What’s that rustling sound? It’s the hedge I’m peeking over
to see if sufficient time has passed to discuss the real George H.W. Bush: the
rudderless operative, the corporate shill, the butcher. I
learned something when I released my Reagan obituary the day after his passing and
received 106 pieces of hate mail (death threats included), and that is is to
let some time go by before issuing disparaging language about recently deceased
beloved public figures.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (speak only well of the
dead) invites omission. Which has been my strategy all week. It is a time to sit on your hands a while, and then collect and share your
thoughts. It's poor form to boo the hearse, but public figures do merit and
even require frank assessment, hopefully during their lifetimes, but also in
times when their careers are in the public mind and that is, naturally, upon
their passing. You can’t wait too long, as the hive mind’s appetite for mulling
it over passes. It’s been a week. I hope that threads the needle adequately.
As a side note, on that blessed day when Trump at long last sucks
down his last fast-food burrito and finally goes moobs-up with an esophageal
hemorrhage, I can’t imaging not violating that conventional wisdom, and
I expect I’ll join the rest of the munchkins in a few rousing choruses of
“Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead,” probably while the body’s still warm (if it ever was).
Bush earns at least that amount of deference, a respectful
passage of time to a father and a soldier, but given
his role as chief facilitator for the most domestically destructive president in US history, Bush the elder earns revilement both for his own
atrocities, and also for carrying Reagan’s water through Iran/Contra, the
Garn-St. Germain Act, the War on Drugs, prison privatization and myriad other
policies and positions that exacerbated US economic and cultural disparity, and
encouraged what I have always felt to be the United Sates' two greatest
enemies—racism and materialism. While we’re still saying nice things about him
though, and this is not surprising as a former head of the CIA, Bush was a guy
who could really keep a secret.
One common take on 41’s ethics and belief system this past
week is that he “recognized political realities.” A more apt description would
be to say he had no code apart from political expediency. On a topic as
quintessentially divisive as abortion, Bush’s policy positions swung from a zealotry that puts a gun against a pregnant teenager’s head to family
planning position that practically has him escorting her to the clinic.
Bush
was as in on the joke of trickle-down economics as anyone, himself having
referred to it as “voodoo economics,” but that was before he became its leading
mouthpiece. And even though he knew it was a naked transfer of wealth to the
wealthy, he sold the Reagan policies with his WASPy chin and grin as the divide between the haves and have-nots
in the United States became a chasm. Even when he succeeded Reagan and had the
opportunity to adapt what he knew were more sound fiscal policies, he deferred
instead to his new owners and a decidedly un-presidential path-of-least-resistance pledge to be a third term of Reagan.
Many have made a compelling case that the invasion of Panama was an illegal war of
aggression under International Law, and that bombing slum villages and killing
thousands of peasants in order to capture a pineapple-faced narco-trafficker
for not having supported his predecessor's Nicaraguan death squads falls outside the scope of
presidential authority. Seems reasonable. It is likewise commonly asserted that Desert Storm was prosecuted
against the standards of the laws of war. While you could say that according to my own imagined doctrinal oversight, every American president should be thrown in leg irons and dragged
before The Hague (and that may be true) the cases against Bush have a ripeness all their own, most especially in Iraq.
What with the now defunct Soviet Union’s Russian leadership
momentarily in retreat, caprices in Iraq became too much for oil lobbies and GOP colonialists to resist. In a
conscious effort to disabuse US citizens from “Vietnam Syndrome,” or a broad
distaste for war (that in itself a depraved goal), and as a means of making some
vague statement of purpose about reshaping the Middle East, Desert Shield was
launched along with a string of specious rhetoric about Iraq dipping its straw at a
diagonal into Kuwait’s oil fields. Iraq moved troops to the Kuwaiti border over Kuwaiti oil production quota violations and Bush had everything he needed. After rejecting every backpedal Hussein made from this tactical error, Desert Shield was set up as a farcical drumroll of feigned restraint to the planned cymbal crash of Desert Storm. It was the beginning of an involvement that
was completed by George W. Bush in the most disastrous foreign policy petard in my
lifetime—a two-decades-long slick of blood and oil that has as its bumbling
progenitor the grinning, hapless and thoughtless policy architect, George Herbert Walker Bush, about whom
he himself said, doesn’t “do the vision thing.”
False causes aside, the prosecution of that war, notably the
“Highway of Death” was an exercise in wholesale slaughter that impressed even
hardened soldiers. “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s
pathetic,” Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer, was quoted as
saying. Does ten thousand fish shot in a barrel merit a war crimes tribunal?
How about strafing enemy lifeboats after sinking a trawler? That’s a thing you’d
have to ask a twenty-something George H. W. Bush.
Bush's hands on the intelligence spigot resulted in the October
Surprise to end all October Surprises in 1980. In a move eerily reminiscent of Nixon sandbagging Johnson’s Vietnam talks in 1968, Reagan campaign operatives were sabotaging
Carter’s talks with Iran to free the hostages. William Casey, Reagan’s campaign
chairman, was in secret negotiations with Iranian officials promising a better
deal with Reagan if the Ayatollah would hang on to the hostages through the
election, and Bush kept his thumb on reports to that effect. He ran
interference for Reagan during and after this illegal process that like the Nixon
case, invokes the Logan Act. Bush had his own unseemly entry into the
presidency with the notorious Willie
Horton ad campaign.
Bush’s political career of towering ordinariness and
political cowardice stands in sum as a weight on the ankle of justice as it makes it
tireless slog up a hill the United States keeps trying to make steeper. There
is a lot more to say and to regret about the brief Bush presidency, but I’ll
leave you with the Hunter S. Thompson’s description of Bush the elder with his
most perfectly selected spirit animal, the hyena, from “The Fix is In,” a brief paean
to the run-up of his son’s stolen election:
“There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure
that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the
experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly
appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was
Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had
lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were liars and dunces or
treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory….The old man was the real
tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into
the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was
sealed, and so was Al Gore's.”
First, hats off to the master, Dr. Thompson, but what he and
I both want you to take away from all of this is that the Bushes are in a club
you’re not in, and they’d like to keep it that way.
