George H.W. Bush Dead at 94 - Reflections of a Former Republican

George H.W. Bush died yesterday at the age  of at 94.  Like all all previous presidents, Mr. Bush looks better and better in retrospect as the regime of Der Trumpenführer continues to be increasingly defined by corruption, possible treason, and crudeness and boorishness.  Yes, Bush made many mistakes, foolishly embraced Lee Atwater's racist smear of Michael Dukakis,  and failed to be able to convince voters that he deserved re-election in 1992,  Yet, he had class and integrity again, especially in contrast to the current occupant of the White House.  He valued science, knowledge and embodied what the Republican Party once was before the open ascendancy of the Christofascists and white supremacists within the party.  Like Bush the party he led is dead and gone.  The New York Times looks at Bush.  Here are excerpts:

Historians will measure the presidency of George H.W. Bush in familiar ways — by how well or poorly he managed the major domestic and international challenges of his time, his leadership qualities, the moral and social legacies he left for future generations.

Yet, at the moment of his passing, it is difficult not to take note of the profound differences between the 41st president of the United States and the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump. Beyond a desire to be president — Mr. Bush was more competitive and ambitious than his self-effacing personality sometimes suggested — there is almost nothing in common: the one gracious and modest, the other rude and vain; the one prudent, the other brash; the one steady, the other unmoored.

Mr. Bush’s death on Friday is also a moment to recall a less quarrelsome political order, when relations with traditional allies were more cordial than combative, when government attracted people of talent and integrity for whom public service offered a purpose higher than self-enrichment, when the Republican Party, though slowly slipping into the tentacles of zealots like Newt Gingrich, still offered room for people with pragmatic policies and sensible dispositions.

Fingers pointed in every direction after his defeat [by Bill Clinton] — a deteriorating economy, a divisive convention in Houston, a disjointed campaign. But one big reason for Mr. Bush’s precipitous fall was Mr. Bush himself, chiefly his inability to convince Americans that he understood the depth of their fears or could summon up a coherent plan for addressing them.

A Times editorial after his defeat called Mr. Bush “an incomplete president” — good at some things but clumsy at others. Fate had dealt him one of the strongest hands in foreign affairs ever awarded a new president, and for the most part he played that hand cleverly and energetically. But when it came time to rescue a depressed nation, he had little to offer, either spiritually or in terms of coherent policy. With the economy in decline in the winter of 1992, he told a New Hampshire audience, as if reading from a cue card, “Message: I care.” That very formulation, a bit precious and patronizing under the circumstances, fell well short of the kind of the emotional jolt the moment called for. His opponent, Mr. Clinton, found a much more resonant message: “I feel your pain.”

Mr. Bush’s political persona was no less baffling. . . . . often in the heat of combat, Mr. Bush’s good manners and amiable disposition gave way to bombast and shrill exploitation of fears of race and crime. His 1988 campaign infamously strove to tie his opponent, Michael Dukakis, to an African-American named Willie Horton who committed rape after being released on a weekend furlough program — an effort for which Mr. Bush’s attack-dog campaign manager, Lee Atwater, later apologized.

So hapless was Mr. Bush’s last year in office that it was easy to overlook his early successes. He began smartly, moving quickly to end the ideological combat of the Reagan years, broke cleanly on environmental issues with his indifferent predecessor — the upgrade of the nation’s clean air laws was a major achievement — faced up to the savings and loan scandal and offered creative approaches to the debt of developing nations, especially in Latin America.
 Foreign policy was Mr. Bush’s great strength, and of his diplomatic contributions, two stand out. One was to keep America and the Soviet Union moving forward along a path to peace charted by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a path that in time led to the reunification of Germany, the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, more broadly, the end of nearly a half-century of Cold War. His second big achievement was the skillful orchestration over many months of a collective global response to Iraq’s aggression in the Persian Gulf. A war that began on January 17, 1991, was over in weeks, with Saddam Hussein’s air force neutralized and his ground troops on the run. Some critics have said that Mr. Hussein would not have been so bold as to invade Kuwait had Washington not shamelessly cultivated him over the years; others faulted Mr. Bush for not pushing Mr. Hussein all the way back to Baghdad and removing him from power. Such a course, Mr. Bush said later, would have “incurred incalculable human and political costs … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.” Which is exactly what his son, George W. Bush, a less cautious man, set out to do 12 years later — with disastrous results. Perhaps, in a second term, Mr. Bush might have found a clearer sense of direction on domestic issues. We will never know. But if he is measured by his leadership and choices on the global stage, historians will almost certainly treat him more kindly than the voters did in 1992.

I think most decent people would happily exchange Bush for the current foul and toxic occupant of the White House.  RIP.

Trump Continues to Enable Cruelty and Abuse

Twenty-five years ago (when I was still a Republican), Republicans and conservative Christians would harp that character in an elected official mattered and was a defining reason whether or not to support a candidate or officeholder.  Fast forward to today, and Trumpists - who have more or less replaced the Republican Party in all but name - evangelical Christians have made it most clear that to them, no matter how abhorrent Donald Trump's conduct or his immortality,  they will stand by Trump (in my view, because he panders to their racist bigotry). Seemingly, no amount of bigotry, misogyny, and calls for acts of cruelty causes these individuals to reach a point of saying "enough is enough" and support decency.  In contrast, Democrats, progressives, and individuals like me - an "out" gay, former Catholic and non-church attending member of the ELCA -  believe that character in public officials DOES indeed matter.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case for character and morality in our public officials, including the occupant of the White House.  Here are excerpts:

America suffers from a persistent misunderstanding of the role of character in public life. For some — a diminishing few — political leaders should be moral exemplars. They should be men and women whom children can look up to and emulate. 

Democrats surrendered this standard in their defense of President Bill Clinton. Republicans are abandoning this standard in their defense of President Trump. There is apparently no remaining constituency for the belief that high office should involve moral leadership.

Given human nature, this expectation was always a recipe for disillusionment. But while it is true that politicians are not called to be pastors, something has been lost in abandoning the ideal of rectitude. Trump did not just (allegedly) have a fling. He bragged about sexual assault and dismissed it as locker-room talk. He expanded the boundaries of acceptable misogyny.

It is one thing for public officials to fail a moral standard. That makes them human. It is something else to shift a standard in favor of cruelty and abuse. That makes them poor stewards of public trust. 

This points to an underestimated role for politics. Politicians may not be moral examples, but they help set the margins of permissible behavior and speech. I’m not talking about the law. We have a Constitution that protects hurtful, even hateful language. But public officials help determine the shape of social stigma, which is based on our self-conception as a community. 

[T]he stigmas we feel against misogyny and against racism are tremendous social achievements. Shifting those social expectations in favor of decency was the hard, sometimes dangerous work of generations. 

And political leaders — displaying good public character — have helped determine those expectations. It mattered when President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. It helped break an oppressive social convention against the social mixing of blacks and whites. It mattered when Clinton began the tradition of celebrating Eid al-Fitr at the White House. It sent the signal that American public traditions reach beyond Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. It also mattered when Trump in 2017 discontinued the White House Eid celebration.  

Trump’s political use of this idea [that "political correctness" has gone too far] has had little to do with academic freedom and disruptive student protests. It has had everything to do with testing the limits of prejudiced public language against migrants (particularly Mexicans) as potential rapists and Muslims (particularly refugees) as potential terrorists. 

This is a failure of public character with serious consequences. Trump is urging Americans to drink at a poisoned well of intolerance. This desensitizes some people to the moral seriousness of prejudice. It creates an atmosphere in which bigots gain confidence and traction. And one sad social consequence is the emboldened racism of Roseanne Barr and many like her, many of whom surely believe — on good evidence — that [Trump] the president of the United States is on their side. There are many drawbacks to being ignorant of and indifferent to history. But one of the worst is a failure to appreciate the depth of U.S. racism and the heroism of the long struggle against it. 

We are a country in which 1 out of 7 people was owned by another. We had an American version of apartheid within living memory. It was a hard-won lesson that racism is a form of oppression that destroys the soul of the oppressor as well. 

[I]t hurts to have [Trump] a president of poor character placing his thumb on the other side of the moral scale.

Trump has made it impossible for decent, moral people to support him and his agenda.  Those who continue to support him should be acknowledged by the decent, moral majority as being morally bankrupt and, in the case of evangelicals, utter hypocrites.