100 dagen zonder Bush

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De G20 leiders hebben geen handen geschud met Bush
Zijn vader had te kennen gegeven dat hij vond dat Jeb Bush (ex-gouverneur
van Florida) weer een hoge functie moest krijgen, echter Jeb heeft te
kennen gegeven geen Senaatszetel in Florida na te streven.
At least 75 million shoes have "successfully hit President Bush in the
face" at www.sockandawe.com.
“I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span.
The president who was on holiday 1,3 years out of 8.
I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.” Once again he is shifting
the blame. This presidency was not about Him.
George Bush has bought a new house in a wealthy part of Dallas, called
Preston Hollow, to live in after he leaves office. A few of the neigbours,
reports the Wall Street Journal, have some significant reservations.

America has chosen hope over fear, unity over discord, setting aside
“false promises” and “childish things”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-01/lone-star-pariah/
Lone Star Pariah
by Robert Bryce
May 1, 2009 | 6:59pm

George W. Bush's first 100 days back in Texas have provided at least one
surprise: The state's GOP shuns him. Forty years after LBJ returned in
disgrace, Robert Bryce reveals W.'s rough homecoming.

The Texas GOP provided the gubernatorial platform, much of the money, and
more than 10 percent of the electoral votes that George W. Bush needed to
get to the White House and stay there for two terms. But the 43rd
president's first 100 days back in Texas are proving that the onetime
favorite son is about as popular as swine flu. The state’s Republican
politicians and candidates, who just a few years ago eagerly latched onto
his electoral coattails, are staying away in droves.

"There’s no reason for anyone at this point to embrace the former
president,” a top Texas GOP consultant tells me. “People have their own
battles to fight. Why would they want to go back and try to defend torture
or anything else?" He described the attitude of Republican politicians on
the end of the Bush presidency as one of relief. The political environment
for the Texas GOP is "toxic," he says, before adding with specificity: “it
was toxic because of Bush."

“I don’t think Bush gives a damn what people think about him,” says a
Texas Republican operative. “If history says he was a bad president, he
doesn’t care.”

Republicans now have to set their targets on Obama and the Democrats, says
the consultant, who insists on anonymity because of his ongoing dealings
with the state's Republican officeholders and candidates, and their plan
to triple the national debt over the next 10 years. “Why would we go back
and try to defend the guy who doubled the debt in the last eight years?”

If Lyndon Johnson were alive to see it, he’d surely have a chuckle.
Johnson, born dirt-poor in rural Texas, graduated from Southwest Texas
State Teachers College and worked his way to the pinnacle of power in
Washington. He would have had little sympathy for Bush and his gilded path
from Andover to Yale to Harvard to elected office. But the similarities
between the two men are obvious.

Johnson and Bush both fought unpopular, unwinnable wars based on trumped
up claims about the military capabilities of a backward developing
country. Both declared war on an “ism.” For Johnson: communism. For Bush:
terrorism. While in the White House, both frequently escaped to their
Texas ranches where they happily donned straw cowboy hats for the
photographers. Both were surrounded by a coterie of super-hawks who
believed that America's techno-military machinery could prevail over any
enemy. Johnson had Robert McNamara as Defense secretary. Bush had
McNamara's body double: Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose demeanor,
defiance—and even his eyeglasses—were the spitting image of his Pentagon
predecessor from four decades earlier. And both Johnson and Bush left the
White House as pariahs within their own political parties, returning to
Texas to... well, nothing.

When Johnson moved back to Texas in early 1969, the state’s Democrats,
wary of the unpopular war in Vietnam, kept their distance. Sissy
Farenthold, a former Democratic state legislator who made two unsuccessful
bids for governor of Texas, in 1972 and 1974, recalls attending a large
dinner event held in Dallas a few months after Johnson arrived back in the
state. Johnson was there, she told me, sitting at a table, all by himself.
The post-White House parallels between Johnson and Bush are striking,
Farenthold acknowledges, before quickly adding: “Johnson had his record on
civil rights. Can you say Bush has a record on anything that’s positive?”

The Republican operative offers another insight into the differences
between Johnson and Bush: Johnson loved people. He was a true politician
who was known for getting his way. Those qualities helped make Johnson, as
his biographer, Robert Caro, put it in his most recent volume, Master of
the Senate. Johnson, says the consultant, “wanted to be loved
He wanted
people to like him.” By contrast, he adds, “I don’t think Bush gives a
damn what people think about him. If history says he was a bad president,
he doesn’t care.”

While their personal styles are different, the more important difference,
as Farenthold noted, is about accomplishment. Johnson was a deeply flawed
man whose ego was as big as his home state. His great sin was Vietnam. But
his great redemption came with his forceful advocacy for the Voting Rights
Act and the Civil Rights Act. By muscling those two pieces of legislation
through a balky Congress, Johnson made real the promises set forth in the
Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. On March
15, 1965, a week after violence erupted in Selma, Alabama, over the rights
of blacks to vote, Johnson delivered what's known as the "We Shall
Overcome" speech, most notably rejecting the segregationists' phraseology
of "state's rights." "There is no issue of state's rights or national
rights," Johnson said. "There is only the struggle for human rights." In
words and actions, Lyndon Baines Johnson paved the way for the 44th
president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

Like Johnson, Bush was a flawed man with an outsize ego. But what will
Bush’s legacy be? Waterboarding? Guantánamo? Iraq? The laissez-faire
attitude toward regulation that contributed to the meltdown on Wall
Street? Or will W. be remembered for spending 490 days—nearly 17% of his
time in office—on vacation? A scant 100 days after George Walker Bush
returned to Texas as a pariah, it’s clear that he will have to wait a long
time for any possible redemption. And none of his fellow Republicans are
willing to wait with him.

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