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December 4, 2018

The left can't help themselves in bringing the hate for former President Bush

By Rick Moran

It's become common on both sides of the political divide to use the occassion of the death of a prominent politician to point out the deficiencies, mistakes, even crimes of the dearly departed. Recall the recent death of Senator John McCain and the passing of Senator Edward Kenney in 2009. In both cases, pundits made the obligatory nod to the politicians accomplishments and then went on to savage them for their supposed shortcomings.

It doesn't matter if they deserve the disapprobation or not. It's something that simply wasn't done.

It's a change from the way political obits and commentary were written just a few decades ago. Then, the summation of the political careers of politicians were respectful, even reverential. There may have been criticism but it was mentioned in passing. The overall tone and tenor of the writing was gracioius and deferential.

Today, with the death of former President George H.W. Bush, the left doesn't even try to hide their hatred.

A prime example is Ruth Graham's piece in Slate Magazine about the Twitter photo of Sully, the former president's service dog, lying next to the casket of his friend.

Graham called it "demented" for people to think the dog was doing anything special.

The photograph, in other words, is not proof that Sully is a particularly “good boy” or that “we don’t deserve dogs,” as countless swooning tweets put it on Monday. On its own, it says almost nothing other than the fact that Sully was, at one point in the same room as the casket of his former boss. This is simply a photograph of a dog doing something dogs love to do: Lie down. The frenzy around it captures something humans love to do, too: Project our own emotional needs onto animals. 

The Associated Press got into the act when they published an article on the former president, calling him “a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term.”

The outcry was so severe that AP was forced to delete and revise the story:

A lot of people weren't satisfied:

Amanda Marcotte helped the cause with this tripe:

Here's an ungrateful Iraqi who preferred Saddam Hussein's brutality:

Breitbart points out the unfairness in criticizing Bush for the infamous Willie Horton ad:

Indeed, many of the negative reactions mentioned the infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ad which attacked Michael Dukakis for his past support of prison furlough programs, using the image and story of William Horton, a convicted murderer who got out on a weekend pass program in 1986 and later kidnapped and raped a woman. Horton is black, and many accused the Bush campaign of race-baiting.

The ad was not even made by the Bush campaign, however; it was produced by an outside group, and, as some have argued, the ad’s efficacy was overhyped by media coverage after the fact. This hasn’t stopped many on the left from attacking Bush over it.

Think Progress criticized Bush's lack of support for the Civil Rights Act in 1964:

A former US congressman, ambassador to China and to the United Nations, CIA director, and vice president to Ronald Reagan, Bush voted in June 1963 to reject the landmark civil rights legislation, saying that the problem of racial injustice would better be solved via “moral persuasion.”

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Bush opposed it as a violation of states’ rights. He also vetoed civil rights legislation as president in 1990.

So government can "solve" racism? Government can force people to think and feel a certain way? States' rights is a fantasy and doesn't exist? Many conservatives of good conscience supported the Civil Rights Act. Many conservatives who didn't have a racist bone in their body opposed it. Most northern Republicans (a southern Republican was a rarity, the region being a one party Democratic dictatorship in those days) supported the bill while some did not. It was a perfectly legitimate argument to make in 1963 as the federal government had never interferred in the business of states to such a degree - ever. 

Why the hate for one of the most inoffensive men ever to hold the office of president? It has to do with the idea that the "personal is political" and that there is no occassion, no time when attacking the political opposition is inappropriate. Politicizing everything from family pets to sex must make these people desperately unhappy in their lives. There is no satisfaction to be had except to lay low one's political enemies. 

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