The patriarch is dead.
Mr. Bush was barely brushed by Iran-contra, the major scandal of the Reagan presidency. He said he had been “out of the loop” when decisions were made to sell military equipment to Tehran to gain the release of U.S. citizens held hostage by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon…
…As Mr. Bush left office, he issued pardons for Caspar W. Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, and five other officials who had faced charges for their Iran-contra roles.
Your corporate media.
The minute they die, they become saints. I consider Iran-Contra far worse than Watergate. We’re still paying for the meddling in both the Middle East and Central America at the hands of both Bushes.
I was waiting for your post on this because you’re an expert on The Patriarch. And this is all you got? I’m disappointed 🙁
Give him time!
I’ve been busy all morning, so I barely had time to put a thread up.
For some reason, though, I don’t feel like giving Poppy the full work up, either now or even after a decent interval.
I probably will anyway because I can’t let it stand that the guy was some upstanding model of a good president or person, but I am willing to give him a temporary reprieve out of respect for the fact that he was at least recognizably human, unlike his Republican successors, including his son.
You should, because I’m selfish and I’d appreciate it 🙂
It might even be therapeutic
I didn’t read it, TL;DR but there is a long piece on Bush up at Lawyers Guns and Money:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/12/bush-2
Read that one this morning, was good. But I want Booman’s look at it from a “CIA Deep State Operative” point of view. The “unexplored” aspect, if you will.
One should also note that Poppy Bush was so proud of his pardons for Cap the Knife and the rest of the Iran-Contra crowd that the pardon was announced on Christmas Eve evening that year in an info dump. He just wanted to scrub his record snow white so that the sheeple wouldn’t notice he was letting alleged criminals off before they could be tried. He was so afraid of what would come out that he couldn’t even allow the prosecution to proceed. So many coincidences and we’re supposed to believe Poppy Bush wasn’t up to his eyebrows in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Willie Horton … and I could go on all day. What kind of hagiography will they do of Trump in 10 years when he kicks it from eating too many cheeseburgers?
Something about how he was the voice of the white working class.
A thousand points of blight.
Where’s our friggin’ peace dividend?
The sad thing is that he was by far the best Republican president we’ve had since Eisenhower.
The Republican party is a dumpster fire.
He at least showed occasional dim flashes of decency. I’d take him over the current edition, although that’s not saying much.
According to Matthew Iglesias, GHW Bush would’ve been re-elected if not for the devious policies of the Federal Reserve.
Sorry, that’s Yglesias.
He must be on some good stuff to say something that silly. The Fed at the time was packed with Republican supporters and in any case they hardly were overdoing it with raising rates at the time. The 1990 recession was very mild, and the slow recovery afterwards was caused not by the Fed but by the recovery from the pre-recessionary bubble.
He was without a doubt the highest-ranking CIA/Intelligence asset/member/whatever to have held the office of president.
Nice folks to have as leaders, eh?
AG
Head of CIA is an immediate disqualifier for me.
Once you stipulate a.) There will be, from time to time, Republican presidents and b.) presidents will definitionally be successful politicians, you’ve narrowed your chance of getting anything north of ‘not awful’ down to practically zero from jump.
You’re drawing to an inside straight.
Too little, too late.
He always stank of privilege and cossetted wealth, and was a gutter fighter, viz. that Willie Horton ad. And the “out of the loop” excuse was bullshit; he was more like “up to his eyeballs.”
There’s no question that he risked his life as a TBM Avenger pilot in WWII. He almost lost it when his aircraft was shot down, and his two crewmen were killed. That’s more than one could ever say for the physical coward who is now in the Oval Office.
But I think that military service needs to be put in the context of the time. EVERYONE who aspired to high office back then knew this was a ticket that had to be punched: think Joe Kennedy, Jr.; JFK; even LBJ who volunteered for some extremely hazardous B-26 missions around New Guinea just as an observer, solely to say later he put his ass on the line.
He was a successful war president and, unlike his idiot son, wisely declined to go into Iraq. But he always lacked the common touch — Remember, “Message, I care”? — and I was happy to see him defeated. He shines only in comparison to the GOP monsters who succeeded him in the Presidency, and ultimately that’s not enough to rehabilitate him in my eyes.
Once he encouraged a revolt, he had blood on his hands by abandoning them. If he wasn’t willing to go to Baghdad or back up the revolt with American airpower, he shouldn’t have incited the intifada in the first place. Maybe it was “wise” (I’m not sure I agree, especially seeing the destruction laid at feet of propping up the dictators), but it arguably laid the groundwork for Clinton’s escalation and Shrub’s illegal war of aggression.
Don’t forget the “highway of Death,” which is whitewashed in most of what I have found on the web.
Yes, and before they became hacks and propagandists for the worst regimes on the planet, Seymour Hersh and John Pilger did a great job reporting on it. Now they traffick in war crimes denial themselves.
That stuff in Syria can’t be war crimes because the US didn’t do it.
It’s not that complicated — do try and keep up.
Now I’ve got to go out and smash US imperialist hegemony for a while. Be back in a jiff.
Lost me. No idea what you are talking about.
Don’t be silly, there’s plenty of US war crimes in Syria:
2017 al-Jinah airstrike
But that war crime wasn’t aimed at civilians under Assad’s government’s control, and obscures the narrative; it therefore must be ignored. Also it occurred under anti-interventionist President Trump, not Obama. It was a meeting for al Qaeda, and the War on a Terror (in Syria) is Good now. This Makes Sense.
Can you expand on your thoughts about Seymour Hersch?
Seymour Hersh has either completely lost his mind that’s been soaking in anti-US propaganda and he can’t see the difference between fake and real, or he’s willing to take money in order to push out propaganda under the guise of investigative reporting (or both).
He’s publicly doubted doubted Skripal poisoning and Russian hacking of the DNC, wrote an incorrect story doubting Assad gas attacks in Ghouta, was caught up in bullshit story doubting the Khan Shaykhunabout gassings. For all of this faulty reporting, he’s never once recounted or apologized for it. He relied solely on the name he made for himself with his legendary reporting, and traded it in for fascist state propaganda. He can never be trusted.
Hersh and Bob Parry have both done gone round the bend. Too much time sniffing their own farts I think. Sad, because Parry was great during Iran-Contra.
ETA: Parry, before he died, went round the bend.
Last night I was thinking that most Republican presidents look better and better in the rear view mirror, primarily because they are mostly succeeded by worse Republican presidents.
Starting with Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and now the Orange Abomination. But perhaps Bush Sr. is a mild exception (compared to Reagan) – he was not that ideological, and accepted his defeat with grace.
Also most Democratic Presidents who succeeded the Republican presidents helped rehabilitate their Republican predecessors by their graciousness toward ex presidents.
In contrast, Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama have not been a similar horror show. And often in hindsight, some of them seem a bit tarnished (Clinton’s legacy in particular). Carter has gone on to do some wonderful things after his presidency, though with the Republicans he will never gain much currency!
I am still in deep cognitive dissonance. I came to this country from India in 1980. I was starry eyed – primarily about NASA and US STEM dominance – but secondarily also about its country-above-party politics. All The President’s Men was a shining beacon on the hill!
But all the racism that has slowly upwelled was completely hidden from plain sight. MLK and the Statue of Liberty was what America stood for. At that time I knew of very few countries, including my birth country of India, that welcomed immigrants. USA and Canada. UK was quite hostile to people from the sub-continent. My wife’s brother was subjected to “Paki bashing” when he was in Nottingham during their father’s visiting professorship at the University.
And with Obama’s presidency, in the early years, we became convinced that US had shaken itself free of the racial animus during the epochal events of the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement.
But looks like Obama’s presidency stirred the bottom of the pond, instead of precipitating all the dirt!
But to go from all the technological advances that made US as the most advanced country to where Florida has legislated that the state agencies cannot use “Climate Change” in their reports, or North Carolina officials cannot measure sea level rise!
How to reconcile this amazing polarity reversal!