Opposite? Not.

[adrian_turtle]

George H.W. Bush is dead. You may have heard.


I've seen and heard Bush referred to as "the opposite of Donald Trump." I think they mean to say the two men are completely unlike one another. Maybe some of them mean the life's work of one opposed the life's work of the other. (In that sense, I'm not sure a real opposite of Trump could be president. We'd be talking about somebody like Fred Rogers. Maybe Jonas Salk or Dorothy Day or Pete Seeger.) Bush and Trump did some things differently, sure. They have very different styles. I don't know how much that matters.
No. I have a strong suspicion it doesn't matter very much in the long run.

There's a thing in volleyball called a set. One player throws the ball up gently, right where it's convenient for their teammate to punch it down across the net really hard. When one moves the ball up and the other moves it down? When one moves it slow and the other moves it fast? When they are helping one another move the ball in the same direction? They are not "opposites."

I remember Bush was personally polite to his political opponents, in between making campaign ads with racist dog whistles. Trump pushed the boundaries of how much racism was acceptable in politics--he could tell how much racism was accepted, and pushed it farther. Bush (and Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove) helped set those boundaries. He also set precedents about how the president and his buddies could do whatever foreign policy against Congressional decisions. Nixon tried, but Bush got away with it--Trump is pushing it farther.

Let's look at foreign policy. I mean, let's look SOUTH. (No argument that Bush handled the fall of the Berlin Wall far better than Trump would have.) Bush was heavily involved in Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s. They were funding the anti-communists in Nicaragua, who were not respecters of civil rights. (Understatement alert! Understatement alert!) It encouraged a generation of widespread terrorism. Even when the war technically stopped, there wasn't enough government left to stop gangs from taking over. Would there be so many refugees desperate to leave Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador if the US hadn't invested so heavily in trying to wreck the government?
Trump should be dealing with the consequences of Bush's old Central America policies, though he mostly isn't. He does seem to like the precedent of Bush sucking up to dictators.

Oh. And Bush also figured his buddies could do what he liked in terms of foreign policy, regardless of what Congress wanted...he could just pardon them later. He got away with that one. Do you think Trump knows about that precedent? Sure, Bush might have been doing it because he thought it was a good idea, more than because he thought it was personally profitable. But he was still getting away with it.

Comments

[cliff_diver]

I hear a very good analysis of Bush Sr. today, in one of the rare times I listen to the radio anymore (especially WGBH, which I no longer really trust to be untainted by the Koch Bros. but I digress). The commentators were pointing out that G.H.W.Bush is being remembered against the current totally dysfunctional Trump/GOP disaster, and the fact that people are even praising an American president for how Polite he was is really a sad statement. There was one thing I respected him for, and that was raising taxes because he knew it was the right thing, even though he knew it would cost him a second term. He did always put "duty to country" before party. That said, he also very much helped pave the way for the Authoritarian takeover we are now struggling against. He helped bring the evangelicals into a power position in politics, he ignored the AIDs crisis, he turned to volunteer charitable "thousand points of light" instead of having the government carry the majority of the responsibility for the public good, something it did with at least as much efficiency as the private sector, and at a much lower cost and with no more fraud.


There were many other issues, which you already pointed out and I won't just belabor. But he was probably the only "Conservative" president I knew in my lifetime, other than Gerald Ford. The rest of the Republicans were doing their best to dismantle our democracy so that they could raid the treasury and the natural resources without those pesky regulations.

[adrian_turtle]

Funny you should mention WGBH. They were the first place I heard that line about Bush being the opposite of Trump. Whenever an audience member called to remind them about something awful he'd done, the hosts of the show would come back to their core idea about "opposites."

The commentators were pointing out that G.H.W.Bush is being remembered against the current totally dysfunctional Trump/GOP disaster, and the fact that people are even praising an American president for how Polite he was is really a sad statement.

I think he's being praised for being a gentleman, even though it's often not phrased quite that way. The old meaning of "gentleman." Rich. Upper-class, in the sense of family prestige and connections. I recently reread the Doonesbury collection "Read My Lips, Make My Day, Eat Quiche, and Die!" It includes a lot of jokes about Bush (Ivy League Poppy and his evil twin Skippy, for that weird combination of ineffectual and vicious). Trump is just presented as crass--wealth without taste or sense.

[pameladean]

I couldn't stand him. I used to walk out of the room so as not to hear his voice. His ignoring the AIDS crisis and the incredibly stupid and evil war on drugs were my primary objections to him, but there were so so so many others. Just because the Republicans have sunk even lower after him doesn't mean he was anything great.

Which was pretty much your point; so, vehement agreement.

P.

[adrian_turtle]

Oh, yes! His approach to the war on drugs did So Much Damage! He escalated it so much it's somehow in my memory as all his fault. That hideously racist law that said crack cocaine is 100x more illegal than powder was passed before he was president, so it's not fair for me to blame him for it...but he did so much to militarize the war. He pushed for drug testing as part of the standard hiring process (which spread through the culture like it was on meth or something.) Aargh.

Saying he ignored the AIDS crisis feels inadequate, somehow. He knew perfectly well about efforts to protect patients and at-risk groups, appeals to fund research, and he deliberately turned away. He tried to push back against ACT-UP. But I guess "ignored" is the right word. It's not like he stood up and said there was no such thing as AIDS, so I wouldn't want to call him an immunology-change-denier.

[mrissa]

That set analogy is GREAT.

[adrian_turtle]

Thanks. I was so proud of it I forgot to even mention his horrible failure to respond to the AIDS epidemic. I had wanted to say something about how many died because of that, but I can't even estimate how many died during his presidency. I can't even estimate how sooner we would have had effective antivirals if he'd responded well. I can't even know how many people wouldn't have been infected before then. I can't even.