A thousand points of power.
There are a few in every high school. They vie for class valedictorian, collect honors and awards, and run every school club worth running. Some of them are athletes, rounding out the college applications. They manage both charitable work and part-time jobs. Resting their heads on their pillows after busy, meritorious days, they dream of acceptance letters from elite institutions, the golden tickets to the good life in America.
They get their letters and some go on to lead productive, admirable lives. Some build ostensibly impressive resumés while pursuing prestige, power, and pelf, on the way abandoning principles, idealism, integrity, and honor. Perhaps the holes in their souls are filled by whatever self-satisfied, ego-driven pleasure is derived from the elite’s embrace. Perhaps not. In their waning years, they do have a questionable consolation: imagining the fulsome tributes and eulogies and their lengthy and impressive obituaries when they die.
Last week the gilded resumé set lost a shining exemplar: George Herbert Walker Bush, forty-first President of the United States, forty-third Vice President, a US Representative, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, multi-millionaire founder of an oil company, captain of the Yale baseball team, and an aviator in the US Navy during World War II. Generationally, his resumé stretches backwards and forwards. His father was a successful investment banker and US Senator. One son was the forty-third president, another was governor of Florida.
The alternative media has filled with uncomplimentary articles about Bush. They’re a welcome counterweight to the cloying eulogies in the mainstream media, which is determined to make Bush a statist hero surpassing even the recently lionized John McCain. We’re mourning for an entire week. Financial markets are closed today for Bush’s funeral, which Trump will attend.
Everyone who is anyone in the Deep State, Military, Intelligence, Corporatocracy, Entertainment, Academia, and extortion racket known as Politics and Government will be there. Only a country that’s completely corrupted by the scourge of all-powerful government would put up with this farce. What does it say about a country that not just puts up with it, but embraces it?
Power is what George Herbert Walker Bush and the entire Bush clan craved, sought, and attained. It requires only one episode in Bush’s “illustrious” career to demonstrate what that pursuit did to the man, and what it’s done to his country.
Before Ronald Reagan selected Bush to be his vice president in 1980, the common rap on him was that he didn’t have any defining principles or purpose, what Bush himself later called “the vision thing.” The Church Committee hearings in 1975 had exposed intelligence agency depredations. Bush’s one-year tenure as Director of the Central Agency Intelligence (1976-1977) burnished both his resumé and his image as an opportunistic operative. Most of Reagan’s base was deeply suspicious of Bush.
They were still suspicious eight years later when Bush ran for president. Reagan had made taxes the Republicans’ signature issue, albeit more rhetorically than in reality (he cut taxes, then he raised them). Taxes are everywhere and always the key issue in the political firmament. Ask Emmanuel Macron, the first in what will be a long line of politicians dealing with tax revolts.
When a government has first claim on income and those who earned it are entitled only to a residual—or nothing at all—politics becomes a scabrous scrum, divvying up the loot. There is no middle ground on taxes. You either own your own life and what you produce or the government does. Any “compromise” is the government taking a little less than it wants to take, which is everything.
To allay the suspicions, Bush said, “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Bush had no principled objection to the income tax—nobody in Washington does—but saying he wouldn’t raise them helped him get elected. Bush was pragmatic, Washington-speak for unprincipled. Washington is the world capital of pragmatic. You go nowhere in that cesspool if you’re not pragmatic. Coercive power, its stock in trade, is always unprincipled. When coercion and violence are your means, your announced ends are only mendacious cover for your essential immorality.
Bush reneged on his promise, raising taxes in exchange for the Democrats’ promise to cut spending. He knew better. Reagan had made a deal with them—for each dollar raised in taxes, spending would be cut by two—that was never honored. Bush played Charlie Brown to the Democrats’ football-holding Lucy knowing he’d get the same outcome, which he did. It cost him the 1992 election. Americans chose up-front-about-it grifter Bill Clinton, rejecting the grifter who pretended to be otherwise. The Bush doubters were correct all along: power devoid of principles or purpose.
As the deaths of McCain and Bush sickeningly demonstrate, the devotion to power wins Washington’s highest honors and accolades. It is the root of evil and it has led the US down the path of debt, destruction, death, and ruin. There is no middle ground between freedom and voluntary interaction on the one hand and coercion and violence on the other. To seek the middle ground is to choose the latter.
That is the most important lesson from the life of George Herbert Walker Bush, and the most important thing that can be said upon his death.
You Should Be Laughing At Them!
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
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Bob:
In reading your outstanding “tribute” to Bush “41,” I was reminded of how “far” we have come. Far, with respect to what now passes as “virtue;” virtue within the sphere of politics; the amalgamation of what are recognized as personal virtues of character, when “absorbed” into the maze of murky and toxic waste-waters of politics.
What follows is a quote from Republican Conservative nd Candidate for President in 1964, Barry Goldwater, circa early sixties:
“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”
I cite the above as a reminder of what has become of our ideals over the brief span of 100 years – the 50 preceding Goldwater’s eloquence, as well as the 50 following it.
Yes, as Ayn Rand reminded us, Goldwater was to compromise his ideals, but the eloquent expression of them during the dying intellectual “niche” that had become “the Right,” could still be occasionally found. Bush “43” was in his late thirties by then. Bush “41” in his twenties, embarrassingly born/residing on 3rd base, thinking he had hit a triple, ever-mindful of finding a way to steal “home.”
Beginning around the turn-over into the 20th century, our culture had begun to shed the ideals of independence, self-reliance, and mutual respect for the individual, that had generally, so characterized “Americanism,” since Jefferson’s eloquence and our founding. This “sense of life,” as Rand termed it, was to be subjected to the obscenity that characterized our entry into WWI and the treaty that ended it, whereby said treaty set the stage for WWII. A treaty whereby Wilson’s newly-anointed Ivy-league intellectuals, with their maps of Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, spread over the floors of their Paris quarters, were busily re-drawing the boundaries of the “lesser tribes,” with the wisdom of the “greater ones,” setting the stage for not only WWII, but consequences that plague us to this day. Meanwhile, the newly-established Central Bank, part of the “FINANCIAL-shedding” of distinctly American values, had other ideas – ideas that embraced “new” financial ideals.
Prior to the obscenity that would become WWII, we were to further lose the distinctly American sense of life, through the further loss of individual freedom and the rights/responsibility that underpin it. We were called to endure he Great Depression, and, more importantly, the political prescriptions for its “remedy.” Bush the Elder was in his early post-pubescence during this period, and no doubt added to whatever values of character he had embraced until that time, those that much of America would come to embrace as well.
Those of us who presume to understand the moral/political crisis that we face, must & WILL, “call em as we see em.” You have powerfully done so Bob, as is usually the case when you direct your focus toward whatever manifestation of the loss of the moral/political ideals our relentless slide into collective tyranny portends.
Unfortunately, to the “innocent” ignorance of what has become of the “average American,” you will be seen as calling – if not a “Saint,” a “well-intentioned” nice guy; a noble, but flawed “uncommon man;” a privileged and courageous fighter on behalf of the “common man” – always seemingly treating same with respect and compassion; as being either a sham or charlatan – or BOTH.
In such a circumstance, it is you that will be thought of as the latter – NOT by those of us who understand such things, but those who now represent what is left of the heritage and values bequeathed to us by our founders. It is important to consider such things when “one of us” comes to believe we shall attempt to remedy such things politically.
We will invariably be seen as Satan competing with – if not Jesus, one of his disciples! It is sad that is, under current circumstance, to be the case, but such is the reality we now face.
Keep up the good work!
Dave
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Dave,
Thank you for your well-considered words. I will continue to direct my “focus toward whatever manifestation of the loss os the moral/political ideals our relentless slide into collective tyranny portends,” and fight that tyranny as long as I’m able. I’m reading and enjoying The Driver. I have a couple of long plane rides coming up and I should be able to finish it and start the email I promised. Good hearing from you.
Bob
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Thank you, Bob. I fondly think of our visits together.
I guess I would sum up my previous reply to your outstanding article as follows:
We must confront the fact, that much as Eddie Willers responded to Dagney, when he replied to her question of what he would do when he grew up, “whatever is right,” Bush the Elder seems to have been, to his family, his friends, his associates – both near and far, to always have tired to do “the right thing.”
What might constitute the right thing has, and remains, the issue(s).
When an article such as yours is read by those who knew him best, it is summarily dismissed, which leads to the underlying issue.
How do we conduct ourselves so as to make that NOT to be the case!
Dave
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That one I’ll answer in an email written on the plane tomorrow.
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I like the reply that spoke of goldwater’s ideals; in 1964 someone became an urban terrorist in Dover Delaware😳😳
they went to mr. Livingston’s Dairy Queen on Route 13 and outside of the building where he had a bubbler waterfountain with a sign painted in blue on the wall which read cold water. The sign was altered to Read “Gold Water!!” Unfortunately like Mister goldwater’s candidacy the sign was too little too late. Bush legacy? ha ha straight to a Brugel inspired Hades scape for that rat bastard. Wwg1wga
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Excellent summation of the head Royalist thief of a clan of Godless, sinful Royalist thieves. It is a pity that, outside of a few enlightened websites such as WRSA, no one will read this truthful essay. Too many fools are following that path of debt, death, destruction, and ruin. All I can do is get out of their way and brace for impact. Blieb ubrig, Robert.
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