’s public image improves, more former Bush officials are running for office — and are starting to tout their connections to the former president rather than running from them,” The Hill reports.

“Bush veterans privately admit the president, who left office in 2009 with an approval rating that dipped as low as 25 percent, was an albatross for many years in both primaries and the general election. The Wall Street bailout and other expensive Bush-era programs infuriated the Tea Party base, while Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War tarnished him with independents. But five years later, they say things have changed and that he’s no longer toxic. The former president’s personal approval ratings reached positive territory last year for the first time since early in his second term.”

Jonathan Chait: “The conventional wisdom – propounded by many of the same pundits now equating Obama with Bush – held that Obama’s hardball tactics would backfire. Obama needed to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and didn’t dare change the Senate’s rules… To fail to placate conservatives would only enrage them more. This analysis turned out to have it backward. Congress managed to pass a budget for the first time in three years precisely because Obama
defeated the GOP’s extortion tactics, forcing Republicans to actually trade policy concessions rather than demand a ransom.”

“The prospects for Obama’s second term remain constricted. Not many deals beckon in Congress. The Obamacare rollout was surely a political disaster, but the administration has three more years to get the law up and running. By the end of 2005, George W. Bush had seen the promise of his presidency collapse from justifiably lofty heights. At the end of 2013, Obama stands at just about the same place he began his term.”

The Week looks at the evidence.

Ron Fournier: “Reading Peter Baker’s extraordinary account of the Bush-Cheney era, Days of Fire, I found a striking number of parallels between Bush’s fifth year in office and the atrocious first 12 months of President Obama’s second term. My takeaway: Obama needs to shatter the cycle of dysfunction (his and history’s) or risk leaving office like Bush, unpopular and relatively unaccomplished.”

George P. Bush, “the 37-year-old grandson of one former president and nephew of another, is launching his political career by running for Texas’ little-known but powerful land commissioner post,” the AP reports.

“But rather than campaigning on the mainstream Republicanism embodied by the family name, Bush says he’s ‘a movement conservative’ more in line with the tea party.”

“As if to underscore the point, he says he draws the most inspiration not from the administrations of his grandfather, George H. W. Bush, or his uncle, George W. Bush, but from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who engineered the 1994 Republican takeover of that chamber.”

Vanity Fair says former President George W. Bush “has, quietly and wholly, ingeniously refashioned himself into an Internet-friendly, cat-loving, ironic-hat-wearing painter-cum-Instagram savant. Lately, George W. Bush is a hipster icon, and the Internet, unofficial Fourth Estate of the youth of America, is totally buying it.”

“The artwork of George W. Bush — the painter known as ’43’ — is finally for sale,” the Dallas Morning News reports.

“While the former president’s paintings won’t be found at the National Gallery of Art — or even the Dallas Museum of Art — the George W. Bush Presidential Center is selling a limited-edition Christmas ornament that highlights one of Bush’s pieces.”

“I did the best I could do. I’m also
very comfortable with the fact that it’s going take a while for history
to judge whether the decisions I made are consequential or not. And
therefore, I’m not too worried about it.”

— George W. Bush, quoted by The Wrap, reflecting on his presidency on “The Tonight Show.“

Peter Baker has a must-read look at former President George W. Bush’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“But the story of Bush’s eight-year pas de deux with the master of the Kremlin, reconstructed through interviews with key players and secret notes and memos, offers lessons for President Obama as he struggles to define his own approach to Putin and shape the future of the two nuclear powers. The last few months have become another dramatic juncture in the volatile Russian-American relationship, with Moscow defying Washington by offering shelter to national security leaker Edward Snowden, Obama becoming the first president to cancel a Russian-American meeting in more than 50 years and then, suddenly, improbably, the Kremlin throwing the American leader a lifeline when his confrontation with Syria took a wrong turn.”

“Looked at in the context of time, Obama’s own dashed aspirations to build a new partnership with Moscow seem to echo his predecessor’s experience.”

A Washington Post review of Days of Fire by Peter Baker says the book “should become a standard reference for historians.”

“The book has few groundbreaking revelations or startling judgments. Its virtue lies in the mass of information Baker has collected and the way he has pulled it together, so that the jumble of material on the Bush years is consolidated in one smooth narrative. He has read the memoirs so you don’t have to.”

“The heart of Days of Fire lies in the changing relationship between Bush and Cheney — how Bush in the early years of his administration relied heavily on his vastly more experienced vice president, but during his second term he increasingly operated on his own, relegating Cheney to the margins. Baker draws out each development in this tangled relationship in much the same way that Robert Caro wrote about the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”

Jonathan Karl reviews Peter Baker’s Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

“Mr. Baker, a White House reporter for the New York Times, has pulled off something of a journalistic miracle: He has written a thorough, engaging and fair history on the Bush-Cheney White House, the most polarizing presidency since Johnson’s (Andrew, not Lyndon), with the possible exception of the current one. Mr. Baker chronicles the astonishing influence of Mr. Cheney, but unlike so many other writers, he doesn’t fall for the popular caricature of the vice president as a sinister force controlling a hapless president.”

Jeb Bush:
“Some guy told me that on the plane in — stuck on O’Hare Airport. He
said he was supporting Obama. This was early in the primary and I go,
‘Why?’ And he goes, ‘Well, we had a Bush, then we had a Clinton. Then we
had a Bush. And now we’re going to have a Clinton.’ And then he looked
at me and said, ‘And then we’re going to have a Bush.’ So he had an
interesting perspective. I think some people believe that.  That won’t
be a motivating factor in my decision, though.”

Dick Cheney told 60 Minutes that just 67 days after taking the oath as vice president, he took a historic and unprecedented action of submitting a standing letter of resignation to President Bush due to his poor health.

Said Cheney: “Basically, what I did was I resigned the vice presidency effective March 28, 2001.”

“Cheney discovered there was no provision in the constitution to replace a vice president who is alive, but incapacitated. So he drew up a letter of resignation to give to the president.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney told 60 Minutes that in 2007 his cardiologist disabled his defibrillator’s wireless function over concern that terrorists could use it to send a fatal shock.

Said Cheney: “I was aware of the danger…that existed…I found it credible. I know from the experience we had and the necessity for adjusting my own device, that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible.”

National Journal:
“George W. Bush’s recent heart problems were far more dangerous than
generally believed — potentially life-threatening, in fact. Sources
familiar with the former president’s medical situation [said] that a
major blockage in a coronary artery discovered during Bush’s annual
physical exam in August had almost completely shut off blood flow to one
of his heart chambers.”

Conservatives gathered in New York to roast former Vice President Dick Cheney “at an event where many of the biggest laugh lines touched on the most controversial policies of a key architect of his administration’s War on Terror,” BuzzFeed reports.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “said something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial,” recalled one person who was there.

The person added: “There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless. I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it.”