"Our dear dad has died"

Poppy Bush is dead, finally leaving us a "kinder, gentler nation."

"Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died," his son, former president George W Bush, said in a statement.

"George H.W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for."

  alJazeera

So much for the good die young. Read my lips:  George H.W. Bush was an evil bastard, and a handsy one, too, mentored by the truly evil Richard Nixon, and once head of the very evil CIA. But the fawning praise and lies will be showering from 1,000 points of lightweight politicos and journalists today.

Jim McGrath, spokesman for the former president, said the elder Bush died at 10:10pm Central Time (04:10 GMT), adding that funeral arrangements had yet to be scheduled.

Do you think Trump will attend?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12/2:











Which may be why Trump has been strangely solicitous of the Bush family since Poppy's death.

The Middle East is as it is today because of the Bushes. The first Iraq invasion has been enshrined as a model of foreign policy — but only because the second one was so much worse. In fact, doubts attended 41’s invasion, too.

[...]

Only the wellborn or well connected can truly say they bypassed the lucrative private life, which they can still have whenever they wish. To the rest of us, choosing to run for high office might seem the pathway to power, no less a lure than easeful riches. But to the patrician, it means sullying oneself. That is why they keep around thugs and heavies — Lee Atwater, Karl Rove — to do the nasty political work.

  NY Magazine

With his Gulf War and his illegal attack on Panama which killed an estimated 300 to 2,000 innocents, Bush I made war cool again for a nation that, for a minute after Vietnam, started to think that maybe the answer to international conflict might not lie in killing on an industrial scale.

[...]

88,500 tons of bombs were dropped in Bush I’s brief war on Iraq — and 70% missed their targets. But even of the 30% that struck true, contrary to popular perception at the time the targets were not exclusively military but included civilian electrical and transportation infrastructure, destroyed to make Iraq more amenable to US demands.

Destroying the electrical infrastructure shut down water and sewage systems, and wrecking roads and rail meant food could not be transported. Tens of thousands of civilians died of starvation and epidemics of cholera and typhoid.

[...]

As CIA head, Bush resumed the covert intelligence community’s tradition of aiding right-wing dictators, covering up a terrorist attack by Pinochet’s secret police.

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And he was fully involved in the crimes of the Iran-Contra affair, including chairing a “Special Situation Group” which recommended covert operations including the mining of Nicaraguan waterways.

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As President, Bush pardoned several of his Iran-Contra co-conspirators.

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Bush became president by stoking the fires of racism with the famous Wille Horton ads. And once he got in he revived Nixon’s racist War on Drugs.

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The federal prison population went up 39% in just four years under Bush, with 16,946 news prisoners — more new prisoners in four years than under eight years of Reagan. Bush was truly a pioneer of the carceral state.

[...]

In 1987, Bush told atheist journalist Robert Sherman “I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

Because the remark was made directly to Sherman and not recorded, and because Americans distrust atheists, many pundits have doubted whether Bush actually said that. But in a 2004 interview with Don Imus, Bush was publicly documented expressing much the same sentiment, saying “Lincoln said you cannot be President without spending some item on your knees. I have repeated that and a bunch of Atheists got all over me. Wait a minute. Does that mean that you cannot be President if you are an Atheist? I say yea that does mean that….One Nation Under God.”

[...]

It’s time to stop hagiographying evil.

  Patheos

Indeed. And Charlie Pierce has an article that does just that. Here's an excerpt:

[ I]t sums up a great deal of George H.W. Bush’s political career—the pragmatic insincerity, the subcontracting of the hatchet job to a hired hand, the willingness to play a role, no matter how clumsily, in order to keep and maintain power. Oh, and as it happens, while he was play-acting the bad-ass, Bush also was lying his hindquarters off about Iran-Contra.

  Charles P Pierce

Read the entire article here.