George Herbert Walker Bush Comes Clean

On his 85^th birthday, corporate son, Vice President, President, father of our second Great Leader after FDR and before Obama, plane jumper, former CIA Director, and Bonesman George H.W. Bush has become as honest as a babe.

According to a recent bubbly and adoring news article in the Washington Times, "When asked directly whether the CIA lies "all the time," Mr. Bush said it does not.

The CIA does not lie all the time.

So there.

I recently read Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, because Lew interviewed Russ Baker and it sounded great. The book delivers, although I suspect there are a lot of Bush family secrets that remain unexposed. I am personally curious about any Bush secret recipes on the back burner back in March 1981. As history, the Wikipedia version of the Reagan assassination attempt reads like a CIA moonlighter’s script for a movie of the week.

Baker’s research led him back to the days of the JFK assassination, where HW, or "Poppy" Bush was not where he said he was, after all these years. You’ll have to read the book for a real, and real interesting, lesson in modern American democracy.

During the "wide-ranging" interview Poppy gave to the salivating Washington Times, he had shared this observation:

I think people are alarmed now. There's too much government intervention into everything – putting people on the boards of directors. Too much. And too much spending," Mr. Bush said. "I think people are, you know, understandably concerned about some of the things that are going on now.

Non-interventionist conservatives, libertarians, historians, economists, and thinking people everywhere have been "alarmed" for decades, and most today have realigned portfolios, gotten passports, and planned their bug out locations. So what "people" are alarmed now, according to Poppy? Apparently, Poppy’s friends and cohorts who aren’t getting picked to lead the interventions. What people are "understandably concerned?" Apparently, Poppy’s friends and cohorts who aren’t getting invited to sit on the fasci-boards as either the government partner or the corporate partner.

Poppy also doesn’t believe the rumors that the GOP is dead. What the GOP needs, Poppy suggested, is a good dose of his good son, Jeb, who just got back from a "‘listening tour’ with other prominent Republican leaders as part of a new party effort dubbed a ‘Conversation for a New America.’"

I am not making this up.

Poppy’s good son Jeb believes that listening to good ideas and alternative voices will help the GOP recover power. Good ideas and alternative voices from everyone except those from the only activated and vibrant remnant of the GOP – Paulians who embrace the idea of a constitutional republic.

Responding to a suggestion by the Times that perhaps the GOP ought to "rediscover" Reagan in order to renew itself as a party, Poppy retorts, "I don't know what you mean by 'Reagan principles.’" We are two for two in the truth – the CIA doesn’t lie all the time, and a top lifelong GOP’er has no idea what Reagan principles were in 1980, but instinctively recoils.

This is considered reporting by the Washington Times. Follow-ups? Fuggetaboutit! More importantly, it is also a textbook example of the fawning corporate media (Ray McGovern’s term for American Pravda, Tass and Izvestia) doing what it does best – setting up the Daily Show for its next fake news blockbuster.

The Washington Times has just launched a radio broadcast called America’s Morning News. Featured on yesterday’s debut was Poppy Bush observing that the results of the Iranian elections last week, with a claim of a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were "weird" and "it sounded funny when the opponent claimed victory by 60 some percent then the next thing you know he's on his back, counted out, and there is "something strange about it."

Beyond sounding like a 14-year-old mall rat instead of an American statesman, yes, Poppy, there is a lot strange about it – not least that Washington’s fave maniac handily won a flawed election, and no one in the FCM seems to be interested in Iranian anger about it, or the extreme brutality of the Iranian state against peaceful demonstrators. This is stability, DC-style, Poppy’s own business for many decades.

It’s good to see Poppy back in the news. It’s good that he is in his reflective years, and can speak the truth sometimes, even when it makes him look dotty. But what is really great about this interview is what it says about Washington’s news reporting, and the FCM overall. Its audience has shriveled, its remaining devotees a bled-out choir of codgery, and its apparent competition, in Mine That Bird style, is the dust cloud left by comedic news producers like The Onion and The Colbert Report.

This is very good news for the revolution.

June 16, 2009

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.

Copyright © 2009 Karen Kwiatkowski

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