Richard Jernigan -> RE: That bit with Sanders / Clinton (Mar. 4 2016 3:58:25)
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z quote:
ORIGINAL: Piwin If Jeb hadn't dropped out, I would've pointed out that the US has already had 16 years under a Bush President. Anyways, just saying that sometimes an outside perspective, even if critical, can give some interesting new ways of approaching a domestic issue. At the 2003 Guitar Foundation of America convention at Merida, Yucatan, Mexico my uninformed choice of accommodation turned out to be the hotel where the principal performers lodged. At breakfast there was a guitar table of a dozen or so. One morning a well known English guitarist and I fell to talking. He lamented the attitude of his friends toward America. He said that his European and English friends thought everything about America was bad, but he tried to point out that America had a great musical and literary culture, and that many Americans were fairly enlightened politically But his friends would have none of it. American = Bad. I asked whether they were showing French movies at the mega-cinemas on the Champs Elysee. He laughed, and admitted, "No, still Hollywood." Then he asked me what I thought of George W. Bush. i replied that my father, a retired general, was one of the first active Republicans in Texas since the military occupation of the south after the Civil War. (I didn't mention that this was one of a few main sources of friction between us.) Dad became friends with George H. W. Bush. Dad used to say, "Three times I tried to talk him out of running for Congress---because he would lose." Dad would smile with mock sheepishness (I never knew him to be genuinely sheepish) and say, "I was right twice." I went on to say that Bush, Sr. was a cultured and educated scion of the Eastern establishment. The boys, on the other hand, grew up in Texas, and George W. at least, was a true believer. I added "No one is as dangerous in politics as a true believer in a position of power." Scott McClellan, one of W's press secretaries, is a friend of my son. We and the McClellans were neighbors while Sott's mother was Mayor of Austin. Scott worked for W. while he was governor of Texas, and considered him a friend. Scott was no political naif when he went to Washington. He had managed one of his mother's campaigns before he was 21, and continued to be active statewide. Despite having as much interaction with W. as anyone except Cheney and a few Cabinet members, and having attended almost all major policy meetings, Scott resigned from W.'s administration, feeling betrayed by the machinations of Rove, Cheney, Libby and W. himself over the affair of "outing" the CIA agent, Valerie Plame. In his book, and in his conversation Scott's critcism of W. as President has been that he "lacked intellectual curiosity, " and "tended to make policy decisions 'from the gut' rather than from careful intellectual analysis and comprehensive staffing." It would be hard to differ more from Bush, Sr.'s approach. For example, Gorbachev and Schevardnadze champed at the bit while Bush, Sr. took months over a careful review by State, CIA, Defense, National Security et al of Reagan's policy and negotiations with the Soviets. Though they were father and son, it would be difficult to find two post WW II Republican presidents more different than the two Bushes. Personally? My Japanese girlfriend told me she voted for Bush, Sr., though she didn't like either candidate and thought Bush was "out of touch with the country." She felt Bush would be more favorable than the Democrat to my consulting business in the defense industry. I replied, "The last president I felt like I really knew where he was coming from was Dwight Eisenhower. I was a teenager who had grown up in the military." Bush, Sr.'s nominating convention in Houston, stage managed by Jim Baker, was carefully modeled upon the Southern Baptist Convention. Its falsity and the poundingly moronic talking points of the stump speecheds so turned my stomach that I didn't vote in that election. Always wrong-footed , I have continued to move leftward with age. My large extended family in Texas have barely tolerated it--except a few who have written me off. RNJ
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