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George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States, Dies At 94 (washingtonpost.com)
George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, has passed away tonight at the age of 94. As The Washington Post reports, he was "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." From the report: Although Mr. Bush served as president three decades ago, his values and ethic seem centuries removed from today's acrid political culture. His currency of personal connection was the handwritten letter -- not the social media blast. He had a competitive nature and considerable ambition that were not easy to discern under the sheen of his New England politesse and his earnest generosity. He was capable of running hard-edge political campaigns, and took the nation to war. But his principal achievements were produced at negotiating tables.
Despite his grace, Mr. Bush was an easy subject for caricature. He was an honors graduate of Yale University who was often at a loss for words in public, especially when it came to talking about himself. Though he was tested in combat when he was barely out of adolescence, he was branded "a wimp" by those who doubted whether he had essential convictions. This paradox in the public image of Mr. Bush dogged him, as did domestic events. His lack of sure-footedness in the face of a faltering economy produced a nosedive in the soaring popularity he enjoyed after the triumph of the Persian Gulf War. In 1992, he lost his bid for a second term as president. Bush's spokesman Jim McGrath announced his death on Twitter, but didn't provide the cause of death. In 2012, he announced that he had vascular Parkinsonism, a condition that limited his mobility.
UPDATE: George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, has issued a statement on the passing of his father: "Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro, and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died. George H. W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41's life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens."
Despite his grace, Mr. Bush was an easy subject for caricature. He was an honors graduate of Yale University who was often at a loss for words in public, especially when it came to talking about himself. Though he was tested in combat when he was barely out of adolescence, he was branded "a wimp" by those who doubted whether he had essential convictions. This paradox in the public image of Mr. Bush dogged him, as did domestic events. His lack of sure-footedness in the face of a faltering economy produced a nosedive in the soaring popularity he enjoyed after the triumph of the Persian Gulf War. In 1992, he lost his bid for a second term as president. Bush's spokesman Jim McGrath announced his death on Twitter, but didn't provide the cause of death. In 2012, he announced that he had vascular Parkinsonism, a condition that limited his mobility.
UPDATE: George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, has issued a statement on the passing of his father: "Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro, and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died. George H. W. Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for. The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41's life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad, and for the condolences of our friends and fellow citizens."
Thus goeth the last Republican politician that I still respected.
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Tho you can say a lot of things good and bad about him, I will always respect how he stood by Dan Quayle as his running mate, essentially knowing it would cost him the election. Any other snark or criticism aside (and there is plenty, sure) I think that speaks a lot to his character.
He was famous for saying, "Read my lips, no new taxes." and then raising taxes. Awful liar.
In retrospect, that was a fairly harmless lie compared to what's come since.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Seriously, there isn't even a hint of a tech or geek angle to post this story on slashdot.
Ken
And we'll be paying for Clinton's balanced budget for decades to come. We'll pay for Reagan's mass deflation of currency forever. We'll pay for Obama's limp dicked social healthcare which started as "Healthcare for all" to a piece of paper that said "Affordable Healthcare Act" and really meant "There's nothing left in here from the original policy and we've let every politician in America earmark the shit of it. Oklahoma can no declare black people as aliens and teach creationism as science. But at least I passed my bill".
Rule #1 : If you think you're the right person to represent hundreds of millions of people with hundreds of millions of different and generally conflicting needs. You probably should be shot before entering office.
Rule #2 : If you need to associate with a political party who will sell you a chance at the presidency in return for what few drops of your soul you have left... you should not run for president.
Rule #3 : If you are either a conservative or a liberal... you can not represent people fairly. You should not be allowed to run for present.
Rule #4 : If you actually become president and when midterms come around you're supporting only one political party or worse... you're supporting a political party instead of the merits of the individual candidates... you should be burned on a cross.
Please don't pretend like one president is better than the next. The system specifically permits only bankers and lawyers and oilmen into the office. They are people who like to play the game or to represent themselves and their families. After two Bushes and a Trump, American is clearly becoming something of an oligarchy.
Worse, we see things like Hillary running for office because well if GWB can be president after daddy, then shouldn't she be able to be president after Bill? And the most fucked up thing is, she might have been the most technically qualified presidential candidate we've had since the founding fathers died since she might be the only candidate that actually had real experience running the country because she and Bill were a team. Now, considering that like all other presidents, Bill sucked at the job.. even with her help, I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
Dukey was a mess. He would have been a lame duck. Nah... he'd have been a limp dick. He was almost as stupid as Al Gore.
We sit here judging US presidents as though we really think there's such a thing as a possibility of having a good one. When you have one part of a country who get's their education from the Westboro Baptist Church, another part of the country idolizing and learning from Kim Kardashian, another part rallying for Donald Trump and wearing hats specifically designed to target rednecks, another part like Jamaica Queens NY where there are multiple police officers on every corner all day and night trying to either maintain the peace, simply keep people alive, or beating teenaged kids for carrying a joint... and then close to a hundred million retired people who mostly have burned through their savings that were stored based on 10 years of life after retirement but now everyone is living 20-30 more...
You know what... I can make a list that sounds like Billy Joel's we didn't start the fire that lists everything from modern day hippies to wall street one per-centers and I would never get close to covering even the smallest portion of America.
Let's make it simple... GHWB wasn't any worse than the rest of them. When he went to war and he incarcerated people for being poor.... he wasn't being any worse than the rest of them. He was an unqualified person being controlled by an unqualified party voted for by unqualified voters and criticized publicly by unqualified journalists who were trying to make a buck by turning The New York Times into just another tabloid like the rest of them with bold and shocking headlines.
Guess what... bold shocking headlines aren't bold or shocking when you've shocked everyone so much that no one gives a shit anymore. If the Post
Set the stage for the 2003 homicide spree in Iraq (Gulf War II).
No he didn't. He very eloquently and clearly explained why "going to Baghdad" would have been a supremely stupid thing to do in 1991. Everything he said applied just as much in 2003.
It is not his fault that his son was a moron.
You ignore the Democrats had the majority in the senate (the only reason it was passed) and the Senate version was the bill passed. Just a handful of Republican amendments; it was mostly a creation of the Democrats, and they own it's consequences to this day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Homicide spree? You mean Obama's drone campaign? He murdered more children than any other Nobel peace prize winner. Remember when he bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital and then sent gunners in to murder the fleeing doctors and patients? This was 2015. Don't pretend you don't remember.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
He's only viewed with rose-colored glasses because the current vulgarian is so awful.
He handled the end of the Soviet Union really well (even sending $1biilon to the former enemy). His team handled the end of the El Salvador civil war with (especially in retrospect) surprising skill. He also committed to "full enforcement" of the Anti-Apartheid Act in South Africa (unlike the Reagan administration). In many his foreign policy was great (and again, in retrospect, he made the right decision to not conquer Iraq).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
highly doubtful you respected him while he was president.
A *whole* lot of people who claim to respect him now were claiming he was hitler at the time.
Kind of like Trump now...
No. Bush I had an average approval rating of 61% in office, as high as 89%. ... keep going ...
Guess what Trump's approval rating is?
No, lower.... lower still
Tell me again how he deserves respect?
During the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia(*):
Generals: Estimated casualties to take Bagdhad and remove Saddam Hussein, 5,000 US troops.
President HW Bush: Not worth it. End the war. Kicking the Iraqis back to their own country was our mission, not regime change.
(*) Yes Saudi Arabia too, Battle of Kafji. 3 Iraqi divisions invaded, stopped by US Marines and Rangers and a hell of a lot of air support.
"Just a handful of Republican amendments; it was mostly a creation of the Democrats"
Republicans added 161 amendments to the bill, then refused to vote on it. It was based on the Heritage Foundations earlier proposal (including the hated mandate).
One hell of a handful there.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Guess what Trump's approval rating is?
More than the new speaker for the Democrats?
"His name was James Damore."
That Iraqi troops were throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwatti hospitals, for one. There wasn't much enthusiasm for a military intervention until a teenage girl got on television and told that little fable - of course she was the daughter of an ambassador and was no where near the invasion or any clinics.
Go jump out of an airplane over the Pacific and let us know how much kinship you feel you vicarious-living charade.
Jumping out of a plane going down in flames isn't really the accomplishment. Flying a perfectly good airplane to the island that is heavily defended and known to be commanded by someone who beheads captured pilots and practices ritualistic cannibalism is the accomplishment.
Trump is the first US president in modern times to never get above 45%. That can still change, but smart money says it won't.
Set the stage for the 2003 homicide spree in Iraq (Gulf War II).
No he didn't. He very eloquently and clearly explained why "going to Baghdad" would have been a supremely stupid thing to do in 1991. Everything he said applied just as much in 2003.
It is not his fault that his son was a moron.
His son was not the reason why Dick Chaney and corporate America made it a priority to invade Iraq instead of going after Pakistan and the Taliban. At the time Sadam was continuing to manage to ship oil on the sly to Asia and work in conjunction with Pakistan to develop strategic nukes. If Sadam had managed things better then things might have been different, he would not have been caught with his pants down and might have even clobbered the shit out of Dick Chaney and company if he had taken the help that was offered to him on the sly by China and some of the disaffected crowds in Russia. That is why Chaney was in such a hurry to take out Sadam, he was starting to effect the worlds oil supply again and was slowly building up support in Asia and Russia that would soon have made it impossible for the US to control.
No the second gulf war was a war to make certain that oil would only flow to China largely through companies approved by the real oil cartels which are run by the major corporations. Chaney made certain that the big payoff for the US in undertaking the second Gulf war was the sudden dominance in world wide oil patch industries by Halliburton. In Canada Halliburton then swallowed up all sorts of major corps like Schlumberger and the like as a direct result of all the cash they were paid to do the logistics of the second Gulf war. In case you are interested at the time Canada started to ship more oil to the US than any other country or region on earth so the US was not that interested in how Iraq oil effected the world market only that Sadam would stop making his money from it.
The Bush era was and is the era of big oil and the consequences of not diversifying the energy economy fast enough in the US. This is the real legacy of the Bush presidencies, the inability to wean the US off fossil fuels quickly enough. GM and others have finally seen the writing on the wall, as does anyone with half a brain except the petro chemical industry which still runs the United States and far to much of the worlds economy. The legacy of the Republican party and the petrochemical industry in the US is what history will remember the most about the Bush family. And the fact that the oil industry controlled the presidency of the US and led the world down the path to what has is essentially corporate despotism culminating in the presidency of the complete moron puppet that is now in power.
Well documented propaganda, I'm afraid.
Fake news ain't new.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
George H.W. Bush was instrumental in undermining the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro ... and then bullshitting about it, calling the US a "global leader" for the climate in a speech.
After having got a letter from his buddy Ken Lay at Enron before the event, he made sure sure that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's mandatory emission cuts were replaced with voluntary measures. He also got it changed that developing nations would be exempt. For many nations, including the US -- the world's biggest polluter -- this meant no change at all. Also, that China -- then (and for some inexplicable reason, still ) classified as a "developing nation" could increase its emissions.
Greenpeace called him a "environmental degenerate" and a "highway robber".
It has been said by many researchers that have looked back, that if it hadn't been for Bush in '92, the world's climate would have been in a much better state than now.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
The US basically tricked Iraq into invading Kuwait. Kuwait was pumping oil from Iraqi oil fields (horizontal drilling). When they refused to stop, Saddam Hussein met with American diplomats to ask if the US would have any problem with an Iraqi military action against Kuwait. The US told him that it wouldn't be a problem since we don't get involved in regional conflicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie
The allegation being that it was done under the direction of Lyndon B. Johnson and collaboration of Allen W. Dulles, CIA director 1953–1961 who hated Kennedy while H.W Bush was serving in the CIA at the time of Kennedy's assassination.
Who knows what the truth is? The truth is that our reality has been fuzzed for decades now by our own media and politicians that we've been conditioned to respond to any information that challenges the status quo with the words "Conspiracy Theory" despite knowing that we are being lied to constantly.
Most of us here wern't even alive back then which shows how practiced the lies are.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It is not his fault that his son was a moron.
isn't the moral thing to do to public tell your son is a moron, if he's about to cause a war?
No term limits and all the politician cares about is re-election. Trump has spent more time campaigning and golfing than being the President in his first 2 years.
You say that like it's a bad thing. On evidence, I'd prefer him to spend less time being President, but unfortunately the consequence is that it delegates authority to mostly unelected actors.
Yes it should.
People don't want what they think they want. They think they want a leader who will do the right vs. the expedient thing. But they'll punish leaders who actually do this. Bush was one of those old-school people who thought debt was a real problem for a country. Raising taxes after promising not to was political suicide, but whether or not it was the right thing to do, he thought it was.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No. Moron is what we have now. Bush Jr was of the same caliber as Obama: establishment stooge.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.