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.