{"id":298050,"date":"2017-03-08T03:38:02","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T02:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/george-w-bush-now-on-right-side-of-press-corpss-nostalgia-machine\/"},"modified":"2017-03-08T03:38:02","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T02:38:02","slug":"george-w-bush-now-on-right-side-of-press-corpss-nostalgia-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/george-w-bush-now-on-right-side-of-press-corpss-nostalgia-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"George W. Bush Now on Right Side of Press Corps\u2019s Nostalgia Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/strong> welcomes the return of George Bush at a time when Republicans are “trading principles for power.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

“A welcome return.”<\/p>\n

That’s how the Guardian <\/b>(2\/27\/17<\/a>), in all sincerity, referred to George W. Bush’s mild criticisms of Donald Trump delivered to the reliably softball hosts of NBC<\/b>‘s Today <\/b>show. Bush alternately extolled the virtues of the news media (“indispensable to democracy<\/a>“), waxed philosophical on the contributions of immigrants to America (“I am for an immigration policy that’s welcoming<\/a>“) and decried Trump’s Islamophobic Muslim ban as antithetical to America’s tolerance of other faiths (“a bedrock of our freedom”).<\/p>\n

“It says a lot about the United States that Mr. Bush can be seen now as a paragon of virtue,” the Guardian<\/b>‘s editorial board wrote.<\/p>\n

Well, it certainly says a lot about corporate media.<\/p>\n

As numerous commentators in independent media pointed out<\/a>, Bush’s record in the White House should hardly be whitewashed. The Trump policies and ideologies Bush criticized were often ones his own administration had winked at or openly promoted.<\/p>\n

This type of post-presidency image rehabilitation is nothing new in American politics; US news media have been massaging the images of Oval Office alumni for decades. Last-guy normalization is used as a cudgel to cajole or shame the current president into adapting or rejecting any number of political policies or priorities.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush always had the shadow of the last Republican leader hanging over him\u2014all the more so because that leader was his father. \u00a0And Bush Jr. didn’t do much to dispel those comparisons, loading his Cabinet and the White House with relics of his father’s administration and, of course, launching a war on Iraq barely a decade after his dad\u2019s. \u00a0This was easy to psychologize, as Jake Tapper did (Salon<\/b>, 3\/11\/03<\/a>) when he peculiarly called Bush Jr. decision to invade the same country his father did the “ultimate act of rebellion” against that same father.<\/p>\n

Some in the media used the familial comparison to make W seem more presidential, a firmer decision-maker than his \u201cwimp\u201d father. In The Atlantic <\/b>(4\/04<\/a>), Richard Brookhiser praised Bush Jr.\u2019s instinctive grasp of politics and iron hold on his staff\u2014in contrast to Bush Sr., whose chaotic White House was filled with “fireworks,” and who lost his reelection bid for “failing to attend to domestic issues.”<\/p>\n

Yet as the Iraq War dragged on, the elder Bush\u2019s image began to improve as his son’s reputation declined. David Greenberg compared the two men for a 2004 article<\/a> in the New Yorker <\/b>(7\/12\/04<\/a>), concluding that for all the son’s efforts to be his own man, he was first and foremost his father’s son\u2014the difference, Greenberg said, was that Bush Jr. lacked his father’s patience. Howard Fineman (NBC News<\/b>, 7\/6\/05<\/a>) also contrasted father and son in a 2005 article on the Supreme Court: “The father fought in a war; the son didn\u2019t. The father didn\u2019t go to Baghdad; the son did.”<\/p>\n

In 2005, ABC World News Tonight <\/b>(12\/27\/05<\/a>) named George H.W. Bush its co-person of the year, alongside Bill Clinton. The two former presidents who fought a bitter election in 1992 were all smiles as they raised money together for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the contrast between the father’s work to help the victims of a natural disaster and the son’s perceived indifference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was stark.<\/p>\n

By the end, the comparisons had congealed into a believable narrative: Bush 43 had impulsively tried to finish Bush 41’s war, but 41’s decision to leave Iraq was the right one. The family’s divisions had destroyed a country, and it was all because of 43’s need to one-up his dad.<\/p>\n