Goddamn, we've become such a pathetic nation living under the bovine shadow of Donald Trump that the orgy of corpse worship of dead George H.W. Bush, our 41st president, makes the nostalgia-gasm over dead Ronald Reagan back in 2004 look like a rushed hand job in the back of the historical convertible. Of course, Bush was a better human than Trump. But there are parasitic worms that are better humans than Trump. The bar is not that high.
So, yeah, sure, you can thank Bush for some things he did that genuinely made the nation kinder and gentler, like the Americans with Disabilities Act or his environmental record (putting aside, for obvious reasons, his years as a Texas oil man). But that's the way it's always been: no matter how shitty you think a president might be, he does a few things that you think aren't bad. It's like if you're fucking a porcupine's asshole, and, once every ten thrusts or so, you don't get a quill in your dick. At the end of the day, you're still fucking a porcupine's asshole. (Sure, it's consensual. The porcupine wanted it.)
Besides, one thing that's been left out in this rush to praise Bush as the Greatest Single-Term President in History or whatever other superlatives you wanna toss out there in the encomiums of doom is that he had no fuckin' choice when it came to legislative goals except to do some rational shit. He had a Democratic House and Senate for his entire term. Everyone wants to talk about the bipartisanship, the "reaching across the aisle" that Bush did, but the fuckin' Democrats did it, too. They didn't just shut the whole fuckin' joint down unless Bush did what they wanted, like the Republicans did with Obama. So spare a thought or two for Tom Foley in the House and George Mitchell in the Senate. Most of what Bush is being praised for are Democratic initiatives he went along with.
So, sorry, tender-hearted liberals and weeping conservatives, I'm not going to spend any more time fluffing this cock. This is gonna be more of a shit-on-his-dead-face type of thing. See, I was there. I remember. I marched against him, against the Persian Gulf "war," which ended with the United States rebuilding the palaces of the oil billionaires in Kuwait; and against his savage anti-choice policies, which empowered the lunatics of Operation Rescue and the Christian terrorist assassins in their war on women.
You wanna understand who Bush was? Look at the shit he vetoed or pocket vetoed. The very first one was for a hike in the minimum wage, which hadn't budged in 8 years from $3.35, because he wanted it at $4.35 and Congress, in a bipartisan vote, wanted it $4.55. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 because he claimed it would force hiring quotas on businesses (it wouldn't) and because it didn't cap punitive damages on discrimination lawsuits. He vetoed the National Voter Registration Act because of, no shit, false allegations of possible "fraud." He vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act because he was a prick.
And when it came to abortion, he vetoed like a motherfucker. He vetoed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Amendments of 1992 because it allowed fetal tissue research using material from aborted fetuses. He vetoed appropriations bills for Washington, DC, because they allowed some funding to be used indirectly for abortions in cases of rape and incest (he only wanted it used if the mother's life was in danger). He vetoed the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 1990 because it included funding for a United Nations family planning program that he said might be used for abortion. He vetoed the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act because it didn't prohibit funds to be used for abortion counseling. He was rabidly anti-choice, ranting about it at every press conference and threatening any legislation that didn't adhere to his strict line.
Indeed, because he was perceived as a moderate, Bush was too fuckin' cowardly to stand up to the nutzoid right-wing of the Republican Party (back when it had wings and not just a single broken one as it does now). And if Reagan opened the doors of the White House to the Falwells and Robertsons, Bush pretty much gave them a key and told them to come and go as they pleased. As vice president and then as president, Bush kissed so much fundamentalist ass that he permanently tasted Moral Majority farts on his thin, patrician lips. He blithely cut the hearts out of gay and lesbian Americans to appease the corrupt religious right.
Bush started embracing all the utterly worthless symbolic shit along the way, the kind of issues that het up the blood of the yokels but have nothing to do with actually leading. For instance, when the Supreme Court held that it was legal to burn the American flag (I mean, fuckin' c'mon. You bought it, so you can burn it), Bush went apeshit. He demanded a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning, declaring, "I do feel viscerally about burning the American flag." You could look at him and think, "He's lying. He doesn't give a shit about this."
It was all such a show to make it seem like he was down in the muck with the shit-covered yahoos. So, really, fuck him.
Where else do you want to go? You want to talk about the racism? The Willie Horton ad and Bush's refusal to not only condemn it, but to fully embrace it? The fake, racist war on drugs, which caused a surge in the prison population, wrecking African American families, as well as the ludicrous stunt of having the Secret Service buy crack near the White House? His bullshit response to the Los Angeles riots after the verdict in the Rodney King beating, the building fires his real thousand points of light?
You want to talk about the poison that he injected into the American political system by having his campaign run by Lee Atwater, as vile a creature who ever raped the country with a scabby dick and who didn't die in enough pain and regret? This is not to mention how Bush's campaign message was crafted by Roger Ailes, the gig a few years before the creation of Fox "news," and, goddamn, how Ailes played those rubes like a fuckin' fiddle and they loved having those racist, homophobic, xenophobic strings plucked, even by a rich Yalie who only got by because of his daddy's millions. This is the fuckin' template that Trump used.
You want to talk about the pardons for the half-dozen Reagan administration officials in the scandal of selling arms to Iran in order to fund the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, obsructing justice and immunizing him from prosecution? Or his lies that got us into the worthless war in Iraq and set us up for our next worthless war with Iraq, all because of Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had no small role in putting into power? Or his role in getting arms and funds to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union, which, of course, led to al-Qaeda's formation?
Or his terrible family, who continued to damage the nation in ways from which we will never recover? Or his failures in the wake of Hurricane Andrew (like father, like son, eh?)? Or his propping up of the heinous Reagan? Or his role as director of the CIA? Or Clarence fuckin' Thomas? Or his dragging the economy into a recession because he was willing to pass tax hikes but not enough to turn things around?
What was so goddamn delicious about Bill Clinton beating him was that it was one of the unwashed telling the prissy socialite to fuck off back to his family compound.
But, sure, yeah, Bush was a bomber pilot in World War II. And if he had become an insurance salesman when he got back, we'd honor him as a hero.
He didn't, though. He decided to fail and flail and flop his way through the political system, falling upward because of his wealth and connections, feeling free to insult people who were less privileged than he was. And because of that, we're free to tear his corpse to pieces and feed it to rabid curs.
Nah, I'm not gonna join in the celebration. I didn't forget everything that happened back then. Whatever he did post-presdiency pales in comparison to the long-term damage he did while in office. He doesn't get forgiven for all the families he destroyed just because he held some fundraisers for Katrina relief (which wouldn't have been so desperately needed if his dimwit son hadn't been such a colossal fuck-up).
I don't give a fuck if he was a good person. That's nice for his family and friends. Who fucking cares though? We have been working and working to claw ourselves out of the national grave dug for us by Reagan and Bush. We haven't been able to escape the molesting grip that they held us in for 12 long years.
Whether we wanted to or not, we all dove out of a plane tied to ol' Poppy, who was fondling our asses and laughing, a big fuckin' joke, and when the chute wouldn't open, he told us that was his plan all along, a kinder, gentler national death pact that we are still trying to untie ourselves from.