The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."
Monday, December 10, 2018
Truest statement of the week
George HW Bush was a one term president who committed committed the usual quota of domestic and foreign atrocities. He put the bloodthirsty Dick Cheney, who’d been Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in charge at the Pentagon, and named Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He invaded Panama, where US forces commanded by Colin Powell obliterated an entire black neighborhood killing tens of thousands of civilians to prevent inconvenient protests against the occupation. Jimmy Carter had negotiated US bases in Saudi Arabia, and Bush filled them with hundreds of thousands of troops, artillery, armor and aircraft for a planned invasion of Iraq.
Millions of Iraqis have died since the Bush invasion, millions more have become refugees. Hardly a week has passed from then till now the the US hasn’t bombed some place in that unhappy country. One of Bush’s last acts as a lame duck president in December 1992 was to land a contingent of US Marines in Somalia to keep that country from forming a unified government that might not be to Uncle Sam’s liking. A quarter century later US forces are still in Somalia, backing this or that warlord faction, or the Somali central government whose reach most days doesn’t extend past the capital’s suburbs, sometimes with Rwandan or Ugandan proxies, sometimes with US paid mercenaries, complimented with US special ops forces and drones.
Domestically, George HW Bush brought NAFTA to Congress two or three times but could not get the Congress to pass it. That would fall to his Democrat successor Bill Clinton, who whipped enough Democratic votes to make the bipartisan guys at Brown Brothers Harriman happy.
We’ll probably never know whether Bush was some kind of actual CIA officer. In Russia at least, Vladimir Putin’s career as an intelligence officer is common knowledge. They do things differently over there, not necessarily better or worse, just different.
-- Bruce A. Dixon, "If There's A Hell Below, That's Where He'll Go: The BAR Obituary on George H.W. Bush" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).