In the long time of Donald Trump, it isn ’ t unmanageable for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of him as a capital patriot and pragmatist ; a president of the united states who governed with “ class ” and “ integrity. ” It is genuine that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a “ bragger, ” and that he eschewed the white patriot, “ alt-right, ” conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said, “ firing a shot. ” He spent his life serving his country — from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was besides a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and eight great-grandkids .
however, he was a public, not a private, figure — one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We can not, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen means. “ When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms, ” as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued, because it leads to “ delusive history and a propagandist whitewash of bad acts. ” The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and rightist Republican figures who came after him — his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent — than much of the political and media classes might have you believe .
Consider :
He ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should everlastingly be associated with Bush ’ south 1988 presidential wish. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts — where Bush ’ s democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor — had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A ill-famed television ad called “ Weekend Passes, ” released by a political natural process committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white .
As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater bragged, “ By the clock time we ’ ra finished, they ’ re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis ’ s running mate. ” Bush himself was promptly to dismiss accusations of racism as “ absolutely farcical, ” even it was authorize at the meter — even to rightist Republican operatives such as Roger Stone, nowadays a close ally of Trump — that the ad had crossed a line. “ You and George Bush will wear that to your sculpt, ” Stone complained to Atwater. “ It ’ s a racist ad. … You ’ re going to regret it. ”
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rock was proper about Atwater, who on his deathbed apologized for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did .
He made a dishonest case for war. Thirteen years before George W. Bush lied about weapons of batch destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his forefather made his own fixed of false claims to justify the forward pass bombing of that lapp area. The beginning Gulf War, as an probe by diarist Joshua Holland concluded, “ was sold on a batch of war propaganda. ”
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For a startle, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait “ without provocation or admonitory. ” What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an effective green fall to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a workweek before his invasion, “ [ W ] e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your surround discrepancy with Kuwait. ”
then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed that he was doing then in order “ to assist the Saudi arabian Government in the defense of its homeland. ” As Scott Peterson wrote in the christian Science Monitor in 2002, “ Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated … that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the samara U.S. petroleum supplier. ”
however when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi bound, she found no signs of Iraqi forces ; entirely an empty desert. “ It was a pretty dangerous fib, ” Heller told Peterson, adding : “ That [ Iraqi buildup ] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it equitable didn ’ t exist. ”
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