The next great development on the Bush family coolness front came Monday when George W.’s father announced to the masses that the Republican National Committee had issued a special-edition pair of socks in his honor. Though his love of socks had already been documented in numerous Internet slideshows, the RNC campaign kicked off a new slew of media coverage.

“I’m a self-proclaimed sock man,” George H.W. Bush wrote in an email to RNC email subscribers. “The louder, the brighter, the crazier the pattern—the better! It’s usually the first thing people notice I’m wearing whenever I’m out in public and that’s the way I like it.”

It wasn’t until several hundred words in that H.W. got around to saying that these limited-edition socks, embroidered with the Republican elephant and signed by him, would go to help raise money for the RNC ahead of the midterm elections. And by then it had already made the rounds on Twitter, with reporters like The Hill’s Garielle Levy tweeting, “I’d rock some 41 socks.”