Final thoughts on 41: "A Thousand Points of Shite."

And two dim bulbs.

It's a long read, but it touches all the bases.

A Thousand Points of Shite, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

How George H. W. Bush paved the way for Trumpism.

 ... Mistrusted by the hard right wing of the GOP, Bush nonetheless enthusiastically adopted elements of their political program, including the aggressive expansion of American power overseas and the racist “law-and-order” policies of the modern carceral state. As such, Bush was a key generational link between pre- and post-Reagan conservatism, the latter of which was later advanced even more aggressively by his son, and which has culminated in today’s historically radical Republican Party.

Bush’s life and political career also reflect the severe limitations of the mythical “reasonable,” “moderate” politics of yesteryear now pined for by today’s media and political elite. While Bush had a pragmatist streak that produced some worthy outcomes, his willingness to play dirty to win, his law-breaking and subsequent covering up of his crimes, and his almost casual use of war as a political tool were ill omens of what was to come. That the modern Clintonite Democratic Party took many of its cues from Bush should make us thankful for its current, albeit painfully slow, transformation.

That bait 'n' switch in the 1990s.

 ... The 1992 election made Bush a one-term president, but his legacy lived on, as his watered down Reaganism essentially became the political program of the new Democratic Party. Bush’s “humanitarian” wars, and his threat to bypass congressional war authorization, became the foreign policy modus operandi of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and continue to constitute the party’s approach, as evinced by Democrats’ steadfast support of Trump’s bombing of Syria early in his presidency. Clinton and the Democrats became even more ardent drug-and-crime warriors than Bush had been, gutting welfare and slashing social spending partly in pursuit of a balanced budget. Finally, Clinton and the Democrats finished off Bush’s work on NAFTA, finally ratifying it in 1993 and helping create the Rust Belt discontent that Trump would ride to power in 2016. That election was less a loss for Bush’s style of politics than a passing of the torch.

His legacy also lived on in the US establishment’s chummy ties with Saudi Arabia, which Bush had been instrumental in strengthening as both president and vice president, and which the same media outlets that mourn Bush’s death today have spent the past few weeks furiously denouncing now that Trump is their champion. Bush’s unusual and disconcerting closeness to the regime — as well as his decision to station troops in the country during the Gulf War — would haunt the country years later when thousands of Americans were killed by a group of well-financed Saudi terrorists on September 11, 2001. Bush’s close friend, Prince “Bandar Bush,” was later directly implicated in financing some of the terrorists.

Moving to the conclusion.

As with seemingly every non-Trump politician both living and dead, there is some insatiable need to rub out the rough edges of former political leaders and present a perfectly smooth, sterile, and misleading image of who they were. It’s half patriotic glorification, half myth-making-as-resistance.

But civility, decency, moderation — none of this accurately describe the record of George H. W. Bush. Bush brazenly flouted the law and lied throughout his career; he changed his beliefs when it suited him and engaged in scurrilous, sometimes racist, smearing of his opponents; he launched appalling wars for political gain and enthusiastically supported some of the world’s worst thugs; and his career was a microcosm of the worrying merger of business interests with public service and, quite possibly, the national security state. If Bush is a “moderate,” it’s because many of these practices have long been internalized as normal and routine for the political elite.

Rather, Bush’s presidency was a key bridge between the New Deal-era conservatism of Nixon and the more radical post-Reagan GOP, both of which were rooted in an unfettered, militaristic executive. Bush’s roots in the Eastern Republican establishment of the postwar era prevented him from fully advancing the Reagan program, a task that would fall to his son; paradoxically, and tragically, it was his liberal political opponents who adopted his agenda as their own, a fever dream from which the Democratic Party only now seems to be waking up.

But if nothing else, at least we’ll have that one Simpsons episode.

Current appreciation for the late George HW Bush? "It's largely rooted in appreciating who he was not: he was not his son, and most importantly, he was not Donald Trump."

Photo credit.

Thanks to D for the link. This essay is the best short statement I've seen about something that isn't being seen.

the cumulative effect is 'lying', by Anne Helen Petersen

When people ask me what I do, I’ve recently found the most satisfying answer for everyone involved in “culture reporter, broadly defined.” Culture, under this definition, means everything from celebrities to how people engage with larger cultural ideas (politics, public land, religion, etc. etc.) That explains why my political reporting is a bit different — I’m always more interested in talking to the volunteers and crowds than, say, political analysts.

Which, in turn, helps explain my reaction to the death of President George H.W. Bush, who has been roundly remembered, at least in political circles, as a highly decent (even “prudent,” to use the word that, thanks to Dana Carvey’s impersonation of him, I’ve always associated with him) leader, the last of his political kind. As my editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, put it in his obituary for Bush, he died “every Democrat’s favorite Republican.” He resigned from the NRA when it became too extremist and ideological; nearly twenty years after that resignation, when Americans were clamoring for a conservative who was not beholden to the NRA, that resignation letter went viral. His “restraint” while intervening in Iraq is favorably compared with his son’s; as Smith points out in his piece, Obama compared his own “traditional, bipartisan, realistic” foreign policy strategy to that of HW Bush’s.

But the main thread of appreciation for HW Bush, in this moment, is not tethered to the whole of the historical record. Instead, it’s largely rooted in appreciating who he was not: he was not his son, and most importantly, he was not Donald Trump.

That’s why the artifact that began to circulate more widely, after his death, was not the NRA resignation, but the letter he wrote to President Clinton on the occasion of the transition of the presidency. CNN called it “a lesson in grace,” highlighting HW Bush’s belief that “Just because you run against someone does not mean you have to be enemies . . . Politics does not have to be mean and ugly.” (Secretary of State Colin Powell: “I wish we could get some of that back in our system now.”) USA Today calls it “gracious”; the Washington Post’s Alex Horton labels it “an artifact of political humility”; CBS News declared that it demonstrated President Bush’s “civility.”

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an important letter, and it is all of the things for which it’s been lauded. But the main reason that the letter has guided the overarching note of remembrance is, again, because of the contrast between its tone and posture and that of the current leadership. The sentiment driving its virality is the same sentiment driving the appreciation for Bush’s son sharing candy with Michelle Obama. Look at these men in power, not being Trump!

Part of the magnetism to the letter stems from nostalgia for a leader who does not embarrass his country on the national and international stage; part of it is a yearning for “civility” which is another way of saying the “non-polarized, non-hyper-partisan politics” whose decline started right around 1994, just two years after Bush’s loss to Clinton. (For more on that point, I strongly recommend Alan Abramowitz’s The Great Alignment)

That means that many are remembering Bush partly for who he was — but largely for what many wish the current president would be. It’s significant, too, that the primary point of remembrance centers on an interaction between HW Bush and another person in power. And while it makes sense that other politicians and political reporters would look to such a moment — that’s their world! — that doesn’t mean that it’s an adequate or even fair representation of Bush’s legacy. As historian David Greenberg explains, of course, in our attempt to grapple with Bush’s death, there should be respect for both the president and the family that mourns him. And yet: “respect for the dead must coexist with respect for the historical record.”

Writing for Politico, Greenberg offers a clear-eyed look at Bush’s legacy on the right. But another strain of that legacy was highlighted by the timing of Bush’s passing — just one day before World Aids Day. When The New Yorker tweeted that Bush “had irreducible niceness to him, an appealing mixture of noblesse oblige, parody-begging goofiness, and boy-next-door bonhomie,” author Alexander Chee responded with a YouTube clip of the ACT UP Ashes Action from 1992, in which hundreds protested Bush’s inaction on fighting AIDS by sprinkling the remains of those lost to the disease on the White House lawn.

Politicians are challenging figures to eulogize — they are people, and thus have family and others who react to their deaths as one would react to any other death. (When I say eulogize, I don’t mean the actual eulogy at the burial; I mean how they’re eulogized within public discourse). But in addition to their status as humans, politicians are also symbols: the cumulative sum of the actions as leaders. To remember them solely in terms of how they interacted with the powerful and the privileged, without consideration of how they ignored or elevated “the least of these,” to quote the Book of Matthew, who were most acutely affected by their decisions as a leader, strikes me as both ahistorical and incomplete.

Yes, that means that every politician’s remembrance is complicated and mixed. That means remembering that Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and did little to stop the AIDS epidemic in America until it was associated with an “innocent” boy instead of gay men. Which is another way of saying that a leader should be remembered politically, but they should also be remembered culturally. And to acknowledge their cultural legacy isn’t to attack them. It is to do them justice.

“Using the occasion of a person’s death to attack them isn’t edge or cool, it’s childish and cowardly,” political journalist Olivia Nuzzi tweeted after John McCain’s death. “You’re not Christopher Hitchens, you’re an asshole.” The sentiment was retweeted more than 11,000 times. And while I agree that “attacking” isn’t necessarily the right angle, I also think that the word mischaracterizes most of what’s actually happening, either to McCain or Bush “Most figures do bad things and good things,” Texas journalist Chris Hooks responded yesterday, when the tweet began circulating again. “When saccharine hagiography is permitted but not its counterbalancing opposite, the cumulative effect is ‘lying.’”

The problem with eulogies and remembrances is that they are history absent historical training. A historian recognizes how spectacularly easy it is to craft a narrative of a person or event or group vis-a-vis the present: the object of analysis becomes what society needs them to be, in order to fit a certain socio-psychological gap, not what they actually were. Historians are trained to resist that impulse — both in the way they perform research and they way they transmit that research to the public. Good historians are also keenly aware of the limitations of their vantage point: that the sphere of a presidential historian is separate from, but should, in this case, overlap, with that of a gay rights historian.

But pundits and journalists are rarely historians, even if they are versed in history. Remembering a leader is remembering how power was wielded — which means it’s ultimately also always a remembrance of how their power affected, ignored, or elevated the powerless.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Dog whistle racism, or what the late President Bush used Willie Horton for.

I'll give George Herbert Walker Bush full credit for his deft handling of international affairs during the fall of Communism. He also ran a Gulf War considerably better than his son.

However, the bad goes alongside the good, and I'll also remind viewers about Bush hatchet man Lee Atwater's marvelous contribution to American politicking.

First, a definition of "dog whistle."

The phrase "dog whistle" has been around for years. It's political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views.

These days we have the Racism WatchDog to help with these dog whistles.

I'm satisfied to let it rest here, at this juncture, and allow posterity to be the judge.

George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad will always be the reference point for dog whistle racism, by Rachel Withers (Vox)

How “Willie Horton” went from shorthand for black depravity to shorthand for political racism.

George H.W. Bush, the one-term president who died on Friday at age 94, is often overlooked by history, despite having presided over the last truly bipartisan “grand bargain” and the end of the Cold War. But if there’s one context in which his name, along with that of another man, is regularly invoked, it’s when political campaigns make coded racist appeals to white voters.

Even as President Donald Trump usurps him with increasingly transparent racist attacks, George Bush Sr.’s “Willie Horton” ad remains the key reference point for dog whistle politics.