Saturday, December 1, 2018

George H.W. Bush Has Entered the Void

And has almost - almost! - replaced Donald Trump and his scandals as the number one topic of discussion among the corporate media resistance fighters. You see, although Trump's publicists put out the obligatory statement mourning the Passing of Poppy, media outlets are scrambling to broadcast the time when Trump mocked this beloved elder statesman. See here and here to get the handwringing drift of the manufactured outrage.

Thank goodness Trump didn't mock Bush's wartime exploits as he did John McCain's. Otherwise he might have been barred from attending another star-studded funeral. The Bush affair promises to be even more clubby than normal, because the midterms have also recently entered the Void, and all the Duopolists have been unleashed to revel in a veritable frenzy of plutocratic bonhomie.

The gist of the liberal class's Poppy obituaries are in the vein of "I didn't always agree with his politics, but boy, what a great and totally classy human being!" Even the unflattering comparisons of Bush Jr. with his poor beleaguered father that were standard fare during the reign of the son are a thing of the past, now that Dubya has been fully rehabilitated by the freedom fighters of the Democratic Party and their military-surveillance complex partners. They don't even care that Bush the Younger recently stumped for reactionary Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who got his own political start stumping for Junior and giving torture his legal rubber stamp.

The accolades for Bush the Elder already rival those for John McCain for mawkish bipartisanship. There will surely be yet another achingly tender and funny moment between Junior and Michelle Obama at the funeral. What will the headline event be this time? A hokey dance routine, like the one they performed at a memorial for slain Dallas police officers? The sentimental sharing of a cough drop. like at the McCain extravaganza? Brace yourselves for a chill up the spine or a lurch in the stomach, depending upon your class status, your political party, or your healthy independent ability to detect phoniness whenever you see it. 

Meanwhile, insert the boilerplate hagiography here:





Luckily for most hagiographers, the death of the 94-year-old Bush has been expected for so long that the obituaries were written well in advance of the event. A reverent book-length obituary by Jon Meacham, complete with a jacket blurb written by Poppy himself, was published way back in 2015. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. long a favorite journalist of the elder Bush, then wrote fawning review of the fawning biography, urging the former president to "not go gentle, man, into that good night," while expressing her awed gratitude that he'd finally broken from tradition and criticized the architects of his son's misbegotten Iraq invasion - if not the son himself - as "iron asses."

And H.W. staunchly held on for three more years. Whether he went gently or whether he went aggressively is not yet known.* Nor is it known whether, like his late wife Barbara and his late colleague McCain, he had nobly decided to end extraordinary medical treatment as a gesture of aristocratic heroism.

Like so many other crass people, I wrote my own premature Bush eulogy years ago. This was in response to the aforementioned Dowd pre-mortem:
I think I'll give Meacham's bio a pass. That the publisher's blurb brags that he was granted unique access to all Poppy's and Bar's diaries as well as to their august doddering selves should be your first clue to run for the hills. Your second clue is that Poppy is openly shilling for what smells like a shameless hagiography*. 
The fact is that a corrupt scion like W can only grow out of a corrupt family tree. An oil-rich Skull and Bones river oozes right through the thought-free realm that shelters this whole misbegotten dynasty.
Unmentioned in the cheap Freudian analyses about obscenely rich fathers and sons is the fact that Poppy himself never could have clawed his way to the top without the help of the Ford administration's Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Although Poppy followed the grand Bush family tradition of being woefully underqualified, they orchestrated his appointment to head the CIA as a cynical means of pushing back against the Church Committee. Once there, Poppy accomplished such feats as destroying all the records of the CIA's hideous mind control experiments. He helped the Neocon cabal give birth to their whole criminal enterprise 40 years ago. They enriched the military-industrial complex by falsely hyping Soviet threats, just as they would later falsely hype the Iraq threat.
They always were asses, iron or otherwise.
Intelligence failure is built right into the Bush DNA.
They deserve neither biographies nor therapy. They deserve indictments.
(addendum) Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets, posits that the Meacham bio is a huge cover-up. That most people will neither buy it nor read it matters not. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. Baker offers exhaustive evidence in his own book that, far from being the mild-mannered virtuous statesman of legend, Bush the Elder has been up to his eyeballs in intrigue and corruption and dirty political tricks his entire life. It was Poppy, for example, who gave Karl Rove his first big break. Baker even suggests a Bush-as-CIA spook connection, through various degrees of separation, with the Kennedy assassination. Yikes. Needless to say, his book was almost universally trashed by the establishment media when it was published, via that tried and true technique called "gaslighting the author." (See: Seymour Hersh.)

And for Poppy's direct role in delaying the release of the Iran hostages, through illegal deal-making with the culprits, to swing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, read the late Robert Parry's Trick Or Treason. (His Consortium News site is also republishing some of his investigative pieces related to Bush Sr.)

  These conveniently forgotten episodes in American presidential history make candidate Donald Trump's flubbed bribery scheme to build a luxury hotel in Moscow look downright benign.

* Update. He went gently. Peter Baker of the New York Times, whom I hereby nominate for a Pulitzer in the category of shameless hagiography, has the blow-by-blow. Poppy apparently started going downhill right after former Secretary of State James Baker took him out for oysters on the half shell two weeks ago. Baker was also present at the end, when he tenderly rubbed his friend's feet to the accompaniment of a live professional opera singer.

4 comments:

Erik Roth said...


Thanks, Karen, for once again providing us with an antidote to the oligarchy's orgy of mutual adoration.
Here's another dose:

"George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family. How wrong he was.
My close encounter with Bush at a Sydney hotel revealed a patrician arrogance whose days were numbered."
~ by Ariel Dorfman
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/george-hw-bush-family

[He concludes,]

George Herbert Walker Bush does not rest in peace.

Nor do we.

Jay–Ottawa said...

Mercenary obit writers with all due respect for George H. W. Bush, his dear family and an amnesiac nation, have flooded the corporate media with tales of his heroism and public service––public service for the sake of humanity here and abroad. In the process, lots of stuff got tossed down the memory hole.

Fortunately, we still have Sardonicky and a precious few other sites to set the record straight on Bush Père and his place in American history.

As is usual with great families, crime lays the foundation and additional crimes along the way add to its greatness. When the distinguished notable of a dynasty passes away, the rest of us nobodies are expected to bow our heads out of respect. Never look back except to remember the good deeds, because forgetfulness is a key element of graveside memorials.

Understanding that, I have come here not to criticize Bush Père but to bury him, as is fitting, in a whitewashed sepulcher. Therefore, I shall not dig too deeply into old questions about Bush Père's heroism as a torpedo bomber pilot in the Pacific during WWII. Nor will I dig up muddy facts about his tenure as CIA director, or as Vice-President under Reagan, or as a racist campaigner, or as an escalator of the drug war at home as well as Panama, or as propagandist Commander-in Chief of the First Gulf War (which opened the door wide for more American boots on the ground over there), or as pardoner of useful criminals in the Iran-Contra Affair.

See you all Wednesday for his blessing at the Washington National Cathedral, then graveside Thursday at his Presidential Library. May he R.I.P. in the void (? Texas A&M ?). Meanwhile, back on earth, decent people will strive to forget the millions of nobodies who still taste the bitter fruit of his public service.

Anna Radicalova said...

I just noticed that our Post Office has a sign up announcing they'll be closed Wednesday in honor of Saint George. Has that ever been done for anyone else? I suppose there will be a new stamp in his honor any day now and maybe a new national holiday. Cripes, give us a break! It's nauseating. I can't wait until we can safely let it rip about His Holiness George I.

The one thing I can say in his favor is that at least George had the decency to be buried next to his beloved wife Barbara. John McCain requested burial where his rich heiress (second) wife, who helped launch his carpetbagging political career and provided him a lavish lifestyle, can't be buried - at the Naval Academy in Annapolis instead of 'home' (one of 8-13 of them, who can keep track?) in Arizona.

But wait. Was that actually Cindy's idea? He did call her the 'C' word in 1992 which was witnessed by others and it likely wasn't the first time either. His excuse was it was a long day, but imagine what the discomfort of long dying days might prompt him to say, and I'm not suggesting a tender 'I love you'. Cindy and the rest of us can rest in peace now. Warmonger McNasty is gone! Yay! The world is a little bit safer.

We can be sure GHWB was not insulting anyone at the end. He clearly loved and respected his wife throughout their marriage, easier when finances and bills aren't an issue (take note, McNasty, wherever you're burning).

David Anderson said...

Perhaps you can answer this question. Did the late papa H W Bush plan every aspect of his Houston funeral or did his son W Bush have something to do with it.

The last hymn was Onward Christion Soldiers. It had been eliminated from many Christian hymnals in the US and abroad. Even the Methodists had debated removing it (but allowed it to remain as they could not take it out of the old hymnals) I think the English Anglican church took it out of theirs.

Just picture this in your mind: One and a half billion Muslims and the same number of Orientals all over the globe hearing the Americans in Houston blast this Western pro Imperial hymn out at the close of the ceremony.



Picture yourself as an Iranian or a Syrian or a Chinaman. No wonder so many people continue to hate us.



Dave Anderson



Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
going on before!
Christ, the royal Master,
leads against the foe;
Forward into battle,
see his banner go!

Refrain:
Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
going on befo