George Herbert Walker Bush

After the war, George got married and enrolled at Yale University. During his time at Yale he joined the secret society Skull and Bones like his father Prescott before him, and just as George's future son, George W Bush, would do many years later. Therefore, perhaps all three men have masturbated in the same coffin.

In 1950, Bush graduated Yale and headed off to Texas to launch an oil business. That same year, Bush's father unsuccessfully ran for a Senate seat in Connecticut. Then he got into politics.

Washington

Dear Mr. President,

It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways. My own view is that I would now ill serve a President whose massive accomplishments I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you my judgment. Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for the country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country. This letter is much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always have for you. If you do leave office history will properly record your achievements with a lasting respect.

Nixon quit the following day, and Gerald Ford became President. In October 1974, Ford sent Bush to China as the second pseudo-ambassador to that country since Mao's revolution. Apparently, there wasn't much for him to do. When the Chinese wanted something from Washington, they didn't bother with Bush. They would just call up Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Bush was completely superfluous.

After spending a year sitting on his ass in China, Bush was tapped to head the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1976. He shuffled papers as Director of Central Intelligence for a year until Ford lost to Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Consequently, Bush had four years of downtime.

Veep

As Reagan's Vice President, Bush got a bunch of shit jobs. But if there was one thing Bush was good at, it was taking orders. No matter how much he privately disagreed with the President, George believed that it was his job to be the ultimate "Yes" man. Bush demonstrated his loyalty by exhibiting slavish devotion to Reagan's policies, even the ones he thought were completely nuts. When reporters asked him whether he still believed Reagan's stimulus plan for the economy amounted to "voodoo economics," Bush denied ever having said it. CBS news quickly settled the matter when they ran footage of him saying exactly that in 1980.

Arms for Hostages

"Today I am proud to deliver to the American people the result of the six months effort to review our policies and our capabilities to deal with terrorism. Our policy is clear, concise, unequivocal. We will offer no concession to terrorists, because that only leads to more terrorism. States that practice terrorism, or actively support it, will not be allowed to do so without consequence."

Except that the minutes from the June 1984 meeting of the National Security Planning Group demonstrated a distinct eagerness to deal with terrorist states, as long as it helped to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua. And the minutes show that George was there:

McFARLANE:	There seems to be no prospect that the Democratic leadership will provide for any vote on the Nicaraguan program.
PRESIDENT REAGAN:	It all hangs on support for the anti-Sandinistas. How can we get that support in the Congress? We have to be more active.
KIRKPATRICK:	If we can't get the money for the anti-Sandinistas, then we have to make the maximum effort to find the money elsewhere.
SCHULTZ:	I would like to get the money for the Contras also, but ... Jim Baker said that if we go out and try to get the money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense.
CASEY:	Jim Baker said that if we try to get money from third countries without notifying the oversight committees it could be a problem.
SCHULTZ:	Baker's argument is that the U.S. government may raise and spend funds only through an appropriation of the Congress.
PRESIDENT REAGAN:	We must obtain the funds to help these freedom fighters.
VICE PRESIDENT BUSH:	The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return, so that some people could interpret this as some kind of an exchange.
McFARLANE:	I certainly hope none of this discussion will be made public in any way.

But an apparent lack of documentation allowed Bush to claim that he had never been "in the loop" regarding the Boland amendment violations.

REPORTER:	Did you know about the Contra aid or not?
VICE PRESIDENT BUSH:	I sensed that there were -- that we were sending arms. And I sensed we were trying to get hostages out. But not arms for hostages.
REPORTER:	Did you not begin to smell a rat here?
VICE PRESIDENT BUSH:	Not really, no. I could see that it was -- got a little close, but not, not, enough to say -- no, this is not arms, that this is purely arms for hostages.

As Senator Bob Dole put it, "The record is that he was either absent or silent. I don't know what that does for him."

1984 Re-Election Campaign

REPORTER: Mr. Vice-President, how can you claim that your home is in Maine for tax purposes and at the same time claim that your home is in Texas for voting purposes? Are you really a Texan or a New Englander? PRESIDENT BUSH: I'm really a Texan. But I got one house. And under the law, every taxpayer is allowed, when he sells a house, and buys another house, to get the rollover. Everybody, if it turns out, and I may hire, I notice she said she has a new good accountant. I'd like to get his name and phone number because I think I've paid too much in the way of taxes. And residence, Mr. Boyd, legal residence, for voting, is very different. And the domicile, they call that, very different, than the house. That they say you're living in the vice-president's house. Therefore you don't get what every -- I've got problems -- what every other taxpayer gets. I got problems with the IRS, but so do a lot of people out there. I think I've paid too much. Nothing ethical. I'd like to get some money back.

Prez

Early on in the 1988 campaign, something snapped in Bush. He disengaged from the broader picture and focused solely on getting elected. So said a bunch of things he didn't really believe in, and started making promises he knew he would live to regret.

The Bush/Quayle team proceeded to run one of the ugliest campaigns in recent history. Bush could not help but call Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis a L-I-B-E-R-A-L at every possible opportunity. He even derided the Democrat for his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging him to be a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." Dan Quayle also got in on the act. During his one and only Vice Presidential debate against Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle spent the entire night maligning Dukakis instead of engaging Bentsen. As he explained years later:

"I just wanted to pretend like he wasn't even on the stage, and I did. I just went after Dukakis and talked about Dukakis, and I tried to get the L-word, if you recall, in the 1988 campaign. Dukakis ran from the L-word, liberal. And I must have used that, I don't know how many times -- a lot -- to remind the audience that Dukakis was, in fact, a true blue liberal that would raise taxes and increase government spending, and not very good for your health."

Bush won, of course, but not without making one critical mistake. It happened during Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican national convention in August. He made what would eventually prove to be one promise too many:

"The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And I'll say to them: 'Read my lips -- No. New. Taxes.'"

After Bush won the election, of course he raised taxes. He always knew he was going to have to do it -- it was inevitable. In fact, Bush signed the largest tax increase in history. Nevertheless, millions of Republican voters felt they had been doublecrossed. But he had only told them what he knew they wanted to hear. He assumed they knew that. And it was that duplicity which ultimately cost him the re-election.

But a man can cram a lot of living into four years.

Panama

Six years later, Bush sent 22,500 troops to Panama. It took them a couple of weeks to capture Noriega and ship him off to Florida, where he was ultimately convicted in federal court of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering.

The NWO

"Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed. And in each instance, a New World Order came about through the advent of a new tyrant or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end."

The term soon became a staple of the President's speeches.

Then one of America's friends in the Arab world, Saddam Hussein, got a little greedy. Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. This prompted the United States to mount a counteroffensive known as the Gulf War. During the buildup of American forces, somebody finally asked the President what his favorite phrase actually meant. True to form, Bush bobbled it:

REPORTER:

You said, President Bush, that a "New World Order" would emerge once the Gulf crisis has been solved. How do you envisage this New World Order?

PRESIDENT BUSH:

Well, I envisage it -- one: where the whole -- once we're -- let me start over. Once we set back this aggression, and once it is clear that the security and the stability of the Gulf are enhanced by whatever arrangements are set into place -- once that this invading dictator gets out of Kuwait -- then I think that it's clear we're going to have an opportunity, given the diversity of this coalition, to work more closely together. And part of that -- I want to see a solution to the question of the West Bank, for example. But I think if we work cooperatively as our -- with our common sights set -- this aggressor will not succeed -- it opens up all kinds of possibilities for a New World Order. We're already seeing that "world order" means "world." And we're beginning to see that with what happened out of the -- well, just as a result of the actions that led up to this successful CSCE meeting. I'm going down to South America, and the evolving democracies there are strengthening their economies, and we've got a program that I think will be very helpful there.

It was pretty clear that Bush had no fucking idea what the term meant. And his tangential meanderings didn't exactly reassure the conspiracists, who sensed that he was really just tiptoeing around the idea of instituting the unified global government prophesied in the book of Revelation. If that actually was his intent, then apparently it was on the "second term" todo list.

Anyway, the coalition of United Nations forces led by the U.S. managed to drive Saddam's troops back over the border, and Kuwait was liberated. Then Bush declared victory. His popularity rating jumped to 91%. And with the election coming up, there was just no way he could lose.

But he did lose.

1992 Re-Election Campaign

"The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And I'll say to them: 'Read my lips -- No. New. Taxes.'"

He finally tried to defuse the issue in March. The plan was for the President to take responsibility for raising taxes, apologize, and explain what the hell he was thinking. It would probably have worked if Bush hadn't completely flubbed it:

"Total mistake -- policy, political, everything else. . . . But it was -- spending caps is good. . . . But when you have to weigh a decision, in retrospect -- have the benefit of hindsight -- I would say both policy and politically, I think we can all agree that it's drawn a lot of fire."

Let's see... no responsibility, no apology, and no explanation. Somehow this didn't manage to satisfy those voters who felt they had been betrayed. By the time October rolled around, for some reason the "Read my lips" thing still hadn't gone away. When Bill Clinton raised the issue during the debate in Michigan, Bush's tactic was to blame the opposition:

"Let me remind you it was a Democratic tax increase, and I didn't want to do it and I went along with it. And I said I make a mistake. If I make a mistake, I admit it. That's quite different than some. But I think that's the American way."

Okey dokey. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush had relentlessly pissed away his unprecedented approval ratings over the previous 18 months, and with them went his lead in the election polls. In his last question of the final Presidential debate, he had to explain why his approval rating had been cut in half:

REPORTER:	Mr. President, why have you dropped so dramatically in the leadership polls, from the high 80s to the 40s? And you have said that you will do anything you have to do to get reelected. What can you do in two weeks to win reelection?
PRESIDENT BUSH:	Well, I think the answer to why the drop, I think, has been the economy in the doldrums. Why I'll win is: I think I have the best plan of the three of us up here to do something about it.

However, this response left most viewers wondering: If you've got such a wonderful economic plan, how come you haven't already implemented the damned thing? Bush's popularity never made a recovery, and he lost the election.

The Democrats who voted for Gore/Lieberman in 2000 experienced the sort of shock, horror, and anguish no one else could understand. You just had to be there. The election had been stolen -- a bunch of crooks hijacked the most powerful nation on Earth. But there was one group of people who did understand that sensation. And those were the Republicans who had supported Bush/Quayle in 1992.

The Republicans certainly felt like they got screwed in 1992, although it went down differently. There were no serious legal challenges or ballot recounts. But the agony was just as excruciating.

The Bush/Quayle voters wanted third party candidate Ross Perot flayed alive for costing them the election. He sucked in almost 20 million votes, more than six times Ralph Nader's tally in 2000. And Perot seemed like he had a conservative appeal. So it just stood to reason that his candidacy had totally fucked over the Republican ticket.

Truth be told, however, the freaky munchkin billionaire had attracted almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, so he probably had little or no effect on the final outcome. But this is not how most Republicans saw it. They just knew, in their guts, that it was the screwball dilettante that sunk their re-election campaign.

George HW Bush's Presidential Pardons

Timeline