When the lights came on

Billy Bush has told the Hollywood Reporter magazine that he has "done a lot of soul searching" in the past seven months since the tape of his stupid 2005 conversation with Donald J. Trump surfaced.

You remember the tape; you saw it 107 times last fall right before the election. Trump and former entertainment reporter Bush are on a bus discussing the liberties Trump felt entitled to take with women on the grounds that he was a "star."

And Billy Bush, given the opportunity to stand up like a man and show a little respect toward women, instead chose to act like a giggly sycophant.  The word everyone used was that he "egged" Trump on.  Note to self: look up why we say people "egg" each other on, instead of saying we "bacon" or "cheese" each other on...

His downfall was swift; he lost his job hosting part of the Today Show. If you are ever looking to hide out from me, just take a job on the weekday funfest on NBC with Hoda and Kathie Lee and the rest of those sillyhearts.

But Billy got the ax, and had to go home to explain to his wife and three daughters what sort of man he was 11 years before. It could not have been easy. It made me think of the guy I worked with who was fired for stealing county property. How do you go home and face your family after that?

At least Bush wound up with a big settlement from NBC, and there are no signs that he's looking for work as the guy who rounds up shopping carts at the BuySumMor. And we all know what happened to the other man on that bus.

"Looking back upon what was said on that bus," Bush told The Reporter, "I wish I had changed the topic. [Trump] liked TV and competition. I could’ve said, 'Can you believe the ratings on whatever?' But I didn’t have the strength of character to do it."

John Wooden, the legendary longtime basketball coach at UCLA (he was the man whom Sarah Palin confused with John Wooden Legs, the tribal president of the Northern Cheyenne) once said that "The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching."

During his time in the valley of despair, Bush fell in with one of those healing seminars. He spent  $5,000 of his settlement on a healing program in Napa Valley, CA. For his 5 Gs, he was given the opportunity to get in the floor with a baseball bat and a pillow, "literally bashing these negative patterns" he had identified in his life.

Now he is planning to get back into television. I recommend maybe doing a morning coffee klatsch in Kankakee, or celebrity bowling in Sheboygan. Once people see he has made his penitence whole, he'll be back on national syndication, telling us all about what Beyonce wore the night before and whom Steven Segal is dating.

It's a living.

Billy Bush thought no one was watching that day on the bus, so he allowed his better judgement to be clouded by his desire to fall in line with the bumptious utterances of a swaggering oaf. The lesson for all of us is twofold:

• everything you do or say is probably being photographed or videoed or recorded in some manner         and 
• it's better to be faithful to one's values all the time.  That way, you don't have to remember what you said to whom.