It’s easy to forget that President Bush was the first YouTube President — that is, until you watch his White House Christmas videos. Produced annually between 2002 and 2007, and titled “BarneyCam” after Bush’s Scottish Terrier, the videos are summer camp-quality skits starring the president, his dog and some of his closest advisers, like Alberto Gonzalez and Margaret Spellings, who seem not to have realized that digital media is 4ever.
Today, some online commenters express schadenfreude at seeing the old Bush cast preserved in this digital snow globe of embarrassment, while others are nostalgic for a president who was, as Marc Maron recently put it, “the most consistently involuntarily funny president that ever existed.” But for me, it’s all about Barney.
Let me skip directly to the scene that says it all, from Barney Reloaded, 2003: