Posted on 10/25/2015 9:29:35 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Former President George Bush, 91 and frail, is straining to understand an election season that has, for his son and the Republican Party, lurched sharply and stunningly off script. And he is often bewildered by what he sees.
“I’m getting old,” he tells friends, appraising today’s politics, “at just the right time.”
These are confounding days for the Bush family and the network of advisers, donors and supporters who have helped sustain a political dynasty that began with the Senate victory by Prescott Bush, the older Mr. Bush’s father, in Connecticut 63 years ago. They have watched the rise of Donald J. Trump with alarm, and seen how Jeb Bush, the onetime Florida governor, has languished despite early advantages of political pedigree and campaign money.
[…]
No one, it seems, is more perplexed than the family patriarch by the race, and by what the Republican Party has become in its embrace of anti-establishment outsiders, especially the sometimes rude Mr. Trump.
In July, even after breaking a vertebra in a fall that left him hospitalized in Maine, the elder Mr. Bush was fuming at the news of the day: Mr. Trump had belittled Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)41% of Arizona for being taken prisoner in Vietnam.
“I can’t understand how somebody could say that and still be taken seriously,” said Mr. Bush, himself a naval aviator in World War II, according to his longtime spokesman, Jim McGrath, who had visited him.
[…]
Contempt for Mr. Trump runs deep in the clan. Two people interviewed, who are in direct communication with the elder Mr. Bush but requested anonymity to avoid betraying a confidence, said Mr. Trump had revived painful memories among the Bushes of another blunt populist: H. Ross Perot. The family has long believed Mr. Perot’s third-party candidacy helped Bill Clinton
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
GHW Bush was truly Reagan’s biggest mistake. Sr wasted not a day beginning to undo the Reagan Legacy and build his beloved NWO for those whom put him in power. Like father, like sons.
He’s certainly demonstrating that type of behavior especially toward those of us who want the border secure, isn’t he.
That cheesed me off to no end. Coulda, woulda, shoulda taken out Saddam first itme around.
“I thought those injuries were due to torture by the NVA. Or was that just another convenient legend?”
Both are true. Injured while ejecting, subsequently hanged by his arms and denied medical attention by his captors.
http://www.pythiapress.com/wartales/McCain-Shootdown.htm That was only the beginning. John McCain died in Vietnam. A reprogrammed, unstable husk was returned to us.
[Apparently it is ok by the Bush’s to destroy the U.S. as long as it is not done by someone who is rude.]
NWO daddy ain’t seeing it happen fast enough so he’s putting down the TV remote to try to make it happen faster?
They really are incredible ...... sellouts.
[So good it needs repeating. SEPTEMBER 11, 1990[
Yes, nice catch.
I agree with you completely.
The entire Bush family are parasites. They have always been about easy money made off the taxpayer and using their influence to make money in the private sector. Texas Stadium, Silverado, Saudi Royal Family, Neil’s stupid thing for schools, George P. selling jobs to buddies in Texas while not doing his job while working for daddy, countless seats on private corporations and doing stock pump and dumps like there is no tomorrow.
It has been, is, and will always be about the money, power and all the stuff the Bush family can take from others so they never have to be work themselves.
McCain is nuts. There is something wrong with his mind. That’s not a secret to people who have been around him. I’ve been around him several times.
After the 1994 mid-terms, Clinton basically adopted Newt Gingrich's policies as his own. He signed most of the Contract With America into law.
For most of his tenure in office, Clinton basically governed as a moderate Republican with some serious psychological problems.
You are absolutely right. I should have included this. In the past, I've pointed out that Clinton's post-1994 behavior was how he actually campaigned: a moderate (or even conservative) Democrat. I forgot to add it to this post.
But as I subsequently speculated:
It has been, is, and will always be about the money, power and all the stuff the Bush family can take from others so they never have to be work themselves.
Don't forget that Jeb is on the board of directors for several Charter School corporations. They plan on allowing children to go to charter schools and get rid of public schools. Charter schools are a private corporation that has no school board, so parents will have no say on how their children are educated. It's a public/private arrangement where your tax dollars will be sent to a private company. Jeb will become a billionaire if this goes through.
The entire Bush family owns so much land in Argentina they are called the Rockefellers of Argentina.
To be honest, I'm ambivalent about Saddam.
He was unquestionably bad: a dictator, mass murderer, etc.
But, I don't think we have the national will to remove a dictator from power and stay behind long enough to pacify the region and set up a stable power structure.
Iraq is one of those places where the British drew arbitrary lines and threw together 3 factions that have been fighting each other for centuries. The only way to keep them separated is overwhelming force.
The resulting instability (and other meddling by the Obama regime) has turned the Middle East into a nightmare. I think it's only a matter of time before it escalates into a wide conflict that sucks in the Western powers, leaving Russia and who knows who else taking the other side. The same thing will happen in Afghanistan, once we finally thrown in the towel there.
I think the only reasonable answer was to completely isolate Saddam. In retrospect, we should have pulled out of Saudi Arabia (as Bush promised them) after the first Gulf War -- that might have kept bin Laden out of our hair. Perhaps we should have set up a protective presence in Kuwait, after we liberated them.
It’s time for all the Bushes to retire to Kennebunkport, or wherever. As far as I’m concerned, they wore out their Texas welcome a long time ago.
He might not have done as well in the election. He still could have won, but have had less power. A lot of people who voted for Reagan-Bush might not have bothered with Reagan-Laxalt or Reagan-somebodyelse. Reagan got a lot of votes from independents and Democrats who weren't that keen on conservative purism and wouldn't have voted for a more conservative ticket.
Or, what if a conservative candidate had been nominated by the Republicans in 1996?
He (or she) would still have lost because of the economy. And who was that ideal conservative candidate anyway? Buchanan? Forbes? Keyes? Gramm? Dornan? Pretty sure it wasn't Arlen Specter or Dick Lugar or Lamar Alexander or Pete Wilson. Seriously -- could any of them have won?
Sometimes the candidate you'd want just doesn't exist or doesn't present himself or herself. Sometimes conditions are such that no Republican is likely to win. And a lot of the time, people go on and on about Dole not being a conservative because he lost. If he'd somehow managed to win, the meme would be different.
GW Bush presents a problem. If only conservatives can win and he managed to win, does that make him a conservative? But he disappointed conservatives to the point where he couldn't have been a real conservative, so how could he have won? By losing, Dole saved us all the trouble of dealing with such conundrums.
Today, I think the world would be a much different place.
Everybody's got an opinion, I guess.
On the heels of a successful Desert Storm, Bush’s ratings neared the nineties. He took re-election for granted, although he lost the support of Pat Buchanan and Sununu left the administration under a cloud of misusing government assets. Without these strong politicos, Bush ran a weak campaign, characterized by being caught during a debate looking at his watch as if he had more important places to be.
As I recall, George Schultz wasn’t interested in running the 2000 campaign, felt unqualified to it, but was bullied into the position by Bush. He ran a lackluster campaign for a candidate who thought it was merely a formality until Perot came in. Afterwards, Bush thought he lost because of unfair media.
Yes, the 1996 economy was doing well, although the prior year 1995 was a bit slow. In retrospect, economists call 1995 a "soft landing". However, we hadn't yet hit the real boom years at the end of the dot-com boom.
My question is whether the other problems Clinton was having would have been enough, if Timothy McVeigh hadn't tossed him a bone to chew on. Clinton never got a majority of votes in either election: he only achieved a plurality. With a better Republican candidate and eliminating the Perot factor, would it have turned out differently?
And who was that ideal conservative candidate anyway?
I don't know who would have been a better candidate. Without Clinton riding high in the polls, maybe the Republicans wouldn't have had to rely on the B-team to mount a token challenge.
Okay, but when things are half-way good, politicians put the focus on how bad they were when they took office. With the advantages of incumbency it can be enough to keep a president in the White House. See Reagan, GW Bush, and Obama, as well as Clinton. It's hard for a challenger to convince people that "I can make things so much better" when the incumbent has all the anger at his predecessor to play with.
Clinton never got a majority of votes in either election: he only achieved a plurality. With a better Republican candidate and eliminating the Perot factor, would it have turned out differently?
You'd need a candidate popular enough to convince Perot that running would be more than futile. Otherwise Perot wasn't going away. And there wasn't anybody that impressive.
Without Clinton riding high in the polls, maybe the Republicans wouldn't have had to rely on the B-team to mount a token challenge.
Two problems with the A-team:
1) They usually want a clear shot at the White House and are waiting till the next election when they won't have to face an incumbent. If Clinton looked exceptionally weak they might risk it, but otherwise, they'd wait.
2) The A-team, the governors of big states and the powerful senators, have had to make compromises. They're usually the ones who get rejected as not true conservatives. So a whole bunch of B-listers comes in claiming to be real conservatives who deserve the nomination (along with B-listers from the moderate or liberal wing of the party).
In 1980 conservatives were lucky that somebody whose conservative credentials were never going to be questioned had the number one spot on the A-list. It hasn't been the same since.
That's right: we're not going to have a New World Order, and the days of RINO dominance are OVER!
Not despite, because of. We the people have seen what those with "political pedigrees" have wrought and we've had enough of it.
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