by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, passed away Friday evening in Houston, Texas, the city that he called home for much of his adult life. The official funeral for President Bush will be tomorrow at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and he will be interred next to his wife, Barbara, on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas.
At the time of his death, Mr. Bush had lived longer than any other president in United States history, but that record will be broken by Jimmy Carter if he survives a little more than three months from now.
During my lifetime I have seen four U.S. Presidents in person, three when they were candidates scrambling to get elected as President - Nixon, Reagan (twice), and Obama - and one who was actually serving in the office - George H.W. Bush. On July 4th, 1991, George and Barbara Bush along with a host of Missouri Republican politicians, rode and marched in the Independence Day Parade at Marshfield, Missouri, and then took up positions in the bandstand on the town square and watched for a good long while as the rest of the parade passed by - an event which included many flag-festooned military vehicles hauling veterans of the recently completed Gulf War that Bush had led America into. I had the privilege - along with two of my children - of being present at that historic event.
This week's news on the death and funeral arrangements of Poppy Bush have, for the most part, tilted toward being flowery and effusive, often citing his "civility" and prowess in international relations. And he was, at least by current standards, a competent chief executive for our nation.
But George H.W. Bush also had a darker side and was, at his heart, more politician than diplomat. Yes, George Bush was in office when the Berlin Wall fell and when the Soviet Union collapsed, but he was not in a position to take credit for many, if any, of the sudden changes that were happening in the world around him. While the world was collapsing and re-inventing itself, George Bush was struggling to chart a path that would ensure his own political survival.
George H.W. Bush had served eight years as Ronald Reagan's Vice President when he ran to succeed Reagan in the Oval Office in 1988. During that campaign he made one colossal blunder when he promised the Republican National Convention that there would be "no new taxes" under his administration, a promise he later broke and which stirred the fires of lunacy in the GOP that still burn brightly today.
Bush also used that campaign to solidify himself with the large racist segment of the GOP base through a political ad featuring a scary looking black man by the name of Willie Horton who had been convicted of murder in Massachusetts. Horton was granted a weekend furlough through a prison reform program in Massachusetts, and Bush used that lenient approach to corrections to paint his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, as being soft on crime. The photos of black Willie Horton with his large Afro got the racist Republican base to the polls and helped put the "compassionate conservative" George H.W. Bush in the White House.
As president, Bush replaced retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black jurist to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas, a black conservative candidate with marginal abilities and who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct toward a female who had worked in a subservient capacity to Thomas. That appointment remains to this day one of the enduring controversies of George H.W. Bush's one term as President of the United States.
Bush also earned public enmity from some quarters when he pardoned six of the convicted central felons in the Iran-Contra Affair of the Reagan Presidency - including Reagan's Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. Even Reagan, the president for whom they had worked, had not gone to the extreme of granting pardons to these individuals, but Bush did. Some felt that was an attempt to bury some of his own involvement in the whole sordid matter.
George H.W. Bush also missed the mark when it came to dealing with AIDS, one of the biggest medical and social crises of the late twentieth century. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had "handled" the situation for several years by simply refusing to recognize it as an issue that should involve him. In fact, Reagan spent several years not even saying the word "AIDS." Bush did address the crisis, but he did so in an off-hand and patronizing way by blaming the victims. He stated that AIDS was the result of specific behaviors, and the problem would be alleviated if people would change behaviors. People more firmly rooted in reality countered that just like breathing and eating were "behaviors" which would be hard to change, it would also be hard to change the "behavior" of desiring to have sex.
So George H.W. Bush prattled on in a civil manner, but he also rode into office on fear and racism, and stoked the home fires of conservatives with things like the appointment of Clarence Thomas, a casual dismissal of AIDS, and pardoning individuals who had flouted the law in the service of Ronald Reagan.
All of that, and I didn't even get to his failed war on drugs, the showboat invasion of Panama, the first U.S. war for oil in the Middle East, a collapsing U.S. economy, or his benign neglect of Floridians after Hurricane Andrew.
George H.W. Bush only served one term as President of the United States, yet, in many ways, that was more than enough.
Rest in peace, Old Soldier.
Citizen Journalist
George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, passed away Friday evening in Houston, Texas, the city that he called home for much of his adult life. The official funeral for President Bush will be tomorrow at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and he will be interred next to his wife, Barbara, on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas.
At the time of his death, Mr. Bush had lived longer than any other president in United States history, but that record will be broken by Jimmy Carter if he survives a little more than three months from now.
During my lifetime I have seen four U.S. Presidents in person, three when they were candidates scrambling to get elected as President - Nixon, Reagan (twice), and Obama - and one who was actually serving in the office - George H.W. Bush. On July 4th, 1991, George and Barbara Bush along with a host of Missouri Republican politicians, rode and marched in the Independence Day Parade at Marshfield, Missouri, and then took up positions in the bandstand on the town square and watched for a good long while as the rest of the parade passed by - an event which included many flag-festooned military vehicles hauling veterans of the recently completed Gulf War that Bush had led America into. I had the privilege - along with two of my children - of being present at that historic event.
This week's news on the death and funeral arrangements of Poppy Bush have, for the most part, tilted toward being flowery and effusive, often citing his "civility" and prowess in international relations. And he was, at least by current standards, a competent chief executive for our nation.
But George H.W. Bush also had a darker side and was, at his heart, more politician than diplomat. Yes, George Bush was in office when the Berlin Wall fell and when the Soviet Union collapsed, but he was not in a position to take credit for many, if any, of the sudden changes that were happening in the world around him. While the world was collapsing and re-inventing itself, George Bush was struggling to chart a path that would ensure his own political survival.
George H.W. Bush had served eight years as Ronald Reagan's Vice President when he ran to succeed Reagan in the Oval Office in 1988. During that campaign he made one colossal blunder when he promised the Republican National Convention that there would be "no new taxes" under his administration, a promise he later broke and which stirred the fires of lunacy in the GOP that still burn brightly today.
Bush also used that campaign to solidify himself with the large racist segment of the GOP base through a political ad featuring a scary looking black man by the name of Willie Horton who had been convicted of murder in Massachusetts. Horton was granted a weekend furlough through a prison reform program in Massachusetts, and Bush used that lenient approach to corrections to paint his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, as being soft on crime. The photos of black Willie Horton with his large Afro got the racist Republican base to the polls and helped put the "compassionate conservative" George H.W. Bush in the White House.
As president, Bush replaced retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black jurist to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas, a black conservative candidate with marginal abilities and who had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct toward a female who had worked in a subservient capacity to Thomas. That appointment remains to this day one of the enduring controversies of George H.W. Bush's one term as President of the United States.
Bush also earned public enmity from some quarters when he pardoned six of the convicted central felons in the Iran-Contra Affair of the Reagan Presidency - including Reagan's Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. Even Reagan, the president for whom they had worked, had not gone to the extreme of granting pardons to these individuals, but Bush did. Some felt that was an attempt to bury some of his own involvement in the whole sordid matter.
George H.W. Bush also missed the mark when it came to dealing with AIDS, one of the biggest medical and social crises of the late twentieth century. His predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had "handled" the situation for several years by simply refusing to recognize it as an issue that should involve him. In fact, Reagan spent several years not even saying the word "AIDS." Bush did address the crisis, but he did so in an off-hand and patronizing way by blaming the victims. He stated that AIDS was the result of specific behaviors, and the problem would be alleviated if people would change behaviors. People more firmly rooted in reality countered that just like breathing and eating were "behaviors" which would be hard to change, it would also be hard to change the "behavior" of desiring to have sex.
So George H.W. Bush prattled on in a civil manner, but he also rode into office on fear and racism, and stoked the home fires of conservatives with things like the appointment of Clarence Thomas, a casual dismissal of AIDS, and pardoning individuals who had flouted the law in the service of Ronald Reagan.
All of that, and I didn't even get to his failed war on drugs, the showboat invasion of Panama, the first U.S. war for oil in the Middle East, a collapsing U.S. economy, or his benign neglect of Floridians after Hurricane Andrew.
George H.W. Bush only served one term as President of the United States, yet, in many ways, that was more than enough.
Rest in peace, Old Soldier.
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