George H.W. Bush

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

I have to be honest: I never trusted H.W. He was the head spook under Ford, and despite his lengthy track record of various political assignments, I didn’t trust someone who had experience in keeping secrets and thus I feared wouldn’t exactly be transparent.

On the other hand, every president who passes away from this point on will have to face one question: Was he better than Trump?

Was George Sr. better than Trump? Good lord, yes. He fought for this country as an aviator, he believed in the system, and he understood the rule of law. Trump doesn’t. H.W. will be missed.

PAD

13 comments on “George H.W. Bush”

  1. My big beef with GHWB was how he lied us into the first Iraq war. He paraded “Nayirah” around the USA to include Oprah to whip us into a frenzy. It worked. I thought we should blow the sh!t out of Iraq too. Bush also deliberately lied about Iraqi forces on the Saudi border ready to invade. I pulled some data from google to make the point.

    Testimony from a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah to Congress in October, 1990. Nayirah claimed to be a refugee and hospital volunteer of the maternity ward of Al Adan hospital in Kuwait City; stating she witnessed Iraqi soldiers steal the incubators and leave 312 infants to die on the cold hospital floor (51).

    Nayirah lied about her identity; she was the daughter of Kuwait Ambassador to the United States and member of the Kuwait royal family, Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah. Nayirah had no connection to the hospital and was coached on how to give her testimony by the US public relations firm Hill and Knowlton (53). Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.

    The reason Iraq invaded Kuwait is not quite certain. But 9 out of 10 Iraqis, and my good friends in the US Military who were in that war, will state that Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields and stealing Iraqi oil and would not cease.

    That Bush was not as bad as Trump is not a claim to success. But I’d rather him any day, for sure.

    1. Though i suspect a possible source for those allegations i may be wrong – could you supply a link to your source(s), please?

      1. I looked it up. Did a fast google search. Everything Joe said is 100% accurate. I’d forgotten all about it. The stroke wiped out some memories and I think that was one of them.

  2. I disagreed with some things he said and did as President, but I’ve disagreed with every President about something. But, the thing is, I found H.W. Bush to be the last link to a Republican party I could identify with in any real way. For me, the end of his presidency was the beginning of the coarsening of the Republican party, the start of the death of a moderate GOP.
    .
    The ending of his presidency gave way to the rise of the Newt Gingrich breed of conservative as party leader and party norm, and petulance and extremism from that branch of conservatism only grew worse over time until we arrived at a party where extremism and idiocy became more valued than moderation, common sense, or decency.
    .
    There are no living Presidents now who represent that branch of conservatism. There are almost no prominent Republicans who do, either. His passing is, for me, not only the passing of a former US President, but, symbolically at least, very likely an era in politics.
    .
    I met him twice. Nice enough fellow. Good sense of humor.
    .
    RIP

  3. I agree, too. Trump has given us a new brass standard for Worst President Ever. I just hope no one thinks they have to strive to go even lower as president.

    One thing I’m wondering is that Trump will be expected to officiate over GHW Bush’s funeral. Will he be able to do that without trying to make it about himself?

  4. I believe in respecting the dead, but praising Bush for not being Trump is setting a pretty low standard, and it tells us almost nothing about his life. It’s like creating a movie review site called “Was It Better than Gigli?”

  5. Lowering the bar does not automatically elevate others. There is always room at the bottom to do some digging. 41 went to war to protect the same Saudi government that Trump is catching so much Hëll for supporting.

    Stick with your mistrust of government officials. If any of them were any good at their jobs there would be less misery.

  6. Honestly, the Age of Trumpism made me reavaliate a lot of my former opinions. I am not praising George H. W. Bush for being better than Trump. I am just wondering if the smug “purity” of Liberals (and I do consider myself as a Liberal, so take this as self-criticism) did not play a part in ushering the Age of Trump.
    .
    The automatic reflex of considering as a monster anyone on the right may have gradually diminished our capacity of sounding the alarm when a real monster took center stage.
    .
    And I see lots and lots of today’s Intersectional Left folks saying the Bushes and Reagan and Nixon were just as bad as Fascists and Neo-Nazis. The same folks who, IMO, accidentaly help normalize real Racism and real Misogyny by adopting overly-broad definitions of Racism and Misogyny that allow the Neo-Nazi fûçkërš to claim they’re just average Americans.
    .
    I agree with Jerry Chandler, that George H. W. Bush, warts and all, was the last President to represent a Republican Party that was still sane.

  8. H.W. at least cared enough to move us into the future; unlike trump, who is doing everything he can to reverse
    any social progress we have made.

    H.W. grew up to become a human adult, while trump never
    achieved sufficient empathic maturity to develop beyond
    childish ogre.

    I used to snicker at the ” kinder and gentler ” hype of
    the H.W. era, but the crassness of the trump milieu has me longing for a time machine.

  9. Some additional thoughts on the credits and debits of Bush 41: Credit – He still believed in multi-lateral action, organizing a coalition, including Muslim states, to carry out Gulf War I. And he had the sense not to push on to Baghdad when we had nothing to replace Saddam ready to go. Debits: He did his bit to help sink campaign discourse deeper into the mud with the whole Willie Horton business in 1988.

Comments are closed.