An honest assessment of George HW. Bush should, out of respect for him and the presidency generally, wait until he is buried. He now is.If you had turned on Faux News or PMSNBC, starting around 12 am early on the morning of December 1, 2018, you would have caught the start of All Bush All The Time over an interminably long weekend, and A Lot of Bush A Lot of the Time until this Thursday. Official Bush Court Biographer Jon Meacham showed up arround 2 am on the 1st on PMSNBC to get the wake officially started, and of course delivered a classically revisionist and hagiographic eulogy at the state funeral Wednesday
No other American political family, save the Kennedys, could ever merit such presidential death coverage.
One pundit on PMSNBC went so far as to intone something like, "George H.W. Bush might just have been the only president in US history to have been elected by being nice."
Nice as in:
1. Hiring Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes to run his campaign?
2. Running the Willie Horton ad?
3. Campaigning at flag factories to imply his opponent was unpatriotic?
Time and distance often make the past grow dim or distorted, but the posthumous "reinvention" of George HW Bush's presidency will approach that of a Stalinist revision over the next few weeks and months in the hands of a media guilt ridden over the idea they helped elect Donald Trump for ratings, and now drool at any prospect of making penance through fanciful and misguided comparisons between an invented Arcadian mythology about the Bush Republican Party and the nasty reality of Trump's party. None of those comparisons will correctly analyze how the self-serving wedge politics, culture warring, and coded racism of the Bush era created a dumbed down voting base and morally bankrupt political class in a party ripe for Donald Trump's hostile takeover.
The real comparison metaphor between the Bush and Trump eras is between a highly processed, high carb "fat free" diet and home cooked comfort food. When the voters Lee Atwater and Karl Rove brought into the Republican Party to vote for two Bushes got a taste of the stuff Donald Trump cooked up and served to them himself, they no longer wanted the fat free bigotry the two George Bushes had been feeding them through surrogates and "independent" dark money PACs all those years.
George HW Bush was not a monster, and he was certainly not as bad a president as his son was, but he was not the political saint his anti-Trump rehab apologists, like Meacham, have made him out to be this past week. He was an awkward politician who governed domestically in the economic interests of those like himself, those who already had it made. There is no doubt he believed he was both entitled and obligated to "serve" his country because of his patrician status, his birthright. He did serve his country in World War II by risking his life in combat, a practice elites in the United States conspicuously avoid today. In that sense he did belong to a better generation of the ruling class, and should be praised for his willingness to do so in a war that was, if any are, unavoidable.There have been many books written about HW Bush. Some of them are fairy tales, either hagiographic like Meacham's, or nightmarish and conspiratorial. Whatever faults HW had, they did not include conspiring to kill JFK as Russ Baker argued in his reputation damaging "Family of Secrets." If you want an honest account of the first Bush presidency that is neither hagiographic nor polemical, the best work is still one of the earliest, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush.
Published in 1992, it accurately depicts George HW Bush as a cautious elitist who preferred foreign policy over domestic. It also correctly depicts him as conflicted about, but nonetheless willing to hire surrogates like Lee Atwater to do almost anything to elect him president. HW was a man who hated politics, viewed it as unseemly, but who believed it was his destiny to be president, and perhaps because of this he lacked the moral courage to resist allowing others to do unseemly things on his behalf,. He preferred to compartmentalize such proxy behavior as tolerable if it gave him the chance to "serve" as president and fulfill his birthright. The most honest and revealing thing about Meacham's "definitive" and authorized biography of him is its title, Destiny and Power.
The bloated praise heaped on HW this past week would be excusable if it were just about honoring him at his death. Even absurd language from Meacham about him being a "20th century American Founding Father." What's inexcusable about this type of overblown hagiography is that its real motive in not just to honor a dead man. It is to draw a dishonest contrast between the dead man and the current president, and even more problematic, it's designed to promote an undeserved, and certainly unentitled political future for the Bush dynasty.
It is not a dishonest contrast because it implies that Donald Trump is dishonest. Trump is a vulgar con man whose "accidental presidency" owes far more to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove's racial dog whistles and culture war baiting, and both Bush presidents' detached economic elitism than any apologist for HW Bush this week would ever loath to admit. It is dishonest because it hides this exact truth they omitted.Trump has spent a business career in sketchy real estate dealings, and likely will be revealed shortly to have laundered Russian mob money through his real estate partnerships via Deutsche Bank and other vehicles over the years. But let's not forget the unseemly deals that HW, JEB! and W Bush had with middle eastern and Chinese business interests, and personal involvement with international corporations like The Carlyle Group and others that profited from their neoliberal trade and financial deregulation and bailout policies, and the outsourcing of American jobs and production. And let's not forget the Dubai Ports World scandal during George W. Bush's disastrous presidency, a deal that would have sold the management of six major US ports to a Bush friendly UAE company, and was so openly corrupt once exposed that it had to be abandoned after even Republicans could not defend it.
Comparisons are often about spin, and there is more than one way to spin a comparison between the two Bush presidencies and Trump's presidency. How about:
1. How many new wars have started while Trump as been president?
2. How many economic collapses have occurred under Trump?
3. Is the rich-friendly tax cut passed by the GOP controlled Congress while Trump was president any worse than one that would have been passed if JEB! Bush had been president?
Even if Trump hired hookers to pee on the "Obama suite" bed at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, and even if the FSB has a video of it, and even if Putin "owns" Trump, does that make a case for a JEB! Bush presidency?
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| "Jesuchristo es mi filosofo favorito" The new Bush Crown Prince, George Prescott Bush? |
Probably not. It might get him ten delegates instead of four if he did so with some real energy the second time around, but probably not much else. It's one thing to proclaim Poppy as "decent" when lowering him into the Texas sod, but quite another to gamble on a third Bush president actually being a decent one.
That dog ain't likely to hunt. Not even on a high dollar private game reserve where the game are starved, caged, and then released right into a bait plot in front of the hunters.
More likely is that this is setting the stage for a Maoist "long march" for George Prescott Bush, who gave one of the eulogies for HW at the Texas funeral Thursday. There seems one thing certain. When it comes to birthright political entitlement, the Bush family likely will never realize their true future destiny is to cease inflicting themselves on the American public, and to go gentle into that good night.
If you think Trump is a disgrace, consider what likely would follow the next Bush president. Let's never find out.
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