RIP Poppy Bush

Rude Pundit does a fantastic job summing him up as president:

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.  (snip)

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?

Ultimately, George Herbert Walker Bush was just another fucking Republican creep, superficially not quite as bad as Reagan, GWB or Trump.

I will grant him his service in WWII, but his long service as a spy and apparent involvement in the JFK assassination made him part of a very ugly history.