George H. W. Bush, some parting shots...

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.