I made a point of getting home early today so I could watch the state funeral for George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States and probably the last President ever that will be able to be spoken of with the words, “great President”. It was with sadness I watched the service, for it seemed to me, I was also watching a funeral for my own country.
Which is sad, because George H.W. Bush represented that dream of many, that the United States can actually be a much better nation than it turned out to be in the opening years of the 21st century. While the man had many flaws and many of his policy prescriptions were also flawed, unlike his predecessor, and definitely, unlike his successors, the 41st President of the United States tried to put the country first, and do what was needed in terms of good policy. Even if it cost him at the ballot box in 1992 – as it did when his own party behaved like the selfish, spoiled children they were to become, by decrying his very necessary move to raise taxes and cut the deficit. He should have been hailed as a hero by the Republican party for that one act alone.
But he wasn’t and so he lost in 1992 and the present era began.
In Alternative History books, they use a concept called Point of Departure. Meaning an event that occurs that alters the timeline and leads to a string of events happening. I will be forever convinced that if George H.W. Bush had won re-election in 1992, the country would not have descended into the political morass that it is in today. There would have been no Clinton impeachment, I am quite sure his son would never have been President – thus preventing a wasteful and disastrous invasion of Iraq, the GOP might not have gone headlong over a cliff to embrace the current vile, cruel and selfish policy prescriptions, and for sure Donald J. Trump would have just been a worthless real estate mogul instead of a corrupt and worthless President.
Those who supported H. Ross Perot in 1992 deserve to be held in utter scorn for being the prototype of the selfish pigs that devolved into the deplorable MAGA hat wearing idiots we see today. They bear a fearful burden for the damage they inflicted on this country. We could have been a much better country.
But none of that happened and events proceeded to the low point of American history, when the current useless occupant of the White House thought himself to be equal to the challenge of the highest office in the land. Donald Trump is not fit to tie George Herbert Walker Bush’s shoes. Bush was as qualified a President as we have ever had. Trump is the other end of the bookend, absolutely the worst and most unfit President we have ever had.
And don’t think that was not lost on the other Presidents in attendance today. Look at these before and after shots when the man baby showed up.
Then the Trumps showed up:
A graceless fool to be sure. Even more so during the service where all the praises for Bush showed to highlight how utterly worthless Trump is. Any recitation of virtue seems like an implicit criticism since Trump is so entirely devoid of that quality.
41 represents the last of the line, the moderate Republican and Eastern Republican. As Charles Pierce noted:
He was the scion of Yankee wealth, that great chilly monolith that provided an opponent with whom the rising political power of the immigrant waves, especially the Irish, was obliged to contend. He was one half of the oldest tribal political rivalry of the time and place of my growing up. That’s why I got such a kick out of watching him handle that baby as though someone had handed him a live grenade. Honey Fitz, Jim Curley, or any of the Kennedys would have known what to do. Hell, Curley might have sung it a lullaby.
Because of that, I was best able to see him as the last of them—the old-line eastern and northern Republicans. (He never could pull off the whole Texas business. His son was much better at it, and he wasn’t that great.) I knew the political tradition from which he’d arisen as well as I knew my own. Certainly, those Republicans became the protectors of inherited wealth and privilege, but they also were the descendants of some stubborn bastards who’d scratched colonies out of some of the most unforgiving landscapes on which anyone ever landed, and a helluva lot of them had been abolitionists as well, while the arriving Irish were busy hanging black folks from lampposts.
Bush really did not change from his youth to his time in the White House. Unfortunately his overrated predecessor had set the stage for the foundation of the party he gave his life to, to fall apart.
However, as Bush rose in the Republican Party, its power base swung south and west. It slowly embraced empowered radical religious fundamentalism. And, most significantly, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, it made a conscious decision to energize itself through the splintered, but still powerful, remnants of American apartheid.
Bush never appeared comfortable with these developments, but he never could quite bring himself to denounce them, and he had very little compunction about using them when he needed to do so. Because of this, and because of the starchy aloofness of his basic mien, he struggled mightily against the impression that he was inauthentic. He did not often win that battle.
And thanks to Newt Gingrich the worthless souls of the Tea Party started to rise and the rest of us have suffered for it ever since.
Read my lips. No new taxes!
He was not a stupid man. He knew that the Reagan economic poison was going to lead to a sugar-rush high and then a massive structural deficit and then a recession. But he couldn’t bring himself to say that to a hall full of people already thick with the prion disease. Then, in a kind of mad irony, economics circumstances forced him to raise taxes just a little because he had been right about the voodoo all along. All the rising forces in the Republican Party he’d tried to appease by being something he was not, or by outsourcing the work to reptiles like Ailes and Atwater, roared to life against him.
Even if America shakes off the shackles of the terminal illness that is Trumpism and elects a decent man or woman ( which contrary to what my red hat wearing friends say, Barack Obama was), that person will never be recognized as such. Today’s polarized country cannot think that way – and as we are seeing in Wisconsin and Michigan, today’s Republican party is committed to ensuring a one party, minority state rule- like their dream of South Africa comes to pass.
I was a Republican when 41 was President. He visited my ship. I flew in Desert Storm, where he was able to stay focused on the task at hand, and unlike his son, did not get suckered into a foreign policy disaster. Too many people fail to realize it, but we probably still have a world to live in because he did not do a break dance on the Berlin Wall, but masterfully helped the Soviet Union to die with some dignity. That may be his greatest achievement, but its also the one he seems to never get credit for.
It wasn’t a given, however, that the Cold War would end peacefully. In fact, we worried inside the U.S. government about all sorts of crises that might unfold as the Soviet Union neared its eventual collapse on Christmas Day 1991. A cabal of KGB and Red Army leaders actually overthrew Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for two suspenseful days in August of that year.
We worried there might be another challenge to Gorbachev and Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin again that autumn which could provoke conflict inside the country or seek to obstruct the freedom of the USSR’s former satellites in Eastern Europe. We were also acutely concerned that the USSR’s vast collection of nuclear weapons and nuclear material might fall into the hands of a breakaway warlord across that vast country or into the hands of a criminal network.
Bush’s singular achievement was in creating a relationship of trust with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. That reassured them the U.S. would not seek to take advantage in the Cold War’s last months.
It was also not a given that West and East Germany would unify peacefully as communism collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand, both with clear memories of the Second World War, were initially skeptical as they pondered the reappearance of a powerful German state in the center of Europe. Some German leaders advocated a reunited neutral Germany between Russia and the West.
Bush knew both of those scenarios would be destabilizing. He was looking to the future and so he swung his support behind German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s aim for a united German nation — but one embedded in the NATO alliance.
Experience counts and in a life of public service, George Herbert Walker Bush had acquired a lot of it. It served the entire US well when it needed it. This is something the current crop of MAGA hat wearing morons seem to fail to understand.
Again, he was not without his flaws and there was plenty he could have done much, much, better. But to me, anyway, 41 represented the hope of making America a better place to be. I wish he had stood up to the thugs that later took over his party, but that was not his style.
So now, here I am at the fall of my life wondering if we will ever have a good President again. I hope so. I am worried we will not. But in George H.W. Bush we had one. We were just too stupid to recognize it at the time.
I’ll take a 1000 points of light over selfishness and cruelty any day.