I balance this with delightful thoughts of how irrelevant Dolt 45 will become upon his demise.
Trump Who??!!
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thank you for putting it this way because I have little nice to say about the Bush family and how disgusting it is how history has whitewashed them -
funny now how Trump makes every previous sin look pale in comparison
though Bush did have the first Treasurer to go to prison and did pardon Iran-arms-for-hostages people
guess maybe he was the “least evil” Bush? best I can offer
we need more Carters and Obamas to return this country to sanity, just imagine having an intellectual president again, we won’t know what to do with that
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One thing that I would thank him for is signing the Americans with Disabilties Act (ADA) into law. That was a good thing.
There was a time when some Republicans could agree to take steps in the right direction. Not anymore, it seems.
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Apparently the thing to see on Panama is this Oscar-winning documentary:
…that shows how Panama was never about stopping the drug flow; the drug flow through Panama increased by an estimated 100% after the invasion. It was clearly about asserting dominance over the government of the allegedly-sovereign country, installing a friendlier regime when Noriega would not take orders.
Also little-remarked upon today is Bush’s pardoning of six Iran-Contra convicts, establishing a Presidential right to abuse pardon power to ensure crooked political and administration members have a whole separate standard of justice. Republican special prosecutor (sound familiar?) Lawrence Walsh wrote that while he had gathered enough evidence to jail both Reagan and Bush if they hadn’t been presidents, the Republican congress covered up and ignored enough of it to let them skate; and that the abuse of pardon power “made the coverup complete”.
But Panama was an impeachable offense in its own right, same as the Iraq War. The UN Treaty forbids signatory states from applying any force to one another; war, in theory, is illegal since 1948. GHW Bush’s own Iraq War #1 was based on that exact treaty provision, the UN approving the action because Saddam had violated the treaty paragraph when he invaded Kuwait. So: break that rule and be Saddam, 35 nations will attack you to enforce the treaty; break it and be GHW Bush himself, and you get this Wikipedia entry:
" The US has ratified the UN Charter and the OAS Charter and therefore they are among the highest law of the land in the US under the [Supremacy Clause] of the US Constitution. Other international law experts who have examined the legal justification of the US invasion have concluded that it was a “gross violation” of international law.
The [United Nations General Assembly] passed a resolution strongly deploring the 1989 U.S. armed invasion of [Panama]. The resolution determined that the U.S. invasion was a “flagrant violation of international law.”
… also the War Powers thing in the USA, where theoretically, only Congress can declare war. This has been endlessly violated, indeed Truman claimed he could start the Korean War by himself. But every time a President does it, the USA becomes a more militarist state.
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Read the whole thread.
Also the damage as a serial groper. Everyone remembers the big things, but we should also not forget the little, more personal touches.
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He wasn’t the worst modern president, obviously.
He was a war profiteer.
His whole family for generations have been war profiteers.
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That reminds me of Arthur Scargill’s text comment when Thatcher died
SCARGILL ALIVE!
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Don’t forgot “wreak a middle-east country, kill or wound 400 thousand, spend $100 billion, and walk away for no US gain” in an attempt to get re-elected v1, AKA Desert Storm.
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And “respect our veterans” while denying them medical care for the myriad of illnesses they came back from that war with. Such patriots, the GOP./s
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You’d be in deep doo-doo fer sure.
There are now no living Republicans who won the White House with more votes than their opponents.
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OTOH maybe it would be best if the story of our 45th president was the most studied, discussed, vividly remembered presidency of them all.
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“Doing socialism”?!? LOL!
The look on his face is priceless!
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Oh, and then there is this…
Spoke out against a song, and it got the album pulled and the song pulled off the album…
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I think it’s high time somebody wrote some award-winning scripts around scenarios like this one, or the Iran-Contra scandal, a la All the President’s Men. Of course there’s Chappaquiddick and the Gary Hart biopic, but there’s so much more content that goes far deeper.
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I dunno if you can call it caving when those are the people that put him in office. The religious right was the signature bit of coalition building that put Reagan (and thus Bush both as VP and for his presidential bid) in office, and gave their party the level of national control it had. And the major thing that defined the 80’s-90’s GOP was the rise of the Christian Right and the dominance of Neo-Cons. Bush 1 may have been a little less tied to the far, far right of the party than Reagan, or some others at the time. And he seems to have had little tolerance for the level of bug fuck crazy that would follow. But a moderate he wasn’t.
There was no caving or pandering because those were his people. His party, his colleagues, the people he selected to serve in his administration. Its a bit like claiming Trump’s problem is he doesn’t realize he doesn’t need to acquiesce to white supremacists to get all that other shit he’d like done.
Best you can say about GHW is that he was stable. Not much got significantly worse under him, a few things got a bit better. The things that had been going on under Reagan pretty much kept going on. Things largely stayed the same. He seems to have been less of an ideological person over all. But yeah. Not a bad president. Few would go so far as to say a good president. But he wasn’t actively a bad thing.
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Bush Sr at 7:45
Carter at 5:15
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