Sunday, 9 December 2018

So now George Bush Sr is celebrated as a titan of unity. How on earth did we get here? | Hadley Freeman

References to Bush’s support for Hillary Clinton have been reverently repeated, as has his unlikely friendship with Barack Obama

George HW Bush was no one’s idea of a great president. His 1988 presidential campaign was the first I followed as a child in the US – supporting, under my mother’s instruction, his hapless rival, Michael Dukakis – and even then he seemed strangely unquantifiable, a blank. His presidency bore this impression out, in which his credit sheet was cancelled out by enough debit that the balance ultimately came to nothing.

A war hero and famously polite, Bush Sr signed the Clean Air Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act (protecting, among others, people with HIV, from discrimination), and eventually spoke out against the National Rifle Association. But he was also arrogant, careless and self-serving. He exploited racial politics and pardoned the defendants in the Iran-Contra hearings to protect himself from investigation.

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from US news | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BWJMSo

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