He was 94.
-
-
Too soon. Fuk.
RIPComment -
Jesus Giant, you have a direct line to the Bush's?
This just happened.
We're you more upset over Stan Lee or This?Comment -
Carter is next. Bet on it.Comment -
RIP - Texas lost a patron Saint.Comment -
RIP president HW Bush
George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
Karen Tumulty
November 30 at 11:56 PM
George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd, was a steadfast force on the international stage for decades, from his stint as an envoy to Beijing to his eight years as vice president and his one term as commander in chief from 1989 to 1993.
The last veteran of World War II to serve as president, he was a consummate public servant and a statesman who helped guide the nation and the world out of a four-decade Cold War that had carried the threat of nuclear annihilation.
His death, at 94 on Nov. 30 also marked the passing of an era.Comment -
was with the CIA when JFK was murdered
Globalist
same crew as hill and obama
skull and bones will miss him
i won't
not a good manComment -
Remember when Barbara died a few months ago, we all said that he was next. Sad day.
- Navy Pilot
- Shot down during a bombing raid. Barely evaded capture South of Tokyo. He was the only one to escape, the other 8 soldiers were beheaded and eaten.
- WWII vet
- Congressman
- UN ambassador
- CIA director
- Vice President
- President
- Father to a president
We may never find another man that did so much. A life well served.Comment -
God Bless him.Comment -
I see jibby has hijacked another accountOriginally posted by Mac4LyfeComment -
Toler...if they only knew the real Bush....it all started with PrescottOriginally posted by jtoler
322Comment -
RipComment -
He was a good man...
His son... not so much.Comment -
rip sir.Comment -
RIP. Lived a good life.Comment -
Read my lips, he was a lying corrupt scumbagComment -
Trump is still aliveOriginally posted by maggiethebestdogComment -
Wow, really cleverOriginally posted by lakerboyComment -
American Patriot. RIP GHWBComment -
The life this guy lived. RIP.Originally posted by Mac4LyfeWhere's the fuckin power box, Carol?Comment -
He was legit.Comment -
You know better than thisOriginally posted by KermitComment -
Sourtwist, can't you start your own loony tune thread where you explain how he was in on the assassination of Kennedy or something?
In other words, get it out of here. Thanks.
Comment -
Originally posted by maggiethebestdog<br>Originally posted by lakerboy
<br>
You spelled Clinton wrong.Comment -
Great man and what a life he had, was never his call so stop any hate now please.Comment -
Watches Zeitgeist onceOriginally posted by sourtwistComment -
Kissenger
Originally posted by pavyracerComment -
94 .. good lifeComment -
History
The First Iraq War Was Also Sold to the Public Based on a Pack of Lies
June 27, 2014
by Joshua Holland
President George HW Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1990. (Image: Doug Mills/ AP)
Polls suggest that Americans tend to differentiate between our “good war” in Iraq — “Operation Desert Storm,” launched by George HW Bush in 1990 — and the “mistake” his son made in 2003.
Across the ideological spectrum, there’s broad agreement that the first Gulf War was “worth fighting.” The opposite is true of the 2003 invasion, and a big reason for those divergent views was captured in a 2013 CNN poll that found that “a majority of Americans (54%) say that prior to the start of the war the administration of George W. Bush deliberately misled the U.S. public about whether Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.”
But as the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to urge the US to once again commit troops to Iraq, it’s important to recall that the first Gulf War was sold to the public on a pack of lies that were just as egregious as those told by the second Bush administration 12 years later.
The Lie of an Expansionist Iraq
Most countries condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the truth — that it was the culmination of a series of tangled economic and historical conflicts between two Arab oil states — wasn’t likely to sell the US public on the idea of sending our troops halfway around the world to do something about it.
So we were given a variation of the “domino theory.” Saddam Hussein, we were told, had designs on the entire Middle East. If he wasn’t halted in Kuwait, his troops would just keep going into other countries.
As Scott Peterson reported for The Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September [of 1990] that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.”
A quarter of a million troops with heavy armor amassed on the Saudi border certainly seemed like a clear sign of hostile intent. In announcing that he had deployed troops to the Gulf in August 1990, George HW Bush said, “I took this action to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” He asked the American people for their “support in a decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong, all in the cause of peace.”
But one reporter — Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times — wasn’t satisfied taking the administration’s claims at face value. She obtained two commercial satellite images of the area taken at the exact same time that American intelligence supposedly had found Saddam’s huge and menacing army and found nothing there but empty desert.
She contacted the office of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong.” But “the official response” was: “Trust us.”
Heller later told the Monitor’s Scott Peterson that the Iraqi buildup on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”
Dead Babies, Courtesy of a New York PR Firm
Military occupations are always brutal, and Iraq’s six-month occupation of Kuwait was no exception. But because Americans didn’t have an abundance of affection for Kuwait, a case had to be built that the Iraqi army was guilty of nothing less than Nazi-level atrocities.
That’s where a hearing held by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October 1990 played a major role in making the case for war.
A young woman who gave only her first name, Nayira, testified that she had been a volunteer at Kuwait’s al-Adan hospital, where she had seen Iraqi troops rip scores of babies out of incubators, leaving them “to die on the cold floor.” Between tears, she described the incident as “horrifying.”
Her account was a bombshell. Portions of her testimony were aired that evening on ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s “Nightly News.” Seven US senators cited her testimony in speeches urging Americans to support the war, and George HW Bush repeated the story on 10 separate occasions in the weeks that followed.
In 2002, Tom Regan wrote about his own family’s response to the story for The Christian Science Monitor:I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,” he said passionately.Subsequent investigations by Amnesty International, a division of Human Rights Watch and independent journalists would show that the story was entirely bogus — a crucial piece of war propaganda the American media swallowed hook, line and sinker. Iraqi troops had looted Kuwaiti hospitals, but the gruesome image of babies dying on the floor was a fabrication.
In 1992, John MacArthur revealed in The New York Times that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. Her testimony had been organized by a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which was a front for the Kuwaiti government.
Tom Regan reported that Citizens for a Free Kuwait hired Hill & Knowlton, a New York-based PR firm that had previously spun for the tobacco industry and a number of governments with ugly human rights records. The company was paid “$10.7 million to devise a campaign to win American support for the war.” It was a natural fit, wrote Regan. “Craig Fuller, the firm’s president and COO, had been then-President George Bush’s chief of staff when the senior Bush had served as vice president under Ronald Reagan.”
According to Robin Andersen’s A Century of Media, a Century of War, Hill & Knowlton had spent $1 million on focus groups to determine how to get the American public behind the war, and found that focusing on “atrocities” was the most effective way to rally support for rescuing Kuwait.
Arthur Rowse reported for the Columbia Journalism Review that Hill & Knowlton sent out a video news release featuring Nayirah’s gripping testimony to 700 American television stations.
As Tom Regan noted, without the atrocities, the idea of committing American blood and treasure to save Kuwait just “wasn’t an easy sell.”Only a few weeks before the invasion, Amnesty International accused the Kuwaiti government of jailing dozens of dissidents and torturing them without trial. In an effort to spruce up the Kuwait image, the company organized Kuwait Information Day on 20 college campuses, a national day of prayer for Kuwait, distributed thousands of “Free Kuwait” bumper stickers, and other similar traditional PR ventures. But none of it was working very well. American public support remained lukewarm the first two months.That would change as stories about Saddam’s baby-killing troops were splashed across front pages across the country.
Saddam Was Irrational
Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was just as illegal as the US invasion that would ultimately oust him 13 years later — it was neither an act of self-defense, nor did the UN Security Council authorize it.
But it can be argued that Iraq had significantly more justification for its attack.
Kuwait had been a close ally of Iraq, and a top financier of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, which, as The New York Times reported, occurred after “Iran’s revolutionary government tried to assassinate Iraqi officials, conducted repeated border raids and tried to topple Mr. Hussein by fomenting unrest within Iraq.”
Saddam Hussein felt that Kuwait should forgive part of his regime’s war debt because he had halted the “expansionist plans of Iranian interests” not only on behalf of his own country, but in defense of the other Gulf Arab states as well.
After an oil glut knocked out about two-thirds of the value of a barrel of crude oil between 1980 and 1986, Iraq appealed to OPEC to limit crude oil production in order to raise prices — with oil as low as $10 per barrel, the government was struggling to pay its debts. But Kuwait not only resisted those efforts — and asked OPEC to increase its quotas by 50 percent instead — for much of the 1980s it also had maintained its own production well above OPEC’s mandatory quota. According to a study by energy economist Mamdouh Salameh, “between 1985 and 1989, Iraq lost US$14 billion a year due to Kuwait’s oil price strategy,” and “Kuwait’s refusal to decrease its oil production was viewed by Iraq as an act of aggression against it.”
There were additional disputes between the two countries centering on Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil fields, which straddled the border between the two countries. Kuwait was accused of using a technique known as “slant-drilling” to siphon off oil from the Iraqi side.
None of this justifies Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But a longstanding and complex dispute between two undemocratic petrostates wasn’t likely to inspire Americans to accept the loss of their sons and daughters in a distant fight.
So instead, George HW Bush told the public that Iraq’s invasion was “without provocation or warning,” and that “there is no justification whatsoever for this outrageous and brutal act of aggression.” He added: “Given the Iraqi government’s history of aggression against its own citizens as well as its neighbors, to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic.”
Ultimately, these longstanding disputes between Iraq and Kuwait got considerably less attention in the American media than did tales of Kuwaiti babies being ripped out of incubators by Saddam’s stormtroopers.
Saddam Was “Unstoppable”
A crucial diplomatic error on the part of the first Bush administration left Saddam Hussein with the impression that the US government had little interest in Iraq’s conflict with Kuwait. But that didn’t fit into the narrative that the Iraqi dictator was an irrational maniac bent on regional domination. So there was a concerted effort to deny that the US government had ever had a chance to deter his aggression through diplomatic means — and even to paint those who said otherwise as conspiracy theorists.
As John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Stephen Walt wrote in 2003, “Saddam reportedly decided on war sometime in July 1990, but before sending his army into Kuwait, he approached the United States to find out how it would react.”In a now famous interview with the Iraqi leader, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” The United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did.Exactly what was said during the meeting has been a source of some controversy. Accounts differ. According to a transcript released by the Iraqi government, Glaspie told Hussein, ” I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country.”
I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.Leslie Gelb of The New York Times reported that Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the transcript was inaccurate “and insisted she had been tough.” But that account was contradicted when diplomatic cables between Baghdad and Washington were released. As Gelb described it, “The State Department instructed Ms. Glaspie to give the Iraqis a conciliatory message punctuated with a few indirect but significant warnings,” but “Ms. Glaspie apparently omitted the warnings and simply slobbered all over Saddam in their meeting on July 25, while the Iraqi dictator threatened Kuwait anew.”
I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60’s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.
There is no dispute about one crucially important point: Saddam Hussein consulted with the US before invading, and our ambassador chose not to draw a line in the sand, or even hint that the invasion might be grounds for the US to go to war.
The most generous interpretation is that each side badly misjudged the other. Hussein ordered the attack on Kuwait confident that the US would only issue verbal condemnations. As for Glaspie, she later told The New York Times, ”Obviously, I didn’t think — and nobody else did — that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
Fool Me Once…
The first Gulf War was sold on a mountain of war propaganda. It took a campaign worthy of George Orwell to convince Americans that our erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein — whom the US had aided in his war with Iran as late as 1988 — had become an irrational monster by 1990.
Twelve years later, the second invasion of Iraq was premised on Hussein’s supposed cooperation with al Qaeda, vials of anthrax, Nigerian yellowcake and claims that Iraq had missiles poised to strike British territory in little as 45 minutes.
Now, eleven years later, as Bill Moyers put it last week, “the very same armchair warriors in Washington who from the safety of their Beltway bunkers called for invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East.” It’s vital that we keep our history in Iraq in mind, and apply some healthy skepticism to the claims they offer us this time around.Comment -
The Nation; When the Subject Is Civil Rights, There Are Two George Bushes
By STEVEN A. HOLMESJUNE 9, 1991
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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
View page in TimesMachine
June 9, 1991, Page 004001 The New York Times Archives George Bush, the man whose Presidential campaign benefited from the now notorious Willie Horton commercials, also has the distinction of having appointed the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell. He will be remembered as a President who vetoed a civil rights bill in 1990 and, if he carries through with his threat, again in 1991, while making a point of donating half the proceeds from his autobiography, "Looking Forward," to the United Negro College Fund.
Images of Mr. Bush's relations with blacks collide at odd angles, revealing no coherent pattern other than contradiction. It is a Janus-like approach that allows his enemies or supporters to choose the lens through which they view him -- as an enlightened healer or a cynical opportunist. And combined with his flip-flops on issues like abortion, "voodoo economics" and "no new taxes," his approach to race raises a broader question: Is there no coherent pattern, or no coherent value system?
The President says he would veto the job discrimination bill approved last week in the House by a vote of 273 to 158, contending that it would force employers to adopt hiring and promotion quotas. Recently his top aides helped undermine efforts by civil rights groups and corporate executives to hammer out a compromise bill they hoped would satisfy the President's objections. Critics said that Mr. Bush was more interested in using quotas as a political issue than in having the bill enacted.
Mr. Bush clearly believes, with some justification, that he has fought for equality, and he and his associates display flashes of outrage when faced with accusations of insensitivity to the rights of any American. "He would be so offended by any kind of prejudice and racism that it must be terribly painful to have those kinds of charges hurled at him, particularly in light of his record," said Sheila Tate, Mr. Bush's press secretary during his Presidential campaign. Associates of Mr. Bush also cite polls showing he has a high approval rating among blacks.
Mr. Bush's history reveals a man whose public and private life has included both episodes of moral courage and incidents that his opponents say demonstrate either racial insensitivity or a willingness to use the racial card for political gain.
Continue reading the main story
In 1948, as a student at Yale, he led a fund-raising drive for the United Negro College Fund, following the lead of his father, former Senator Prescott Bush, who had been chairman of the group's fund-raising appeals in Connecticut.
But as a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1964, Mr. Bush came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that ended segregated lunch counters, restrooms, movie theaters and other public accommodations, and made employment discrimination illegal. In the campaign, Mr. Bush said the law was "politically inspired and is bad legislation in that it transcends the Constitution." He was essentially following the lead of his party's Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had denounced the bill. Hopes and Regrets
Three years ago, writing in his autobiography about his successful 1966 race for the House, Mr. Bush lamented that it was "both puzzling and disappointing" that he attracted so few black votes. "My hope had been that a Republican candidate might be able to break the Democratic Party's grip on black voters in the area," he wrote. "As county G.O.P. chairman, I'd placed our party funds in a black-owned bank and opened a party office with a full-time staff near Texas Southern, one of the state's major black colleges." In the book, Mr. Bush didn't mention his opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill.
In 1968, when the cause of civil rights was more politically popular, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Bush voted for the Fair Housing Act, legislation that banned discrimination in housing. The vote touched off a firestorm of criticism within his conservative Congressional district. As Mr. Bush describes the situation in his autobiography, he faced down conservative critics of the vote at a meeting in his district, saying, "Somehow it seems fundamental that a man should not have a door slammed in his face because he is a Negro."
Mr. Bush seemed to be carrying on the theme of racial justice in 1988 when as Vice President he brokered a deal between Congressional backers and critics in the Reagan Administration of a bill that significantly strengthened the Fair Housing Act.
But that same year, Mr. Bush left himself open to charges of racial insensitivity when his Presidential campaign benefited from advertisements depicting the case of Willie Horton, the black inmate who raped a white Maryland woman while on a furlough program from a Massachusetts prison. The Horton Case
Mr. Bush said the Horton case simply highlighted his Democratic opponent Michael S. Dukakis's approach to crime. But many blacks were offended by the racial overtones and Lee Atwater, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, apologized for the commercials before he died last year from a brain tumor.
And so the contradictions continue. In addition to yearly donations of about $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund, Mr. Bush contributes on average $750 annually to Morehouse College, the black school in Atlanta on whose board of trustees his wife has served since 1983. Yet he has also at times displayed a startling myopia to conduct many blacks might find offensive.
Ten days ago he denounced the civil rights bill now before Congress in a speech at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va. In choosing this forum, Mr. Bush seems to have ignored the sensitivities of many blacks to the F.B.I.'s history of trying to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. Last August, without admitting any wrongdoing, the agency agreed to a $1 million out of court settlement with a black agent who charged that he had been harassed because of his race. High in the Polls
Still, the President remains popular among black voters, at times achieving an approval rating of 70 per cent in the New York Times/CBS News Polls. Even with his threatened veto of the civil rights bill, he racked up a 58 percent approval rating among non-whites in a Gallup poll released on June 2. In comparison, Ronald Reagan averaged an approval rating of 23 per cent among non-whites in the eight years of his Presidency and was never able to top a 50 per cent approval rating.
"Bush enjoyed one major advantage -- not being Reagan," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia. "He has done cosmetic things in office, but it is difficult to cite evidence of policy improvement in favor of minorities and poor people over his predecessor."
Two memos written by The Nathan Group Inc., a black political consulting company hired by the Republican National Committee, lay out a strategy to attract more black voters "without compromising a single plank in the Republican platform." Whether by design or coincidence, Mr. Bush appears to have followed the company's recommendations almost to the letter.
In March 1989 the Nathan Group recommended that the President meet with the Congressional Black Caucus "for the sole purpose of listening, and showing his sensitivity to black issues and a rapport." Two months later Mr. Bush met with 20 members of the caucus, the first time the group had been to the White House in eight years.
Among the recommendations made in a second memo, written in February, was that Mr. Bush look for opportunities to attend "significant black events such as speaking at major black institutions like Hampton University." Four weeks ago, Mr. Bush gave the commencement address at Hampton.
"In politics, perceptions are the only reality," The Nathan Group wrote. "The only thing that's going to count when black Americans consider the merits of the Republican Party is how their perceptions have been molded, negatively or positively."
But political consultants, like television programmers and advertising executives, have a way of underestimating the public. In a country still so divided, 27 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, voters both black and white may be less impressed by grand gestures than by concrete plans to lead them out of a dangerous racial impasse.Comment -
Never heard of him.Comment -
Originally posted by EmpireMakerThe Nation; When the Subject Is Civil Rights, There Are Two George Bushes
By STEVEN A. HOLMESJUNE 9, 1991
Continue reading the main story Share This Page- Share
- Tweet
- More
- Save
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
View page in TimesMachine
June 9, 1991, Page 004001 The New York Times Archives George Bush, the man whose Presidential campaign benefited from the now notorious Willie Horton commercials, also has the distinction of having appointed the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell. He will be remembered as a President who vetoed a civil rights bill in 1990 and, if he carries through with his threat, again in 1991, while making a point of donating half the proceeds from his autobiography, "Looking Forward," to the United Negro College Fund.
Images of Mr. Bush's relations with blacks collide at odd angles, revealing no coherent pattern other than contradiction. It is a Janus-like approach that allows his enemies or supporters to choose the lens through which they view him -- as an enlightened healer or a cynical opportunist. And combined with his flip-flops on issues like abortion, "voodoo economics" and "no new taxes," his approach to race raises a broader question: Is there no coherent pattern, or no coherent value system?
The President says he would veto the job discrimination bill approved last week in the House by a vote of 273 to 158, contending that it would force employers to adopt hiring and promotion quotas. Recently his top aides helped undermine efforts by civil rights groups and corporate executives to hammer out a compromise bill they hoped would satisfy the President's objections. Critics said that Mr. Bush was more interested in using quotas as a political issue than in having the bill enacted.
Mr. Bush clearly believes, with some justification, that he has fought for equality, and he and his associates display flashes of outrage when faced with accusations of insensitivity to the rights of any American. "He would be so offended by any kind of prejudice and racism that it must be terribly painful to have those kinds of charges hurled at him, particularly in light of his record," said Sheila Tate, Mr. Bush's press secretary during his Presidential campaign. Associates of Mr. Bush also cite polls showing he has a high approval rating among blacks.
Mr. Bush's history reveals a man whose public and private life has included both episodes of moral courage and incidents that his opponents say demonstrate either racial insensitivity or a willingness to use the racial card for political gain.
Continue reading the main story
In 1948, as a student at Yale, he led a fund-raising drive for the United Negro College Fund, following the lead of his father, former Senator Prescott Bush, who had been chairman of the group's fund-raising appeals in Connecticut.
But as a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1964, Mr. Bush came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark law that ended segregated lunch counters, restrooms, movie theaters and other public accommodations, and made employment discrimination illegal. In the campaign, Mr. Bush said the law was "politically inspired and is bad legislation in that it transcends the Constitution." He was essentially following the lead of his party's Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who had denounced the bill. Hopes and Regrets
Three years ago, writing in his autobiography about his successful 1966 race for the House, Mr. Bush lamented that it was "both puzzling and disappointing" that he attracted so few black votes. "My hope had been that a Republican candidate might be able to break the Democratic Party's grip on black voters in the area," he wrote. "As county G.O.P. chairman, I'd placed our party funds in a black-owned bank and opened a party office with a full-time staff near Texas Southern, one of the state's major black colleges." In the book, Mr. Bush didn't mention his opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill.
In 1968, when the cause of civil rights was more politically popular, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Bush voted for the Fair Housing Act, legislation that banned discrimination in housing. The vote touched off a firestorm of criticism within his conservative Congressional district. As Mr. Bush describes the situation in his autobiography, he faced down conservative critics of the vote at a meeting in his district, saying, "Somehow it seems fundamental that a man should not have a door slammed in his face because he is a Negro."
Mr. Bush seemed to be carrying on the theme of racial justice in 1988 when as Vice President he brokered a deal between Congressional backers and critics in the Reagan Administration of a bill that significantly strengthened the Fair Housing Act.
But that same year, Mr. Bush left himself open to charges of racial insensitivity when his Presidential campaign benefited from advertisements depicting the case of Willie Horton, the black inmate who raped a white Maryland woman while on a furlough program from a Massachusetts prison. The Horton Case
Mr. Bush said the Horton case simply highlighted his Democratic opponent Michael S. Dukakis's approach to crime. But many blacks were offended by the racial overtones and Lee Atwater, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, apologized for the commercials before he died last year from a brain tumor.
And so the contradictions continue. In addition to yearly donations of about $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund, Mr. Bush contributes on average $750 annually to Morehouse College, the black school in Atlanta on whose board of trustees his wife has served since 1983. Yet he has also at times displayed a startling myopia to conduct many blacks might find offensive.
Ten days ago he denounced the civil rights bill now before Congress in a speech at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Va. In choosing this forum, Mr. Bush seems to have ignored the sensitivities of many blacks to the F.B.I.'s history of trying to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. Last August, without admitting any wrongdoing, the agency agreed to a $1 million out of court settlement with a black agent who charged that he had been harassed because of his race. High in the Polls
Still, the President remains popular among black voters, at times achieving an approval rating of 70 per cent in the New York Times/CBS News Polls. Even with his threatened veto of the civil rights bill, he racked up a 58 percent approval rating among non-whites in a Gallup poll released on June 2. In comparison, Ronald Reagan averaged an approval rating of 23 per cent among non-whites in the eight years of his Presidency and was never able to top a 50 per cent approval rating.
"Bush enjoyed one major advantage -- not being Reagan," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia. "He has done cosmetic things in office, but it is difficult to cite evidence of policy improvement in favor of minorities and poor people over his predecessor."
Two memos written by The Nathan Group Inc., a black political consulting company hired by the Republican National Committee, lay out a strategy to attract more black voters "without compromising a single plank in the Republican platform." Whether by design or coincidence, Mr. Bush appears to have followed the company's recommendations almost to the letter.
In March 1989 the Nathan Group recommended that the President meet with the Congressional Black Caucus "for the sole purpose of listening, and showing his sensitivity to black issues and a rapport." Two months later Mr. Bush met with 20 members of the caucus, the first time the group had been to the White House in eight years.
Among the recommendations made in a second memo, written in February, was that Mr. Bush look for opportunities to attend "significant black events such as speaking at major black institutions like Hampton University." Four weeks ago, Mr. Bush gave the commencement address at Hampton.
"In politics, perceptions are the only reality," The Nathan Group wrote. "The only thing that's going to count when black Americans consider the merits of the Republican Party is how their perceptions have been molded, negatively or positively."
But political consultants, like television programmers and advertising executives, have a way of underestimating the public. In a country still so divided, 27 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, voters both black and white may be less impressed by grand gestures than by concrete plans to lead them out of a dangerous racial impasse.
everything said just is proof his interest was in which direction the wind was blowing at that time. as are all politicians. simply actors.Comment -
Agreed... The man just died and people want to throw shade. At least wait a few days sourT.Originally posted by The Giant
Bush fought for this country. Something less and less people are willing to do. I respect everyone that went to war to protect our freedom. Something MOST people won't do. His life was of service to this country. Something else most people won't do.Comment -
Proper etiquette aside...May GHW Bush rot in hell.
Too soon? Nah.
*Eyes wide open.Comment -
I thought when you reached 90... you were practically already dead.Originally posted by Mac4Lyfe
Betty White is the only exception though.Comment
