George HW Bush is dead, and there is no hell, so the best I can hope for is that he faded away on his deathbed despairing that his legacy, what there is of it, was thrown away by his fuckwit sons.
This is why I can never be president. Barack Obama was far more charitable and generous and diplomatic in his remarks.
America has lost a patriot and humble servant in George Herbert Walker Bush. While our hearts are heavy today, they are also filled with gratitude. Our thoughts are with the entire Bush family tonight – and all who were inspired by George and Barbara’s example. pic.twitter.com/g9OUPu2pjY
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 1, 2018
One thing I’m hoping for is that Trump will deliver a eulogy. I’m expecting something that compares the relative sizes of their electoral college votes and inauguration crowds.
I have one tiny quibble with your post. Bush was not a tool of the élite. He was the élite. Everything he did was in service of the class he was born into.
Drumpf was able to stay on script when reading his prepared statement from the White House, but I somehow don’t expect the twatterer-in-chief to stay on message. As soon as he feels that Bush Sr. is getting too much good press, he’s certain to prove why his own legacy will remain in the sewer.
Well, of course Obama would be kind to GHWB. Why not? Bush set the modern-day precedent of giving up your proclaimed ethical standard to do what the hard right wanted (remember Bush’s capitulation over “voodoo economics”?) and also gave us the “global policeman” rhetoric which Obama was fond of appealing to. And, of course, Obama said outright that in Reagan’s day he would have been a Republican (because a man who brought religious hatred into mainstream politics and set records for number of administration officials indicted is inspiring.) Bush was in some respects Obama’s role model.
As much as I would love to see the hapless fuckwit brag at someone else’s funeral, I suspect he will be gently urged to kindly get the fuck away from the funeral.
What is it that obliges people to say good things about rotten presidents? Is it about pretending that there is something about being president that automatically turns them into great leaders? Even George W, by any measure the worst president until 2016, is nowadays getting revisionist praise. Or is it that Trump has retrospectively made all previous presidents look like Lincoln?
Bush Sr did many terrible things, but he was the last Republican of influence to believe in thinking about policy. This is not exactly high praise.
bush like many of the politicians of the last 100 years or so certainly the last 50 years have taken the struggle as primarily or heavily an economic struggle one, the cold war was between communism vs. capitalism, we were given a choice that was made out to be one of freedom or slavery when what was really being offered as practiced was to be ruled by the “party” or the board room.
very few times was anyone putting the conflict primarily in terms of human rights, democracy and self determination.
the party of Lincoln was walked away from the sentiment he expressed
george was no exception.
uncle frogy
My memory of this is a bit hazy, maybe someone can correct me.
I can’t remember if it was 9/11 or, “Shock and Awe,” but George Jr., due to his nature, was incapable of giving a coherent press briefing. Daddy stepped in for him. It was a startling contrast and made me realize how much this nation’s standards for a Presidency were devolving, if there is such a thing.
Bush Sr. was not as odious as other Republican presidents since Eisenhower. Probably because in large part he was checked by a democratic Congress.
Guess this will be another funeral the snatch snatcher won’t be attending .
The media has a nasty habit of fawning over every dead celebrity or past president regardless if they were total assholes in life. If Donald Trump were to drop deal of a heart attack today (please let it be, God) we’d hear nothing but fawning praise for the most venal, evil and corrupt man who ever stepped into the Oval Office.
“The father of fuckwit sons” perfectly describes George W. and brother Neil, but big daddy Prescott founded the family’s fortune in part by catering to Nazi interests during WWII.
On the positive side, he joined the military and served honorably.
On the negative side, he pardoned those involved in the Iran-Contra affair
@weylguy
#11
Of course that leaves us with President Pence.
Also, PZ, do you not believe that he said atheists shouldn’t be considered (American) citizens, or did you just not consider it important?
it is weird how 45 has so lowered the bar that presidents we used to laugh at are now praised for “not as bad as 45“. I am afraid I will go hyperbolic, and this is why:
we seem to be in a death spiral politically.
With 45 continually extending the spiral as every day we all say “How could he ever say something more stupid”, then next day, he does.
*glug *glug *gurgle
davidc1 @ 10
My wife’s comment while reading some paean to Bush’s character was that something like 6 women accused him of groping them. So, maybe the Groper in Chief will go to this one.
He voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016 and said so publicly so there is that.
And there’s that.
Other than that I’ve got very little and of little significance…. I liked his glasses… does that count?
colinday @ # 13: … do you not believe that he said atheists shouldn’t be considered (American) citizens, or did you just not consider it important?
Hemant Mehta describes why that report calls for skepticism.
And (via Mano Singham) Mehdi Hasan puts a spotlight on major aspects of Dubya Daddy’s deplorableness. Oddly, the war crime(s) of the invasion of Panama go unmentioned, along with the attempt to cover up the Chilean-spy-service-orchestrated murders of a Chilean dissident and an American citizen in Washington, DC, during DD’s time as CIA Director.
@Pierce R. Butler
#17
I had heard there was a question about Bush 41’s actually saying it. Thanks for the link.
Im not so sure Bush was so bad. I heard some very good things about him today from respected people , james Baker and Jon Meachem , the noted historian. One good thing he did was to raise taxes on the rich in 1990, which may have cost him reelection and gained him the ire of Gingrich and other Republicans. It was by many accounts the right thing to do as it helped the economy and lowered the deficit. He knew it would cost him to break his promise of “no new taxes”. Also he was reluctant to go to war at first in Kuwait but was talked into it by his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft,who argued that not intervening would encourage other countries to invade. He was a public servant for 40 years, many think he was a good guy. Is all of that wrong?
From the radical right wing rag, The New Yorker.
The Irreducible Niceness of George H. W. Bush
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/george-h-w-bush-the-forty-first-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-ninety-four
I’m a bit disappointed that no one has yet mentioned his legacy on AIDS.
He continued Reagan’s inaction. He repeatedly called AIDS a “disease of behavior” and implied — often with no subtly — that people who got it deserved it. He implemented the policy that people with HIV could not enter the United States, which made international conferences to share research results rather difficult to host here. He urged states to make HIV a reportable disease, where an infected person’s name and address would be made public for “quarantine purposes.” (A number of states did just that, which was the impetus for adding a privacy provision to HIPAA when passed in 1996.) He certainly gave lip service: in 1990, soon after taking office, he gave a speech urging compassion for people with AIDS, only to, in the same speech, urge policies that were anything but compassionate. In 1988, Congress created the National Commission on AIDS to make recommendations for national law and policy, and Bush refused to enact any of the recommendations.
His bigotry and lack of response prompted several actions. On October 11, 1992 — the fourth National Coming Out Day — a group led by ACT-UP took the cremated remains of loved ones who had died of HIV and scattered them on the White House lawn after a funeral procession through DC. A group of protesters stayed outside his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, because a permanent protest in front of the White House was not permitted. When AIDS activist Mark Fisher died on October 28, 1992, his friends and colleagues carried his coffin in procession to Bush’s New York campaign headquarters the day before the election, a political statement intended to indict Bush for Fisher’s death and the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans under his four years in office.
There are many reasons why the man deserves the very worst that Christian theologians have ever dreamed up. But this, for me, is sufficient to get him the worst possible Hell. I lost a lot of friends because he thought they deserved the horrific, messy death they got, and I will never, ever honor his memory.
GHW Bush was terribly polite, at least in person and in public. Unless you count the groping. He also ran two of the dirtiest political campaigns of his era. Gore Vidal, citing the education they rather precisely shared, said the only possible explanation for Bush’s stumbling speech was that there were so many lies floating around in his head that he could not keep them straight.
But what really gets my goat about the eulogies is the claim that he masterfully handled the end of the Cold War. Really? I mean, really? The Russian economy and social structure collapsed. And his “magnificent” handling of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (provoked by technology Bush sold to the Kuwaitis) led directly to 9/11, the continuing not-war in Afghanistan (it’s definitely not a war but no one can come up with the proper noun for it), the invasion of Iraq (obviously a war but never declared) and the continuing mess in the Middle East. I suppose to be fair we must admit that some of the causes of that go back much further, but then to be fair we must also note that Bush made a large amount of money out of the Saudis, as well as the Kuwaitis. So there is that.