Bush
It is the last Sunday (ok, Tuesday….running a little late here) of the month meaning it’s time for our next President, making this weeks book Bush by Jean Edward Smith.
George Walker Bush was born July 6, 1946 in New Haven, CT to, of course, George HW Bush and Barbara Bush. He was the oldest child of the Bush family but defied the stereotype of being the responsible one and was…well….kind of the family fuck up. While his younger brother John Ellis, aka Jeb, would marry young and start a family, Bush would not marry until November 5, 1977, when he was 31. His wife Laura Welch was also 31 and they were actually looking into adoption when she became pregnant with the couples only children, twin girls Jenna and Barbara, born in November 1981.
So Bush would grow up with all the niceties his father did, attending public schools until he was old enough to ship to Phillips Academy, same school his father had graduated from, in Andover, MA, before attending college at Yale. Much has been made about his C average grades, like that somehow proves he is not smart. A C at Yale is like an A/B at a state run school. The demands are exceptionally high for the Ivy leagues, so I don’t think he was stupid. The author quotes someone else in the book, although I don’t specifically recall who, but they said Bush wasn’t stupid, he was intellectually lazy. I feel like that fits extraordinarily well. Well revisit that thought.
Bush graduated Yale in 1968 and then joined the National Guard in TX. Now…the TX National Guard was already at capacity. This was very much the height of the Vietnam War and National Guard were not being deployed, only regular Army, so basically all the states were at full capacity for National Guard enlistments. But…well, Bush 41 had a connection, and Bush 43 used that connection to get in with the Guard.
Regardless of how serious or not he was with being a pilot with the National Guard, Bush did serve, and was honorably discharged, after which he went to Harvard for an MBA and was one of the very few Harvard MBA graduates to NOT receive a job offer. So he also went into the oil business, but never found the success his father did. He eventually sold out there and went into baseball, organizing a coalition of people to buy the Texas Rangers, of which he would become manager. And he did a good job with the Rangers, and his own investment in the franchise paid off in spades when it was later sold and he netted I believe it was $15 million for his investment, making him legitimately wealthy in his own right. It was with this $15 million that he and Laura purchased the ranch at Crawford.
The sale of the Rangers would come about when he was governor of Texas, a position he would seek…I guess on a whim. It’s like he woke up one day and decided he wanted to be governor, so he ran, and won. And he was not a bad governor, which to be fair, the way Texas set up their government, the governor has virtually no responsibility. Like…sign the laws which are passed every other year, as the legislature only meets every other year.
As governor, though, he really played to his strengths of likeability. He is a likeable guy and was able to get both sides of the aisle to talk and work together to pass legislation for education reform in TX.
Throughout all of this Bush was drinking and he enjoyed partying. At some point while Bush was president I was under the impression he stopped drinking because he had received a DUI. This is not true, he kept drinking until he was 40 and then just decided to stop. So…well kudos for him, he decided he was done and just stopped, and that is not easy. So he had stopped drinking about a decade before he became governor and at least in the 1990’s there was a “gentleman’s agreement” to not mention past foibles during campaign seasons, at least in TX politics back then since such , so that his opponent Anne Richardson, who also had a checkered past, dd not mention the DUI. And so he was made governor, which he would be serving in that capacity in 2000 when he decided to run for president.
And….well, as stated above, he’s a likeable guy. And he had a proven track record of fundraising, having managed to raise funds for his oil business, then the Texas Rangers, then governor’s campaign... As a result, his 2000 presidential campaign was outstandingly well funded by private donors and he, yes, outspent the competition. Additionally, Al Gore was not as likeable. He came across as entitled and refused assistance from Clinton on the campaign trail. Smith seems to think this was hubris on Gore’s part, but from the Clinton book last month, that author John F. Harris seemed to believe it’s that Gore disapproved of Clinton personally, especially with the Monica Lewinsky affair, and the strong allegations of rape and assault and sexual harassment, and so Gore distanced himself from Clinton on principle.
Regardless of the reason, Gore did not use Clinton for his campaign, and subsequently lost. Now, I know to this day there are people who think Bush stole the election by leaning on the Supreme Court who gave him the presidency. However, Smith devoted a significant portion of the chapter regarding Bush’s election to breaking down what happened in Florida, and included an important footnote, which reads “Subsequent analysis of the Florida presidential vote by the nation’s leading newspapers and the research organizations they engaged indicates that if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court had been allowed to proceed, Bush’s margin of victory would have increased from 537 votes to 1,665.” So Bush won. Narrowly. Very close. But his win was legitimate.
And to give the devil his due, his political team advised him quite well during this time, helped him navigate the fluster cuck so that he seemed presidential, whereas Gore seemed like a kid screaming “It’s not fair” on the play ground. And on January 20, 2001, Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president. Quite a lot of people made it seem like this was a dynasty family, set to take over all of political Washington. The Bush family is nowhere near as dynastic as say, the Kennedy’s. But having the son of a former president sworn in just 8 years after his father stepped out of the role freaked some people out. Despite this being only the second time in US History where a son had followed his father into the White House.
And his first 8 months in office were relatively uneventful. Bush did make the colossal mistake of surrounding himself with sycophants and yes men, which is why I think the intellectually lazy comment was probably the most accurate. He hired people to do his thinking for him, then for the most part did what they said was best. Mostly.
In the several months between being sworn in and 9/11, Bush had received warnings in his daily intel briefing that Osama bin Laden was set to make a move, that an attack was coming. Bush…basically ignored it. He seemed to think with Afghanistan so very far away, bin Laden was not actually in a position to act on his threats. Bush didn’t take the briefings seriously, asking his CIA point of contact to cut the briefings in half.
Now, Bush has been criticized for his immediate response on 9/11, which was to keep reading. He was on a scheduled trip to a school and was reading a children’s book to a group of like 1st graders. I think his response was spot on. No purpose would be served by panicking the children.
And Smith was highly critical of Bush’s first press conference. But I think it made him more human. EVERYONE was shook that day. Everyone was traumatized. His subsequent press conferences got better as he found his feet. And then went overboard with the War on Terror. Like…what the fuck even is that? If he had declared war on the Taliban, with the sole stated goal of bringing bin Laden to justice, he would have kept the goodwill of the entire planet. But by making this very nebulous war on a feeling…well, there’s no end to it, is there? How do you win a war against a feeling? Therapists never had it so good as the unending money pipeline that opened and flooded our intelligence and military communities.
Bush’s war was quickly approved by Congress and troops were sent to Afghanistan in short order, where bin Laden was pushed into hiding somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And again, had Bush stayed focused on the Taliban and bin Laden, the world would have backed him.
But, following 9/11, Bush became very aware he had been slacking on the intel front, and began drinking from the fire house. Like, his intel briefings went from eh….8 ish minutes, to 30 plus. He no longer had his briefings filtered through CIA analysts who could provide context of what he was seeing, but got the unfiltered full throttle straight from CIA director George Tenet, and immediately after Tenet, he met with FBI director Robert Mueller. Every. Single. Day.
And from this point on, Bush became a one man wrecking ball, and almost unilaterally decided in March 2003 that Saddam Hussein was the next big threat. I think the war on terror was actually HIS terror that he would be caught unawares again and experience another massive loss of American life by ignoring intelligence briefings. Only, rather than activating his brain and having a measured response, like his father did when the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and again when Saddam Hussein actually DID aggressively move to take over the Kuwait oil fields, Bush 43 allowed his inner circle of power hungry advisers to convince him that weapons of mass destruction were a thing and Saddam Hussein needed to be stopped.
The entire rest of the planet, including I believe it was UN nuclear inspectors, advised him there were no WMD, no nuclear weapons in Iraq, Hussein WAS in fact cooperating with the inspections. But Bush wouldn’t hear it, and sent the troops in. And like 5-6 weeks later made his famous Mission Accomplished speech, claiming the end of major combat operations. And yet troops remained in Iraq for the remainder of his presidency. All six years of it.
His enhanced interrogation techniques, which Congress did NOT approve, even going so far as to pass literal laws saying this was not approved, he basically granted himself a line item veto over the parts of the laws he disliked, ignoring them on advice of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is a largely unknown bureaucratic branch in support of the Dept of Justice and Attorney General, which exists to provide legal advice to the president. Only during Bush’s term, the head of the OLC John C. Yoo, created legal advice which bent the rule of law to justify WHATEVER the Bush White House wanted to do, essentially granting him a get out of jail free card for…well…EVERYTHING. Yoo’s legal opinions were so convoluted that subsequent lawyers, including OLC and DOJ personnel have pointed out the massive flaws in his logic, flaws which have resulted a not insignificant number of things that Bush did being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
And it’s really easy to get mad at Bush about these things. And I’m not thrilled with him, but then again I never really was. But I’m more angry at Congress. Because THIS….was impeachable behavior. Refusing to follow the laws Congress passes, line item vetos, which are NOT legal, or at least weren’t when he was president, not sure about now, violations of the Geneva convention, which was legally passed and signed treaty that the US was bound to follow as of its ratification in 1955….this could quite easily have fallen under that blanket High Crimes and Misdemeanor clause of the Constitution which is one of the things a president can be impeached on. Hell, Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached, was done so for refusing to follow the law as legally passed by Congress, specifically violating the Tenure of Office Act. The fact that Congress did NOT seek impeachment tells me two things:
1. Bush’s likeability absolutely crossed party lines. At one point during the 2008 campaign, when it was still unsure if McCain or Obama would be the winner, he joked with Nancy Pelosi that she’d miss him when he was gone.
2. Congress was as complicit in the violations and money train as Bush was. I’ve seen nothing in the 16 years since he stepped down to convince me otherwise. And given the way Congress is reacting to Elon and DOGE, I’m even more convinced of their complicity.
Like, everything about the war on terror, everything I read in this book, just made me madder. Bush absolutely did not see how bombing the shit out of people might breed more terrorists. He’s even quoted as saying something like Killing terrorists doesn’t make more terrorists. I don’t think that’s the exact quote, but it’s close.
I finished this book last night, and I’m very glad I slept on it before writing my review because last night when I went to sleep, I was sure that his entire presidency was a power grab of the military industrial complex…and YES, I am aware that makes me sound like a dirty hippy.
However, having slept on it, I think what I said above, about the war on terror, was really Bush’s terror that he would again fail to see the signs and have to watch as American’s died, I think that was his true motivation for going into Iraq. Which breeds empathy for the man, who had taken on the burden of leading a nation, and had to watch in horror as he could do nothing to protect the innocents who died on 9/11.
The author found it interesting, and I did too when he pointed it out, that both Clinton and Obama were all about troop withdrawals in Iraq UNTIL they became presidential candidates themselves, at which point they didn’t want to commit to a troop withdrawal until the job was done.
Bush was reelected in 2004, despite no one knowing why we were in Iraq, with a little over 50% of the votes and again, had about 8 months of relative peace, Iraq notwithstanding, until August 2005 when hurricane Katrina made landfall, and the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain from flooding New Orleans failed, causing millions of dollars in damages and thousands to be made homeless in the blink of an eye. And Bush, who also had warnings that Katrina was making landfall, did basically nothing.
Afterwards, while people were still hanging out on their roofs waiting for rescue, one of Bush’s inner circle, I don’t recall if it was Karl Rove or Dick Cheney, said that Air Force One should do a flyover and the traveling press corps could get a picture of Bush surveilling the damage. One of his other advisors said he should be on the ground, meeting people and seeing what he could do to help, but ultimately Bush went with the flyover advice. Smith points out that Bush looks like he’s out of touch with what people were going through and the advisor pushing for ground coverage was right.
I would posit that both sets of advice were dead wrong and Bush should have been nowhere near New Orleans, and should instead have been directing FEMA from the White House. Why? Well, by doing a low flyover, Bush ensured that rescue operations stopped, leaving people to be stranded on their roof tops while he did his looky-loo, since no other planes could possibly be cleared to fly while Bush was doing his low, 2000 feet flyover. For the same reason, he should not have been on the ground, as resources that should have been used to help people would have been diverted to ensure the president’s safety.
And then, after that, he tried to shoehorn himself in as the great savior of New Orleans, offering active duty troops to police the neighborhood, which he could only do if the Governor of Louisiana asked for federal assistance. She told him to shove his offer up his ass, he did nothing to assist prior to Katrina, despite clear warnings of the danger of the storm, and then did his low flyover while people were still on their rooftops awaiting rescue, she’d be damned if she let him send in active troops to act as police.
Unlike the continuous quagmire of the War on Terror, Katrina was one month. And as damning as Smith was regarding Bush’s overall presidency, he is actually very fair in his reporting, and spends some time explaining the things he believes Bush did quite well, most noticeably setting up aid to Africa to fight AIDS, and government bail outs during the financial crises.
And I am well aware that while my criticism of Bush’s wartime efforts makes me look like a dirty hippy, I am also aware that my belief that American tax dollars should
1. Not be sent overseas to help AIDS victims
2. Not be spent bailing out companies that made bad investments.
Listen, it’s real fucking easy to be generous with other people’s money, which is what both of those things are. My heart aches for Africa, and for the people who suffer with HIV/AIDS. And it made me think of the half ass story you get from memes, like this one:
Where they said nestle told women in Africa their breastmilk wasn’t healthy for their babies to make a profit. Except….well, if those women are HIV positive, their breastmilk ISN’T healthy for their babies. I’m not saying Nestle is totally innocent here, but they may not be the total bastards the meme would make them out to be. There was also a but hullaballoo about Nestle putting extra sugar in formula bound for Africa. Well….in a continent with severe malnutrition problems, extra sugar is a good way to but weight on an underweight infant FAST.
On bailing out the banks during the 2008 financial crises….Well, remember way back in 2023 when I read the book on Grover Cleveland, A Man of Iron. And we learned that during the financial panic of the 1890’s, Cleveland made a deal with James Pierpont Morgan for Morgan to buy $100 million gold and sell it to the Government for treasury bonds. Well, make a deal with the devil, and eventually the devil wants his due.
JPMorgan-Chase bank was NOT one of the banks facing bankruptcy. However, they offered a way out for Bear Stearns, but JPMorgan-Chase did not want to buy the bad mortgages. They would only buy Bear Stearns if the US Government would take control of the bad mortgages. And well…having bailed out one bank, they bailed out another. They declined to bail out Lehman Brothers, which brought that trading house to closure, but the political fallout from NOT bailing out Lehman Brothers led to a bail out of AIG, which at the time of this books writing was like 80% owned by the US Government. Already most of the way there to being a single payer, we didn’t really need Obamacare. And then two of the three big automakers…Ford declined government assistance, but Chrysler and…Dodge….? They both took a bail out. Smith approved of this. Again, I think it’s real easy to be generous with other peoples money, in this case, the tax payers money.
That much financial collapse would have absolutely led to another depression. And if government had just gotten out of the way, we would have recovered pretty quickly, as evidenced by Calvin Coolidge’s presidency. As is, we’re still paying for it.
Overall this book was quite good. Pretty sure the author swings left of center….he cited The Daily Kos, when he could have just as easily cited Cato.org…which was funny because he was quoting Daily Kos ABOUT the Cato Institute. But for all that, it was fair. It was very fair to Bush 43. I was not impressed with Bush when he was president, and this well documented and cited book tells just how much responsibility falls on Bush, and will give you all new reasons to be outraged about the rise of extreme government overreach that, until 2025, has run unchecked and rampant.
