George H.W. Bush wants you to leave his boy be! And it’s always the same, isn’t it?
“Do they want to bring back Saddam Hussein, these critics?” the elder Bush railed to the newspaper. “Do they want to go back to the status quo ante? … Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if Saddam were still there?”
Well, you know I hated Saddam and, sadly, I supported your son’s war. But it was never about getting rid of Saddam. It was about other things that have been hashed out everywhere now, and I don’t think I need to get ino them here. But for Bush 41 – who’s apparently forgotten all that, it’s about Saddam. Because that’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? Now anyway.
Note to Pa 41: Nobody wants Saddam back- even the most liberal of liberals wanted him gone. Your Sean Hannity impression sucks.
Zifnab
I don’t know if I would say that. There’s probably some 23 million Iraqis that kinda miss him.
JPL
I will say this, though. Yes, it would be better to have Saddam back and to have never invaded Iraq in the first place. He was a horrible person who should have been tried and executed for crimes against humanity (in a *fairer* court than what the US gave him, mind you, even though I have no doubt at all he was guilty), but the chaos and bloodletting in Iraq are at least an order of magnitude worse now than when he was in charge.
Dreggas
Poppy must be gettin a bit of the Reganitis. After all he was the one who said it would not be a good idea to invade Iraq back around oh ’91 or so…
Fuckin tool.
JPL
Truth, Zifnab.
rawshark
Animal Farm
Michael D.
I listened to an NPR report where they talked to Iraqis – mostly Sunni, I think. They don’t want him back. They want stability. To say that there are 23M Iraqi who miss him is wrong.
dslak
I’ll miss the fun-loving Saddam who would dance the can-can while chomping on a cigar. Does anyone have a link to that video, by the way?
Zifnab
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. No one would argue that Saddam sucked. But he provided stability. Right now, how many times has the GOP floated the idea of erecting a Saddam-like strongman in the region to fill the power vacuum?
Of the hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced, a few in there were Shia too. There’s been no shortage of migrants crossing the Iran-Iraq border, specifically because Tehran offers a haven that Bagdad does not.
I can’t imagine anyone living in Iraq right now who wouldn’t have been happy launching a peaceful Gandi-esque protest revolution over a US-lead Shock-and-Awe regime change. Iraqis want stability, and they want freedom. But nowhere in there do they desire US intervention.
Michael D.
dslak: this what you’re talking about?
dslak
Sadly, no. I remember seeing stock footage on CNN back in 2003, shortly before the war began, of Saddam chomping on a cigar while holding hands with some other guys and dancing the can-can. You can’t make this stuff up!
jcricket
Damn, beat me to it. The right wing has descended pretty far if they’re well beyond the parody The Onion puts out and are now basically parrots of anti-communist/totalitarian analogues in 1984 and Animal Farm.
But you’re still a Republican, right Michael?
rawshark
I know Romanians who preferred life under that communist dude with the name that is spelled far differently than its pronounced so I ain’t gonna try to sound it out. OK I will, Choychesskoo. They say it was more structured and orderly. Yeah! Helsinki syndrome maybe?
calipygian
Bush 41 then adjusted the onion in his belt, as was the style in his youth, complained about the use of the words “bra” and “horny” on TV and proceeded to tell those damn reporters to get off his lawn and stay off.
Dennis-SGMM
The status quo ante was that Iraq, although contained, was acting as a counterpoise to Iran.
Would life be better in the Middle East if Saddam was still there? Ask the Turks, ask the 2.2 million Iraqi refugees. Ask the legions of the dead.
Bush Sr. is now officially an asshole apologist for his misbegotten son.
wingnuts to iraq
The US would be better off if Saddam was still in power and the war never would have happened. The area would be more stable, Iran would be kept in check. And we’d have a secular power at the helm in Baghdad.
This liberal, from a pragmatic sense (which HW can appreciated), wishes Saddam was back, and had never been taken out in the first place.
We aren’t the police of the world, you know.
And at least in Saddam’s Iraq you were 95% certain on how NOT to get killed.
dslak
Perhaps the question might better be rephrased as “Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if the US hadn’t invaded Iraq?” The bleedin’ obvious answer is: Yes!
So, yes, the Middle East would be better if Saddam were still there, but not because he’s still there. That’s the misdirection going on with the question. It’s not that Saddam’s presence would make the Middle East better, but that the lack of the power vacuum caused by his absence, the botched occupation, and improved position of US adversaries, would.
ThymeZone
Old Man Bush has always been a damned fool.
It’s just that somehow or other, nobody really noticed much when he was working for a living.
He’s a pathetic figure, really. Like his whole family, just fucking embarassing.
crayz
Under this logic, why the fuck didn’t Bush 41 go all the way to Baghdad back in ’91? Oh wait, I think Cheney explained it. Glad none of that stuff was still operative in 2003 or we’d be in a real pile of shit right about now
Elvis Elvisberg
dslak, that sounds suspiciously like “logic.” You know that doesn’t apply to our decisionmaking as to who we’re going to invade.
dslak
Yeah, I know it sounds suspiciously like logic, the same way what GWH Bush said sounds like assholish hackery.
To use a WWII/Hitler analogy (since those are the only kind these people seem to understand): It would be like pointing out that WWII established the US as a world power and supporter of human rights, only to have someone respond “So you thihk it’s a good thing that the Holocaust happened?”
Bubblegum Tate
He then addressed his missive to “the perverts at Modern Bride magazine.”
rawshark
Dude, the people he’s talking to, people who are not the reporters nor the critics nor ummmm, us, don’t make those distinctions. As soon as you said Yes to that question they would have been thinking of the nearest location through which they could report your non-american ass to the proper authorities.
srv
No, George, I want to go back to before you were president and we had $25/barrel oil and no troops in Saudi Arabia to serve as a recruiting poster for Osama.
slippytoad
Dear GHWB:
3,500 American families would like their dads, moms, daughters, and sons back. And despite your churlish pouting, we didn’t go into Iraq to GET RID OF SADDAM HUSSEIN. We are not the world’s policeman. We were told that Saddam had weapons that were an immediate threat to us and that he was planning on using them against us.
By your son. The compulsive liar. And total embarrassment to YOUR family, MY country, and OUR species.
I really don’t give a wet fuck about Saddam, gone or otherwise. I care that our nation was lied into a false occupation of a nation that wasn’t a threat to us by a man who had no business making that decision. YOUR STUPID-FACED MORON OF A SON.
He is your everlasting skidmark on the underwear of history. Go fucking cry into a bag of money you borrowed from my unborn grandkids, you self-centered blueblooded aristocratic ass-crack. And then fuck yourself off home.
Mr. Furious
Nobody? Speak for yourself!
I’m not so sure I wouldn’t prefer to have a contained Saddam WMD-less regime, a (more) stable Middle East, thousands of American soldiers alive and half a trillion dollars back in the Treasury.
And, as already mentioned, I think there’d be plenty of Iraqis who agree—not to mention some American families.
jcricket
Are you sure Neil Bush isn’t also a total embarrassment? He’s not gonna go down well in history either.
Mission accomplished (if the mission was fucking up America and the world).
maxbaer (not the original)
Even if history might have regarded Bush 41’s presidency in a somewhat positive light, it no longer will. If nothing else, then simply for the reason that he donated the sperm that caused Bush 43. George Sr your son has destroyed whatever legacy you may have hoped for. Deal with it, just like the rest of the world is dealing with the destruction caused by your psychopathic offspring.
jake
George & Babs. A match made in Hell.
slippytoad
jcricket, don’t even get me started on Neil. The whole Bush clan are a bunch of over-privileged fuckoffs. I could spend YEARS mining the depth of my hate for Bush Senior. Every day that drags on with his mini-me twitfaced son in office is a psychic strain on me. I literally cannot listen to a syllable of his speech — I switch off the radio instantly. The only time I’ve been able to listen in horrified fascination was the other day when he threw an infantile tantrum over the Democrats — I think the problem was SCHIP, but he went on about a whole bunch of his other craptastic ideas that they weren’t jumping on implementing. I found it bizarre that I could listen to him when he didn’t have that eye-crossingly, head-splittingly aggravating smirk on his face (and in his voice).
So for a few minutes the other day I was happy that Congress had managed to slap that stupid smirk off his exceptionally stupid face. Other than that the entire Bush family gives me severe heartburn and the sight or sound of them strutting all over the world like they’re worth more than their own weight in cow feces is more than I can stand.
The Other Andrew
In 2020, when Iraq and Iran are Shiite theocracies that are teaming up to smack around their neighbors, I imagine that quite a few people will miss Saddam.
merlallen
When I was in the Persian Gulf in 1980 in the USN protecting
Saddam’s oil tankers from Iran, I really hated him. When I got back home I forgot all about him.
Badtux
It’d really be a neat trick to have Saddam back. Saddam being dead, and all that. What next, running Zombie Ronald Reagan for Preznit?!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Anne Laurie
Bush Sr. is now officially an asshole apologist for his misbegotten son.
You can’t call Dubya “misbegotten”, he was born more than nine months after the Poppy-Bar nuptials and he is very very obviously his daddy’s descendant.
But I guess that’s going to be the Official Wingnut Excuse for historical purposes: “If you object to any aspect of our beloved Operation Enduring FUBAR, then you are objectively pro-Saddam.” Since none of the other seventy-leven interim excuses for invading a country that hadn’t attacked us have proved marketable, it’s back to the Boogeyman Theory; decent people and/or those with an IQ higher than room temperature will still reject it, but that still leaves the Hardcore Twenty-Eight-Percenters wagging their pompoms.
Slipperytoad, you are not alone. The way that the Bush Crime Family was allowed so much leverage for their evil, incompetence, and general unpleasantness over the last 50 years of American history is going furnish a limitless treasure of data for future historians, assuming there are any.
gogiggs
I didn’t vote for Bush 41 (and I didn’t vote for Bush 43, either time) but, jeez, he’s an 83-year-old man with a broken heart (he knows his son has fucked up to a historic degree). Do people really expect him to come out and start trashing his son publicly? Really?
Maybe I’m getting soft as I age, but I just feel pity for the man.
Notorious P.A.T.
Saddam Hussein was like asbestos. If you found out there was asbestos in your house, you would probably say “yikes! that stuff is horrible! get it out immediately!” But then, after talking to contractors who know what they’re doing, you would find that tearing down your walls and ripping open the old insulation in order to remove it would only make things worse, and you would decide that living with the awful stuff was by far the lesser of two evils.
Every day that drags on with his mini-me twitfaced son in office is a psychic strain on me. I literally cannot listen to a syllable of his speech
Same here.
jake
Let’s say there is a serial killer who likes to slice people up and serving them as hor d’oeuvres. And let’s say the cops finally catch the guy with a fridge full of body parts and he laughs and smirks at everyone who calls him a monster.
Heh.
Now let’s say when reporters interview his father, dad defends his son’s actions.
Does dad have to defend his kid? Nope. Does dad have to trash his kid? Nope again. Dad could say “I don’t want to talk about it,” but the fact dad goes for “You leave him alone!” tells you that the kid might not be the only sick fuck in the family.
slippytoad
Well, he could maintain a semblance of dignity and respectability and just shut the fuck up. There is no defense for his son. And I can’t feel pity for him. He knew his son’s character, and if he didn’t he’s a complete failure as a father. He chose to assist the catapultation of his inapt spawn into the Oval Office and deserves the resulting horror and misery to be carved into obsidian tablets and permanently erected as a monument on top of his family plot so huge it can be read from space:
slippytoad
Well, more like having the contractors shouting at you to STOP through a huge megaphone, plus 15 million of your co-residents marching around outside begging and pleading for you to not do it because it was so much worse than just leaving well enough alone, and totally ignoring everyone who had any credibility or knew anything about the topic and Decidin’ to just do it yerself — or rather, decide it yerself! But yeah, that’s about how it is.
jcricket
I actually spent many summers during my youth in a town next to where the Bush’s vacation (Kennebunkport).
The main difference, besides me not failing in every business I’ve been handed (and not being handed any businesses) and not committing the worst global fuckups this century, is that I don’t fake a Texas accent. I know I grew up privileged.
The biggest mystery to me is how people think of GW as some good ol’ boy. How they think of anyone like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Malkin, Coulter, etc. as “salt of the earth” types is actually beyond me too.
F. Frederson
I think the same thing every time Greenspan opens his yap.
The Other Steve
That is a mystery. All these fucks are overprivileged whiners.
The Other Steve
That’s a good analogy.
El Cid
This is either a subjective or an objectively measurable questions.
If we’re talking any indicators of life and quality of life, there’s no question, Iraq and Iraqis were better off under Saddam.
But then, I never was in favor of the Soviets or Cubans bombing and destroying Guatemala in order to stop the rampages of Reagan’s genocidal tyrant allies, because obviously that would have just made things worse.
itsandy
Even so, doesn’t it feel weirdly satisfying to hear a politician use a 10th-grade phrase like Quid Pro Ante? I’ll take that Bush over this one if only for that reason.
deBOraaah
slippytoad Says:
He is your everlasting skidmark on the underwear of history.
I don’t know how to block quote, but that is fucking brilliant. Brilliant.
TenguPhule
I miss Saddam. Late night comedy has just never been the same without him to kick around.
Bush turned the laughing stock of South Park into a fucking martyr. Both him and his shithole of a father should die horrible fucking ironic deaths, preferably involving something that is related to stuff they vetoed earlier.
ATS
There are now many in Washington (not just Dems) who wonder whether we mightn’t have been better off leaving SH in place— obviously for pure geopolitical reasons. That is to say, for the very long-term good Weltpolitik rather than the short-term humanitarian good.
But the real issue is whether the benefit–if there is one– has been worth the cost. And too often that cost is merely weighed against alternate use of the money (health care etc). The most dire result is our strategic impotence elsewhere.
That is to say, stop squabbling about whether getting riding of Saddam was “a goood thing.” Ask whether it was worth it.
Johnny Pez
As others have noted, the obvious question to ask Poppy was, “If Saddam was so bad, why didn’t you take him out when you had the chance?”
I’m guessing nobody asked him that.
jcricket
My kingdom (as it were) for an honest press.
Again, those of us on the left who criticize the press want the press to work. The right wants it to shut down the independent press and replace it with the official-press-release mill ™.
I’d be happy for all sorts of politicians (Dems too) to get honest scrutiny. I would kill for an end to the he-said-she-said faux-equivalency news we have today. Not just on the political front. Science and health reporting would improve massively if there wasn’t the “must show both sides no matter how inane one side is” BS.
kchiker
NO need to get out the psychology textbook to figure out why Poppy Bush has been crying so much in public lately.
Not to be outdone, it was just shortly after the 2nd or 3rd major public-sobbing episode that Junior told a reporter about how often he cries too.
It just boggles the mind. If only we could go back 20 years and get this family some therapy….
jcricket
Fixed.
F. Frederson
Here you go, deBOraaah. The tags are [blockquote] and [/blockquote] (replace [ ] with the normal LT and GT symbols), or you can use the javascript buttons above this box (press the single button with the double GT to show all the buttons if you don’t see them already).
HyperIon
yes. i recall in 2000 how several members of the family expressed amazement that GWB was the one running for Prez (not the anointed Jeb). because they were very familiar with his idiocy, no doubt. so Poppy has got to be bummed. at least he didn’t cry this time.
Slippytoad
I am honored that my skivvy joke will now be immortalized in blockquotes. May I add that jcricket is dead on; 60 years ago this whole mess could have been . . . aborted.
Gee. Is that crude?
Blue Jean
Or if Poppy had actually stayed on board his aircraft and tried to help his flight crew, instead of parachuting out and leaving them to their deaths. But, hey, that’s the Bush motto; “I got mine, so screw everybody else.”
incontrolados
I remember back when Poppy was running for prez, there was a short bio thing on PBS (I could very well be wrong about the station) and I’ll never forget the odd way he refered to their child who died. He repeatedly called her ‘this girl.’ I thought at the time — she had a name, why not say her name? That he cries now about W I think has more to do with age than sincerity.
I think Neil Bush has gotten into a bit of trouble lately with that ‘educational software’ he’s been peddling for years. Not that it is any indication or anything, but one of Neil’s buddies worked in my department last year. The guy couldn’t teach for shit. He finally bailed on us. I guess he wasn’t up to a real teaching gig.
Lastly, nobody but nobody hates that fake Texas shit like a Native. We aren’t caricatures. While I don’t go in for conspiracy theories, I sure do hope that the story about W buying land in Paraguay is on target. DeLay is in Virginia now, so if we can ship out the Bushes, we’re in much better shape.
Splitting Image
“Do they want to go back to the status quo ante? … Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if Saddam were still there?”
Two different questions obviously. A lot of the people complaining about the results of the war effort are the same ones who were trying to change the status quo before the Republicans decided to get their feet wet.
I don’t think many people want to see a return to apartheid in South Africa, but I could see a lot of people longing for the stability it provided if the country had degenerated into a bloodbath the way Rwanda and Burundi did.
It’s worth asking how well the Truth and Reconciliation movement would have gone in South Africa if the U.S. had bombed the country back to the Stone Age in an effort to be helpful, killed half a million blacks, and displaced four million others. Someone should submit that question to Bush.
incontrolados
Stability? I think your head is in the right place, but your analogy is wrong. South Africa was a long, too long, drawn out, example of what not to do. The white South Africans used torture with impunity. To connect what happened in S.A. to Rwanda (not Burundi — different social make up there) is to ignore the geography of the continent and lump the whole thing together.
teh stupid. it hurts.
binzinerator
But the asbestos wasn’t even in the walls of our house. A few edits on that analogy…
binzinerator
Hmm. Dang overstrike tag didn’t seem to work. The “your” part in “…your his walls…” didn’t get overstruck.
But I think you know what I was trying to say.