The Iraq War turns 17; America sleeps

Protester:  Condoleezza Rice has blood on her hands

Seventeen years ago today, the United States military invaded Iraq on false pretenses to steal their oil.

Many Americans are reflexively allergic to looking back, but we can't progress as a country if we fail to absorb the lessons of the past. For all the flag-waving and military fetishism injected into the media bloodstream by the right wing and Democrats who pander to the lowest common denominator, there is little public discussion of how to best serve veterans once their deployments are over and close to zero examination of why we now have so many wounded and dislocated vets.

When assessing the challenges of veterans, from homelessness to PTSD to traumatic brain injuries to healthcare accessibility to suicide, the elephant in the room is the invasion of Iraq, a unilateral war of choice that eclipsed and then prolonged the more limited (and justifiable) multilateral effort against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Apologists for the Iraq invasion often claim that George W. Bush/Dick Cheney didn't really want to invade Iraq, that they were convinced of the necessity by flawed pre-war intelligence which inflated Saddam Hussein's WMD threat. But the evidence clearly shows that Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld had their eyes on Iraq well before 9/11, which gave them the political capital (and cover) they needed.

Even before becoming president, in 1999, candidate Bush told interviewer Mickey Herskowitz, “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it." 

Waste it he did not. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, said the administration began planning an invasion of Iraq within days of W’s inauguration, in January of 2001, a claim which was seconded by a Vanity Fair feature entitled "US Was Targeting Saddam 'Just Days after 9/11,'" among many other sources. 

In March of 2001, Dick Cheney's secret Energy Task Force met and discussed ways to divert more of Iraq's oil supply to the U.S., as revealed in the "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" documents. (Cheney's lawyers spent years afterward successfully keeping the public from seeing notes from those meetings.)

On the night of 9/11, according to Richard Clarke, Bush's key counter-terrorism adviser at the time, “....Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, ‘You know, we’ve got to do Iraq,’ and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks...And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.”

Just nine days after 9/11, Bush asked British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support in removing Saddam Hussein from power.

As early as February of 2002, more than a year before the supposedly reluctant invasion, special operations personnel and Predator drones were secretly being moved from Afghanistan to Iraq.

In July of 2002, while George W. Bush and Tony Blair were publicly claiming that they wanted weapons inspections in Iraq to run their course before taking military action, British officials had the infamous meeting captured in the Downing Street memo, in which "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [of invasion]."

That fall, the Bush Administration preyed on the American public's post-9/11 fear and vulnerability with an orchestrated media campaign to manufacture a case for war. Not coincidentally, this campaign began in the run-up to congressional elections in which the Republicans sought to regain control of the Senate by turning the media focus to national security issues. Asked why the administration had waited until September to make their case for pre-emptive war, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times, “From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The next day, the Bush Administration's principals fanned out to media outlets to parrot lines about the purported threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The propaganda effort culminated on February 5, 2003, when Colin Powell made a long list of false accusations about Saddam Hussein's fictitious WMD ambitions and connections to al Qaeda in a speech to the United Nations. Though much of the intelligence cited was based on questionable sources—including single sources who hadn’t even been interviewed by U.S. intelligence—Powell told the world, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Powell’s Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who had helped craft the speech, later referred to Powell's U.N. presentation as "the lowest moment of my life."

A study of the media offensive by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity found that key members of the administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz) had

made 935 false statements to the press. In the words of Scott McLellan, the second White House press secretary, the administration's p.r. campaign was nothing but "propaganda.”

After ignoring the February 14 statement (to the U.N.) of Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Agency, that "We have found to date no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-testing activities in Iraq," and last-minute peace offerings from Iraqi officials, the Bush Administration got their war on. 

The campaign of fear and fabrication which was the Iraq invasion's original sin was compounded by dire consequences, including but not limited to:

-The transmogrification of the rare national unity and near-universal international support the U.S. had after 9/11 into raw divisiveness domestically and ill will internationally

-The destruction of some of the the world’s oldest, most precious antiquities throughout Iraq

-Astonishing human suffering (four-five million refugees, two million civilians injured or disabled, and up to [and maybe over] one million dead civilians)

-The abandonment of Afghanistan at the very moment when the U.S. had a big coalition (and could have built on the military victory there to help create a safe, civil society), which revived the Taliban when they were on the ropes and dragged the conflict out to the present and beyond

-4,580 dead American troops and tens or hundreds of thousands injured physically and/or psychologically (not to mention the negative impact on those troops' parents, siblings, spouses, children, grandparents, and close friends)

-The over-extension and diminution of the American military through multiple tours and deployment of National Guard members for combat purposes (which robbed New Orleans of badly-needed Guardsmen after Hurricane Katrina)

-An exacerbation of tension with Muslims worldwide and increase in terrorist recruitment (including the founding of ISIS), the very thing the Bush Administration was claiming to counteract in Iraq

-The replacement of a Sunni strongman who provided a check on the Iranians with a Shiite leader who is allied with Iran

-Poisoning of the environment in Iraq from the ammunition used, resulting in an increase in birth defects and cancer and a host of neurological, respiratory, and cancerous conditions for 85,000+ veterans

The long-term costs of the Iraq invasion—which was initiated not long before the U.S. treasury was starting to absorb the staggering costs of Baby Boomer retirement—are up to six trillion dollars.

The opportunity costs of the invasion of Iraq are less quantifiable but immense. Every dollar spent on this ill-conceived adventure robbed us of a dollar for the elemental priorities of a civilized society back home and now Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell (who supported the invasion) use the budget deficit caused by the invasion and occupation as an excuse to take the ax to programs for both those who need assistance most—the poor, elderly, and disabled—and for the struggling, shrinking middle-class.

Though the trauma and loss caused by the U.S. invasion remains fresh for the people of Iraq, most Americans sleepwalk through their days with video games, Netflix, Hulu, and the soporific of cable TV, oblivious to the mass human suffering their country unleashed in its insatiable greed for oil. 

Such is life in the United States of Amnesia.

More political writing by Dan Benbow:

Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election:

Bernie was robbed by the DNC!

The Master of Low Expectations:  666 reasons sentient citizens
 are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush

The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust

Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
 (a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)

Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism 
of voting Green

10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime

178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)

Colin Kaepernick is right

Stephen Colbert delivers the best political roast of all time

Justice Delayed: "Kill the Messenger" vindicates Gary Webb

21st Century Republicans, Part IV

"Inequality for All" and the Elephant in the Room

Memorial Day in the United States of Amnesia

Romney-Ryan's Road to Perdition

 Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter      

"Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins"

Watching the documentary Raise Hell:  The Life & Times of Molly Ivins was like stumbling into a fond old friend I hadn’t seen in many years and having a 90-minute coffee klatch. Like millions of other Americans, I spent countless hours through the years reading Ivins’ political columns without knowing much of her back story. Raise Hell fills in Ivins’ history so that we see the human being behind the singular writing voice.

Born in 1944, Ivins grew up in the affluent River Oaks neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Patterns manifested early on that would become a template for Ivins’ life. From a young age she was a bookworm with a special appreciation of the written word. By age 12, she was six feet tall, making her self-conscious about her appearance and something of an outsider at school. In her teen years, Ivins first challenged authority when butting heads with her father, a patriarchal right-wing oil executive who felt that children should be seen and not heard.

Like many in her generation, Ivins’ interest in politics was sparked by the civil rights movement, helped along by the temper tantrum her father threw when he came home from work to find Ivins and a black male friend hanging out by the family pool. Unlike many women in her generation, Ivins had no desire to stay home and raise children. After high school, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Smith College in Massachusetts, then a Master’s from the Columbia Journalism School in Manhattan.

While at Smith, Ivins crashed the male-dominated field of journalism, interning for the Houston Chronicle. In 1967, after completing graduate school, she worked for the Star Tribune (later the Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Most female journos of the time were shunted out to “food, fluff, and fashion,” but Ivins reported on the intersection of poverty and race, the young radicals, and police brutality. From the Tribune Ivins went to The Texas Observer, which she described as “the only liberal publication in Texas.” While serving as an editor for the Observer, Ivins published occasional op-ed columns at the Washington Post and The New York Times.

Ivins’ op-eds and work for the Chronicle, Star Tribune, and Texas Observer catapulted her to a full-time position at The New York Times in 1976. Working at the Times would be the peak of most journalists’ careers, but it was just a weigh station for Ivins. Ivins’ Southern background helped her land the plum assignment of writing Elvis Presley’s obituary, but it put her at cultural odds with the stuffy East Coast newsroom and the hard-nosed executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. Following a spell in the Manhattan headquarters, Ivins’ outspokenness got her exiled to an isolated office in Colorado, where she raised Rosenthal’s ire by playfully using the words “gang pluck” to describe an all-day chicken slaughter she was reporting on (as explained in the video below).

Ivins truly hit her stride in 1982 when she returned home to Texas to write for the Dallas Times Herald. At the Herald, Ivins was given creative control, which allowed her voice to flower. Her popularity continued to grow in the ’90s, when she switched to the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Ivins’ first book (Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, 1992) made The New York Times bestseller list and her work was syndicated by Creator’s Syndicate, which spread her columns to a peak of 400 newspapers, an exceptional level of success in the field. 

A populist with a social conscience, Ivins consistently advocated for the underdog—women, the poor, people of color, labor—and the public interest, showing a distinct distaste for the parasitic machinations of the Washington and Texas elite. Referring to rising inequality and the increasing economic struggles of the lower and middle classes, Ivins said, “shit flows downhill and the people at the bottom are drowning in it.”

The most unique aspect of Ivins’ writing voice was her humor. Though she had spent several years out of state, in Massachusetts, Paris, Manhattan, Colorado, and the Twin Cities, at heart Ivins was a down-to-earth Texas girl who liked (in her own words) to hunt, cuss, and drink. As an unabashed liberal living in an ultra-conservative state, she learned to buffer right-wing pestilence with laughter, mocking transparently appalling Republican actions—and the lies they concocted to justify their actions—with a dry wit. Of Pat Buchanan’s hateful culture war speech at the 1992 Republican convention, in which he denigrated LGBTQ Americans, feminists, and environmentalists, Ivins said, “It was better in the original German.”

Texas governor George W. Bush’s ascendance to the White House following his theft of the 2000 election elevated Ivins to a rarefied rank in the commentariat. Having covered Texas politics off-and-on for three decades at that point, Ivins was able to laser in on Bush’s personal shortcomings, corruption, and devious policy decisions with a color and precision that eluded the legions of journalists covering the Bush Administration.

Right before the 2000 presidential election, Ivins (with Lou Dubose) warned voters of exactly what they could expect by documenting the actions of Governor (and then-presidential candidate) Bush in Shrub: the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. A few years later, as President Bush was in the process of running for a second term, she and Dubose teamed up again. Their new collaboration was considered such a threat to the administration that Ivins’ house was broken into and her laptop stolen. Bushwhacked came out in 2004.

Bush gave Ivins endless amounts of material, both as a humorist and a concerned citizen. A 1st Amendment absolutist, Ivins wrote eloquently of the Bush Administration's assaults on civil liberties (The Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, torture) and the mistaken belief among many Americans that expansive government snooping was necessary to keep us safe. Unlike the vast majority of mainstream American opinion writers of the time, Ivins foresaw the folly of invading Iraq; two months before the invasion, Ivins presciently wrote of the imminent operation “can you say horrible three-way civil war?”

Speaking truth to power came at a cost for Ivins. Her acerbic wit and unwillingness to sugarcoat the grimness of the Bush years got her blackballed by the Houston Chronicle and other publications who’d published her previously.

In 2005, Ivins’ breast cancer came out of remission. Never married and something of a loner, she spent the last two years of her life doing what she had always done—writing up a storm. At the time she passed away (in January of 20o7), Ivins was publishing two columns a week and working on a book about the fragile state of the Bill of Rights. Her estate included a major gift to the ACLU, which is receiving a portion of the proceeds from Raise Hell:  The Life & Times of Molly Ivins (trailer below).

Raise Hell is not a standout documentary. The film provides a broad life retrospective rather than a close-up of the remarkable body of work Ivins produced over decades of reporting and opinion writing. Ivins’ significance can only be fully appreciated by those of us who had the good fortune to read each new column in real time, nodding along with the keen insights and throwing our heads back in laughter at the sharp one-liners, even (especially) when the subject matter was hard to digest.  

All the same, director Janice Engel should be applauded for rescuing Ivins from obscurity and creating the first and only film tribute to one of the best—and most humane—political columnists America has ever seen.

                                                     Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter                                                                                                                                                                                         

More political writing by Dan Benbow:

Lingering Myths of the 2016 presidential election:
Bernie was robbed by the DNC!

The Iraq War turns 16; America sleeps

The Master of Low Expectations:  666 reasons sentient citizens
 are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush

Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
 (a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)

Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism 
of voting Green

10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime

178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)

Colin Kaepernick is right

Stephen Colbert delivers the best political roast of all time

Justice Delayed: "Kill the Messenger" vindicates Gary Webb

21st Century Republicans, Part IV

"Inequality for All" and the Elephant in the Room

Memorial Day in the United States of Amnesia

Romney-Ryan's Road to Perdition

          The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust              

"Truth and Beauty" film reviews:

       "There must be something in the water: the magic of 'Muscle Shoals"'

"Truth is in the Eye of the Interpreter:  a Review of 'Room 237'"

"Justice Delayed: 'Kill the Messenger' vindicates Gary Webb"

"Errol Morris Strikes Again" (about "Tabloid")

"The Visual Odyssey of 'Loving Vincent'"

"A spoiler-free review of 'Mud'" 

"'Do the Right Thing' Turns 30"

"Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood'" 

"First Glance:  'The Master'" 

"Searching for Sugar Man"

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

"The Wrecking Crew"

     

"Battle of the Sexes"

"Inequality for All"

                                                                        "American Hustle"

                                                                        "BlacKkKlansman"

"Love and Taxes"

                                                                               "Trumbo"      

Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia

Nothing so perfectly reflects the hyper-phoniness of America’s mainstream political dialogue as the recent major media narrative of George H.W. Bush as a devoted public servant and model of civility.

Not speaking ill of the dead around the family of the deceased is proper social etiquette, but presidents’ legacies are public property. Presidents are elected by the people (usually), they are entrusted with the public interest, their decisions impact millions and ripple for decades. If we value democracy, we owe it to ourselves—and especially to future generations—to trade in false praise for an honest examination of Bush’s legacy.

The cold, hard fact is that when H.W. Bush’s record was freshest in our minds, during the 1992 presidential election, he received the lowest percentage of votes of any major party candidate since Republican Alf Landon in 1936. Running while millions of Americans were suffering through a recession, he was seen as an out-of-touch patrician who was unfamiliar with grocery scanners and gazed impotently over the wreckage of inner-city Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots. Not long after Bush lost, news titan Walter Cronkite told an interviewer that the country had lightened its step with the election of Bill Clinton because we knew that we would soon have a president who actually cared about everyday people. Those of us who had been paying attention during the long national nightmare that was 12 years of Reagan-Bush couldn’t wait for Bush to leave office.

In the days after Bush’s death, one of the common refrains among corporate toadies posing as journalists was that Bush consistently put the interests of the country over the interests of his party. In reality, most of his policy positions as vice president and president were narrowly partisan, none more so than his choice of Dan Quayle as vice president in the run-up to the 1988 presidential election.

Quayle was billed as a vibrant new voice on the national political scene, a view to the future, but the truth was that Quayle was a reactionary and a supreme lightweight, a child of privilege who had won a Senate seat through dumb luck—family control of the media throughout much of Indiana and the Ronald Reagan landslide of 1980. Like Sarah Palin after him, Quayle was a national embarrassment, an airhead with minimal experience and little policy knowledge who often assaulted the English language when he went off-script. Like Sarah Palin after him, Quayle’s presence on the ticket was a craven appeasement of right-wing knuckle-draggers in the Republican Party base that reflected very poorly on the judgment of the candidate at the top of the ticket.

Another common refrain among corporate toadies posing as journalists is that Bush was civil, humble, a fundamentally decent man, a claim that is contradicted by Bush's actions overseas and here at home.

As CIA director in 1976, Bush oversaw Operation Condor, in which the U.S. covertly supported anti-communist regimes in South America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia) that tortured and butchered tens of thousands of dissidents and jailed hundreds of thousands more. When American Ronni Moffett and Chilean diplomat/dissident Orlando Letelier were killed in a Washington D.C. car bomb explosion, Bush’s CIA purposely misdirected the FBI investigation with a public assessment which covered up the role of Chilean intelligence in the political assassination. After four years in which the GOP was out of power, Bush rekindled his working relationships with Latin American dictators backed by right-wing death squads as Ronald Reagan’s vice president.

Domestically, the Bush-was-a-fundamentally-decent-man talking point is exploded by Bush’s campaign for president, in 1988. At the time, many Americans had had enough of the selfish and mean-spirited Republican policies that had predominated for the eight years prior. Bush, a blue blood who lacked the charisma of Reagan, was generally not seen as a sympathetic figure. Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis came out of the Democratic convention in the summer of 1988 with a double-digit lead over Bush.

To overcome his deficit in the polls, Bush ran one of the most empty, loathsome, and dishonest campaigns in U.S. political history. In place of issues that actually mattered in peoples’ lives, Bush political adviser Lee Atwater expertly manipulated the lizard brains of undecided voters with a series of distractions. As election day neared, voters were subjected to ads about Dukakis’s veto of a measure mandating that Massachusetts teachers lead their students in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, an absurd non-issue that Bush hammered Dukakis on repeatedly. Bush also made the suspect claim that Dukakis, who had a better environmental record than Bush, was responsible for the pollution in the Boston Harbor, rather than the notoriously regulation-averse Reagan Administration EPA.

Most disgraceful of all was the Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ad. During the ’70s and ’80s, some felons were eligible for weekend furloughs. A part of the prison reform movement, the policy was common in both Republican- and Democrat-run states; Ronald Reagan had supported the policy as governor of California, even after two furloughed inmates were accused of murder.

Willie Horton was a black felon serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for a 1974 murder. Given a weekend release in 1986, Horton stabbed a man and tied up and raped his fiancée. The Bush campaign capitalized on this horrific incident by running a series of ads introducing Willie Horton to the American public. On the surface, the ads presented Dukakis as weak on crime, but the deeper motive was to play to the racism and fear of black men among white voters. The campaign was so ugly that Atwater apologized to Michael Dukakis on his deathbed.

Once elected, Bush washed the dirt from his hands and did some good things. Many historians credit Bush with an adept response to the end of the Cold War. Bush said that his administration would be a “kinder, gentler” version of Ronald Reagan’s domestically, and in some instances this was true. He signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act and broke with anti-tax extremists in his party to negotiate a budget deal with congressional Democrats that kept the skyrocketing Reagan-Bush deficit at bay with budget cuts and a small tax increase on the wealthy. He also worked with Congressional Democrats to update and renew the Clean Air Act and appointed the highly-qualified moderate Republican David Souter to the Supreme Court. 

But as could be expected of a politician in a party run by and appealing to people with authoritarian personality types, Bush for the most part hewed to Republican orthodoxy. After 15 years of no large-scale American interventions overseas following the horrors of Vietnam, Bush made militarism cool again by unilaterally invading former ally Manuel Noriega’s Panama under false pretenses, killing 3,000 civilians and destroying thousands of homes in the poverty-stricken El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama City. One year later, after Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie had given Saddam Hussein a green light to go into Kuwait by saying that the U.S. “[has] no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts,” Bush invaded Kuwait under false pretenses to expel the military of former ally Hussein. Often hailed as a successful intervention, the operation laid waste to both human and military infrastructure, leading to the death of over 150,000 Iraqi civilians. The war also elevated the profile of Dick Cheney, whom Bush had plucked from relative obscurity to become Defense Secretary, putting Cheney on a path to become one of the most destructive leaders in American history.

Though Bush was hot to trot when it came to war, he was lukewarm at best in dealing with the biggest threat civilization faced, forcing negotiators to water down the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change because “the American way of life is not up for negotiations.”

Domestically, Bush vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act (later signed by Bill Clinton) multiple times. He reversed his earlier support for a woman’s right to choose, appointing mostly anti-choice judges to the lower courts and sustaining the Reagan Administration's “gag rule,” which stipulated that clinics receiving foreign aid from the United States couldn’t perform abortions with their own money or even provide counseling about abortion. He fell short in responding to the AIDS crisis that was terrorizing America’s gay community and showed scant concern for working-class Americans who were suffering through an economic downturn when he vetoed the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act of 1991, which would have extended unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed. Though he was found wanting on these vital issues, Bush somehow made time in his busy schedule to hawk a purely token Constitutional amendment to outlaw flag burning.

Another one of the common refrains among corporate toadies posing as journalists was that Bush, like John McCain, was “a patriot.” The assertion in its most basic formulation is that military combat + occasional departures from party orthodoxy = “patriot,” no matter what else the person in question has done in their public life. The problem with this claim is that an objective analysis of the public record shows that Bush, like McCain, was more often than not an opportunistic conservative Republican, the furthest thing imaginable from a patriot.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than Bush’s record on race issues. In 1959, when Bush moved from the East Coast to Jim Crow-era Texas, his family house had a covenant which read "No part of the property in the said Addition shall ever be sold, leased, or rented to, or occupied by any person other than of the Caucasian race, except in the servants' quarters." As a candidate for Senate in 1964, Bush criticized the Civil Rights Act for undermining state’s rights (i.e. undermining individual states’ “rights” to discriminate on the basis of race) and leveled the spurious claim that the bill was unconstitutional. 

After getting into the White House with the virulently racist Willie Horton ad, President Bush doubled down on Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, which was putting record numbers of black men behind bars, and even had the DEA lure (and entrap) a teenage African-American drug dealer to the park across from the White House so Bush could stage a photo op on the evils of crack-cocaine. Bush vetoed the Motor Voter Bill (which made it easier for people of color to register to vote), the Civil Rights Bill re-write, and the Voting Rights re-write. After congressional Democrats weakened protections against discrimination to suit Bush's demands, he signed versions of the latter two bills, but even as he did so, his hatchet man C. Boyden Gray appealed to the worst instincts of prejudiced white voters by pushing an executive order to end Affirmative Action in federal contracting.

Bush’s contempt for black Americans was most obvious in his decision to appoint Clarence Thomas to fill Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court. On the surface, Bush was appointing one black judge to replace another, giving the appearance of offering African-Americans a place at the table, but the reality was the complete opposite. Where Marshall had spent his adult life working on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties, Thomas had pimped himself out to the Reagan Administration, which was hostile to both. Bush maintained his support for the appointee even after it came out that Thomas had likely sexually harassed Anita Hill, whom he had supervised at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and other women who weren’t called to testify in Senate hearings.

Since Thomas squeaked through Senate confirmation, he has proven to be perhaps Bush’s worst legacy, both in terms of his lack of legal chops (he went ten years at one point without making a single comment in Supreme Court hearings) and in his 19th Century belief system. Thomas has not only voted with the GOP majority on all of the most undemocratic, precedent-shattering decisions—including Bush v. Gore and Citizens United—but has consistently sided against the interests of the black community. Though he clearly benefited from Affirmative Action, Thomas voted to kill it in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena. In Shelby County v. Holder Thomas joined the white Republican judges who decided to gut the Voting Rights Act, under the false pretense that it was no longer necessary, which paved the way for Republican voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise voters of color.  

One year after the Thomas appointment, Bush ran for re-election. Though he had been considered a shoe-in after Gulf War I, his approval ratings had fallen precipitously as the economy started to stagnate. Worse yet, he was facing Bill Clinton, a fresh face with uncanny political skills backed by a party eager to win after 12 years out of the White House. Unable to exploit Clinton’s womanizing due to his own infidelities, seen as out of touch by Americans struggling through the recession, and saddled with positions on most issues that were to the right of the average citizen, Bush fell back on the lowest trick in the book:  attacking Clinton’s patriotism. As a young man, Clinton had organized protests of the Vietnam War while living abroad. Though organizing the protests actually showed that Clinton had been on the right side of history, and though the protests had happened two decades earlier and had little to no relevance to 1992, Bush engaged in the typical Republican tactic of throwing shit at the wall, hoping it would stick.

It didn’t.

Clinton won in a landslide.

As a parting gift, right before leaving office, Bush pardoned six Republican officials who had committed felonies in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan Administration had broken federal law by secretly funding the Contras, a CIA-backed mercenary force seeking to overturn the communist leadership in Nicaragua. The pardons wiped away six years of work by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, flushed tens of millions of taxpayer dollars down the toilet, and conveniently guaranteed that Bush would never be held accountable for his direct role in the scandal and the lies he had told investigators.

Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush’s legacy didn’t end in 1992. In 2001, Bush’s oldest son took office after stealing a presidential election through a long list of sleazy tactics engineered by Bush’s second son, chief among them the disenfranchisement of thousands of black Floridians with a knowingly-flawed scrub list of the voting rolls. The whiff of scandal surrounding Bush Sr. would be eclipsed by the staggeringly-corrupt W, who manipulated the fear caused by 9/11 and the public trust invested in him to lie us into a war of choice that fractured Iraq along ethnic fault lines, created millions of refugees, left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars—while actually making the region less stable.  

W’s rigid adherence to right-wing ideology and string of colossal fuck-ups (the security failure of 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, the economic collapse of 2008) made Bush Sr. look benign and competent by comparison. Unlike W—and Reagan, and Donald Trump—H.W. Bush had both the intelligence and qualifications for the job and an interest in the process of governing. Also by contrast to Reagan, W, and Trump, H.W. Bush served his country in uniform and had some sense of noblesse oblige.

But by choosing the Republican Party as his home, H.W. Bush signed a deal with the devil in which he did the bidding of the most toxic forces in American life more often than not.  

Favorably comparing Bush by temperament and experience to the surreally-infantile and inexperienced Trump gives corporate toadies posing as journalists the feeling that they are being “fair-minded” and “non-partisan,” but since when is being less awful than other Republican presidents an endorsement of one’s humanity, decency, or service to the republic?

Until the United States reckons honestly with its past, we will be stuck with fraudulent national narratives believed by a critical mass of credulous, politically-illiterate citizens who are ill-equipped in the voting booth, steadily perpetuating America’s downward spiral to the fate of ancient Rome.

More political writing by Dan Benbow: 

Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism 
of voting Green

10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime

178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)

Colin Kaepernick is right

Stephen Colbert delivers the best political roast of all time

Justice Delayed: "Kill the Messenger" vindicates Gary Webb

21st Century Republicans, Part IV

"Inequality for All" and the Elephant in the Room

Memorial Day in the United States of Amnesia

Romney-Ryan's Road to Perdition

The Master of Low Expectations:  666 Reasons Sentient Citizens 

are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush

The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust

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