George H.W. Bush, Remembered

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(An earlier version of this post erroneously led with an article on George W. Bush instead of George H.W. Bush; IGFCultureWatch regrets the error.)

12 Comments for “George H.W. Bush, Remembered”

  1. posted by Jorge on

    It just goes to show that you sometimes have to separate the political from the personal. I usually say it’s the other way around.

    in 2006… right before the midterm elections… the president said, “…We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”

    The crowd loved it. Levine was crushed.

    Levine was an idiot.

    Levine knew, of course, that Bush had officially backed the Federal Marriage Amendment

    And by 2006 he’d already lost in Congress. What did he expect from the president most famous for “Stay the course,” a change of mind?

    And besides, opposing gay marriage just “wasn’t a centerpiece of the campaign to date,” Levine recalled when we talked recently. “So it wasn’t something that I was expecting to have been sort of his rallying cry at that event.”

    I can’t believe someone actually in the White House didn’t see that coming. Do people not know how to pay attention to politics? Does one think conservative Republican domestic politics is only about tax policy and being microaggressive on race? Or does one think a president mired in foreign policy doesn’t have time to go into social issues? No, his age is not an excuse.

    An enemy is an enemy. You must accept the price of conflict with your elders in order to inherit the earth.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      Heard of “cognitive dissonance”? To make a long story short, it’s the mental discord a person experiences when two things they know/believe are in conflict.

      For example, “Roger is a homophobic bigot” and “Roger is a good man”.

      In the short run, cognitive dissonance makes a person upset and conflicted, but if it sticks around long enough most people will end up compromising one of their beliefs.

      So in our example, the person would either compromise on “Roger is a homophobic bigot”, perhaps to “he doesn’t really mean it”, or “Roger is a good person” to “Roger is not a good person”.

      What the article describes is a person who has reconciled their cognitive dissonance by compromising the former belief so that they can preserve the latter belief, only to run face-first into a situation where they’re confronted with the fact that no, Bush really was that bad.

      He might be an idiot, I’m not trying to argue he is or isn’t. But more importantly, he is human, and this kind of scenario is exactly what you see humans doing. A lot.

      Or to put it another way… people joke about “I didn’t expect the Leopards Eating Faces party to try and eat my face!” dealy, but that really is how people behave and think. We’re very good at rationalizing away the flaws of people and groups we like.

      • posted by JohnInCA on

        Every human is guilty of it.

        • posted by JohnInCA on

          Sure, why not? I’m up for being a robot.

          Beep boop beep, destroy all humans, boop beep boop.

  2. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    The bottom line: Whatever President Bush’s personal thoughts might have been about marriage equality in his later years, that hard fact is that he did absolutely nothing to challenge or change the anti-equality political positions of his party.

  3. posted by MR Bill on

    “As President, George H. W. Bush signed legislation that extended gay rights. On April 23, 1990, George H. W. Bush signed the Hate Crime Statistics Act, which requires the Attorney General to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. It was the first federal statute to “recognize and name gay, lesbian and bisexual people.”[17]

    On November 29, 1990, Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which withdrew the phrase “sexual deviation” from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) so that it could no longer be used as a basis for barring entry of immigration to the U.S. for homosexuals.[10]

    In a television interview, Bush said if he found out his grandchild was gay, he would “love his child”, but tell him homosexuality wasn’t normal and discourage him from working for gay rights. In February 1992, the chairman of the Bush-Quayle campaign met with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.[18] In May 1992, he appointed Anne-Imelda Radice to serve as the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.[19] Losing ground in the 1992 Republican president primary to President Bush’s far-right challenger, Pat Buchanan, the Bush campaign turned to the right, and President Bush publicly denounced same-sex marriage.[20] The 1992 Log Cabin Republican convention was held in Spring, Texas, a Houston exurb. The main issue discussed was whether or not LCR would endorse the re-election of President George H. W. Bush. The group voted to deny that endorsement because Bush did not denounce anti-gay rhetoric at the 1992 Republican National Convention.[21] Many in the gay community believed President Bush hadn’t done enough on the issue of AIDS. Urvashi Vaid argues that Bush’s anti-gay rhetoric “motivated conservative gay Democrats and loyal gay Republicans, who had helped defeat Dukakis in 1988, to throw their support behind Clinton.”[18]

    In 1992, the City Council passed “The Health Benefits Expansion Act”, which was signed into law by the Mayor of Washington, D.C. The bill, which established domestic partnerships in the District of Columbia, became law on June 11, 1992. Every year from 1992 to 2000, the Republican leadership of the U.S. Congress added a rider to the District of Columbia appropriations bill that prohibited the use of federal or local funds to implement the Health Care Benefits Expansion Act.[22] On October 5, 1992, Bush signed the H.R. 6056 into law, which included the Republican rider to the appropriations bill.[23]

    The 1992 Republican Party platform adopted support for continuing to exclude homosexuals from the military as a matter of good order and discipline.[24] The 1992 Republican Party platform also adopted opposition to including sexual preference into anti-discrimination statutes.[24]”-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_conservatism_in_the_United_States#Presidency_of_George_H._W._Bush

  4. posted by MR Bill on

    “VAID: The Bush presidency on HIV, AIDS, was mixed at best and marked by calculated indifference at worst. You have to separate the individual and what his loss means to his loved ones from what his legacy is as a political leader. He did not use his voice or office as president or, for that matter, as vice president, to address what was happening to tens of thousands of Americans, the majority of whom were young people, the vast majority of whom were gay and bisexual men and a significant number of whom were people of color. He just did not use his voice and power.

    CHANG: But President Bush did sign the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which protected people with HIV. There was also the Ryan White CARE Act, which is the largest federally funded program for HIV and AIDS patients. Doesn’t President Bush deserve credit for that?

    VAID: He absolutely deserves credit for signing those bills, but he does not deserve credit for the existence of those bills. Let’s be clear. Each of those bills came about because of AIDS activist pressure, because of congressional leadership and not because of White House leadership. He submitted appropriations bills each year on HIV that were in adequate and had to be increased by pressure brought on Congress. He opposed needle exchange programs that could have saved thousands of lives. So there are many instances in which President Bush did break from the Reagan years and could have signaled and acted upon the kinder and gentler conservatism that he promised at his inauguration. But, you know, there were many other instances in which he did not do enough.” https://www.npr.org/2018/12/04/673398013/critics-of-president-george-h-w-bush-reflect-on-his-handling-of-the-aids-crisis

  5. posted by JohnInCA on

    Why does a blog post supposedly about George H. W. Bush lead with an article about George W. Bush?

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Who knows? The two were separate on IGF Facebook. Stephen primarily posts to Facebook in recent years, and every so often he tosses a fish over to this site. Maybe Stephen was in hurry to get something up about President Bush and just got confused.

  6. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    FRAUDULENT POSTS ROADMAP as of 9:47 pm GMT, December 12, 2018:

    THREAD: George H.W. Bush, Rememberedk, by Stephen H. Miller on December 4, 2018

    This post is intended to provide a roadmap of fraudulent posts in this thread to facilitate removal of the posts.

    The following posts were not authored or posted by the purported author, Tom Scharbach:

    (1) FRAUDULENT COMMENT: 301011
    DATE POSTED: December 11, 2018
    PURPORTED AUTHOR: Tom Scharbach
    CONTENTS OF FRAUDULENT COMMENT: “Saddam Hussein was the good guy in the Illegal AmeriKKKan War for IsraOIL.”

  7. posted by Shadow Chaser on

    If George Herbert Walker Bush was so great, then explain to me how a man with a 91 percent approval rating Labor Day 1991 could get 37 percent of the popular vote for president in November 1992 and be packing to return to Texas Thanksgiving 1992

    Just wonderin’

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