Just because he's not
as bad as Trump doesn't make him what he wasn't and isn't.
Back in November 2018, Michelle Obama described George W. Bush as “a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man,” shortly after images of the former first lady and the former president sharing a cough drop went viral.
On Tuesday, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres told her audience that she is “friends with George Bush,” after images of her laughing with the 43rd president at a Dallas Cowboys game also went viral. In an extended monologue, she explained that she is “friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. … Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them.
Mehdi Hassan @ The Intercept
If that were true of anyone, no one would have any friends.
“Be kind to everyone,” she urged her cheering studio audience, before joking: “Thanks President Bush and Laura for a Sunday afternoon that was so fun. By the way, you owe me $6 for the nachos.”
The comedian’s remarks won her praise from everyone from CNN’s Chris Cillizza to the right-wing National Review to Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon to Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.
A double confession: I’m an admirer of Ellen, who has been a champion of refugees and a supporter of Muslims. I’m also guilty of having favorably compared George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump (although, to quote Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, “next to Trump, just about anyone compares favorably.”)
[...]
No one is suggesting that she shouldn’t be pals with a conservative or a Republican. Bush’s beliefs are irrelevant here; his actions are what matters. He was one of the most destructive presidents in modern American history; a man who has never been held to account for a long litany of crimes, misdeeds, and abuses of power committed during his two bloodstained terms in office. The reason “43” should be treated as a pariah is not because he is a Republican or a conservative, but because he caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and tortured hundreds of others.
[...]
Bush’s own former counterterrorism chief accused of him committing war crimes.
[...]
The then-commander-in-chief falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was working with Al Qaeda. He has never apologized for these falsehoods.
[...]
You think calling journalists “fake news” is bad? According to the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper, Bush “made clear he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera in Qatar” at a meeting with then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair [who], according to the Mirror, had to persuade him not to.
[...]
[I]t was Bush who “authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to commence a secret detention program” after 9/11, under which suspected terrorists were held incommunicado in CIA black sites across the world, and it was also the then-president who granted the agency “expansive authority to engage in ‘extraordinary rendition’” — or the transfer of detainees to foreign governments for the purposes of interrogation and torture. (Asked by aides if he was OK with torturing detainees, Bush replied: “Damn right.”)
[...]
[Consider] the 780 detainees who were held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, after it was opened by Bush in January 2002. Forty of them still remain behind bars; 15 of them were juveniles; nine of them died in custody. None of them were ever charged or convicted of a crime in a court of law. According to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson, the then-president knew many of the detainees at Guantánamo were innocent of any crimes but refused to release them for political reasons.
[...]
[During] one of this country’s worst natural disasters, [...] “day after day, George W. Bush continued a long-planned vacation at his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. … When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been on holiday at his ranch for 27 days.” More than 1,800 Americans died and a Republican-led special Senate report later concluded that the Bush administration failed “at all levels to plan, prepare for, and respond aggressively to the storm.”
[...]
[Paranoid schizophrenic Larry] Robison was one of 152 prisoners executed by Bush during his five years as governor of Texas — a higher number of executions than under any previous governor in modern American history.
[...]
A year earlier, the then-Texas governor had mimicked and mocked a clemency plea made by Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman to be executed in the Lone Star state since 1863, in a Talk magazine interview with Tucker Carlson. As Carlson wrote: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”
[...]
George W. Bush is not a “kind, sweet man.” There is nothing “beautiful” about him. He was a monster as governor of Texas and a monster as president of the United States. Nor has he become any less monstrous since retiring from politics. In September 2018, Bush lobbied Republican senators to approve his former staff secretary, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court — and reaffirmed his public support for Kavanaugh even after Christine Blasey Ford and others accused the judge of sexual misconduct.
Yes, the 43rd president is a better husband and father, more mentally and emotionally stable, and less of a racist or Islamophobe, than the current president. But is that really now our benchmark for making friends or being “kind”?
[...]
This slow but steady rehabilitation of the former president, and the whitewashing of his manifest crimes, cannot be left unchallenged. Bush may owe Ellen six bucks for nachos. He owes the rest of us a prison sentence at The Hague.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment