Posts Tagged ‘Dick Cheney’

George H. W. Bush: Passing Reaction Roundup

Sunday, December 2nd, 2018

Here’s some news, tributes, roundups and reactions to President George H. W. Bush’s death:

  • Bush’s body to lie in state in the capitol rotunda. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Other McCain:

    Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means to impugn the living Republicans they currently defame. Those of us old enough to remember how liberals hated Bush when he was president (and before that, as vice-president under Ronald Reagan) will not be deceived by their panegyrics to his “civility” and “bipartisanship.”

    Snip.

    Bush was one of the leaders of the GOP’s effort to break the Democrat stranglehold on the “Solid South.” He defeated the powerful Texas Democrat machine to win two terms in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970, and served as Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and later as director of the CIA. In the interval, Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74 when it fell his duty to inform President Nixon that he would have to resign, as the Watergate revelations had destroyed his support within the GOP. In all of these roles, Bush was a man of honor who did what duty required, as a patriotic servant of his country.

  • Scott Johnson at Powerline: “He led an almost impossibly full life, capped by his election to the presidency as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1988. A good man and a good president, he was perhaps more than anything else a great American of the old-fashioned variety that is passing from the scene.” Plus a reminder of how the New York Times fabricated stories about him.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, hails Bush as the man who ended the Cold War. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

    • Tweets:

    Finally, America’s journalist class in action:

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Then the Garry Wills Kicked In

    Monday, March 4th, 2013

    Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power, the latest volume in his acclaimed Lyndon Baines Johnson biography, came out May of last year, but Garry Wills just got around to reviewing it in The New York Review of Books.

    The sad thing is that for the first few thousand words, it’s a really interesting review. Caro’s book is about how Johnson’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s mutual hatred for each other drove much of the Johnson’s Presidency. By this point, anyone beyond Democratic hagiographers know that both LBJ and RFK were nasty pieces of work, and it’s no surprise that both of them loathed each other. Caro is a good historian, I’m sure the book is quite fascinating, and the review conveys its central points well.

    Then, alas, the Garry Wills kicks in.

    For those who can’t lay their hands on The Field Guide to Liberal Fossils, Wills is a historian who started out as a protege of William F. Buckley but then started moving steadily to the left and has kept moving ever since. He came down with a full-blown case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and penned one of the nastiest hit pieces on Romney after he lost. He has such a bad case of it he can’t resist getting in digs at Bush43 while reviewing a book that takes place 30+ years before he entered office.

    “He [LBJ] also tried to work the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, requesting an office in the White House with a bulked-up staff for military and security issues. He was trying, we now see, to have the parallel presidency that Dick Cheney secured for himself under a compliant George Bush.”

    This is the sort of wacky “Cheney is the puppetmaster” conspiracism that had the nutroots convinced that “Fitzmas” was going to result the wholesale indictment of the Bush Administration for treason before The Great Fizzle. A professional historian believing in it is akin to treating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real document rather than a Czarist fake.

    Honorable mention goes to the line “Americans hated communism so much that they thought every Russian was a threat.” Yeah, funny what an ideology killing 100 million people and having some 5,000 nuclear warheads pointed at you by an evil empire will do to dampen your enthusiasm.

    At some indefinite point in the future, I hope to read all of Caro’s volumes on LBJ. But I see no need to read anything by Garry Wills ever again.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »