George W. Bush's Andover Prep School nickname: Tweed, as in Boss Tweed.

Imagine this question from the press:

"President Bush, according to the book "The Faith of George W. Bush", your nickname at the elite East Coast prep school was Tweed. What was that nickname based on?"

His two nicknames at Andover reveal much about him at the time. His friends called him "Lip" because of his insolence and "Tweed" because he started a stickball league and ruled it like the famous Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall a century before. When he did not qualify for the varsity sports teams, he became a cheerleader. The Andover yearbook for the time includes a photograph labeled "Bush and his gang."

-"The Faith of George W. Bush" Chapter Three "The Nomadic Years" Page 43

I think his friends at Andover had a real insight.
Just how much is George W. Bush like Boss Tweed?

o Gives special contracts to his friends at Kellogg Brown and Root
o Cost over runs and outragous overcharging have already been documented
o He knows who to pay off in his base
o He will be brought down by an cartoonist and spend time in jail(I wonder
if Jon Stewart is our Thomas Nast?)

Information about Tweed's corrupt activities were passed to Thomas Nast, a cartoonist working for Harper's Weekly. Nast now began a campaign to expose Tweed's corruption. Tweed was furious and told the editor: "I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles, my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures."

Doesn't that sound like something Karl Rove would say? He knows the power of visuals, both good and bad. That's why you never see Bush in any photos with dead soliders, no photos of him with any protesters and it is also why Abu Ghraib was such a disaster. You can tell people about abuse but seeing the image hits them in the gut. They triggered negative emotions and that is something the White House does NOT want to associate with the President.

It's all visuals," Karl Rove told campaign finance chief Don Evans. "You campaign as if America was watching TV with the sound turned down."

Thomas Nast, The Tammany Lords and Their Constituents, 1871