MORE BUSHISMS

George Herbert Walker Bush has a tricky way of sliding a fiction over the truth until a shoe fits like a glove and a hat like a sweater, so writes Kitty Kelley in her book, THE FAMILY (pp. 228-229)

"His slick television ads, his substantial financial backing, plus his name recognition from the 1964 Senate race gave him a resounding (58 percent to 42 percent) victory in November 1966. George Bush had won his first election. But in the end, his appeal to the black community did not work. He did not carry the black vote in his district, something he did not understand. 'It was both puzzling and frustrating,' he wrote in his autobiography. 'Running for Congress, I talked about the possibility of [breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on black voters] with a longtime friend..., who chaired the United Negro College Fund when I headed the UNCF drive on the Yale campus in 1948.

"This recollection is typical of George H.W. Bush. Not only does it show the way he rewrites history to fit his convenient view, but it also allows him to find it 'puzzling and frustrating' that a Republican who opposed open housing would not find support from black voters. The fact is that George had never “headed” a United Negro College Fund drive at Yale. There was no United Negro College Fund on the campus in 1948. Rather, he worked on the school’s annual budget drive, a charity project that allotted 18 percent of the drive’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal to the United Negro College Fund, a far remove from directly raising money for private black colleges. The national office of the United Negro College Fund said its archives show no record of George Herbert Walker Bush being affiliated with them at any time during his entire Yale career.

"'Uh ... maybe he got himself confused with his younger brother Johnny,' joked a friend. 'Johnny is a member of the Executive Committee of the United Negro College Fund and a former board chairman. Or his father, Prescott, who worked to raise funds for private Negro colleges back in 1952 when he was state chairman of the United Negro College Fund in Connecticut.'

"In later years of campaigning and public life, when George needed to embrace civil rights, he would cite his volunteer work at Yale. He further exaggerated his dubious claim on behalf of the United Negro College Fund so many times that it did not just become real to historians and biographers; it became real to George. When he was asked in 1988 how he could in good conscience portray himself as a candidate for black Americans when the Reagan administration had watered down civil rights for eight years, he sat silently and never objected. Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that he looked genuinely hurt by the question. 'But,' George said, 'I helped found the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund.'"


TORTURE IS RIGHT AT HOME IN GEORGE W. BUSH'S WORLD

In 1967 at Yale, George Bush defended his fraternity's practice of burning pledges with lit cigarettes, saying, "It's only a cigarette burn." Can you imagine, with a mindset for justifying burning people with cigarettes, what young Bush and Albert Gonzales, also an advocate for torture, said when they got together in private to discuss information gathering at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib? Pity the poor soldiers going down for behavior approved at the very top of government? What will be their rewards when they get out of prison? We'll have to watch that! If our memories are long enough. (THE FAMILY, pp. 236-237)


BUSH UNDERSTANDS RACISM BUT HE DON'T KNOW IT

Bush Jr. ought to understand very well the feelings of blacks who think they are excluded from successful white society for he is constantly reacting to similar feelings when it comes to America's Eastern society. His failure to measure up to the intellectual standards at Andover stung him deeply. He graduated near the bottom of his class. He just didn't have the intellectual power to get good grades. He still is a mental midget, but does he take responsibility for his own failings? To this day he feels, sounds and acts like a disenfranchised black American when he allows his fears and hatred and inferiority feelings toward Easterners get the best of him. That he is unable to make the connection between disenfranchised blacks and himself is just one more case of his inability to empathize with anyone he automatically considers beneath his station.
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"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." —G.W. Bush

[I hope I can phrase this correctly.] "One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is 'to be prepared.' " (That's right, you guessed it!) —G.W. Bush and boy scouts too.