6 December 2018

SHORTS: What does it mean to be Jewish? Comparisons between a Prison called Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto

What does it mean to be a Zionist? Supporting the murder of medics in Gaza or banning Arabs from a park in Jewish Afula?

Ethnic Privilege at Affordable Prices - Apartheid Adventures

What Keeps Jews Jewish? 




First off there is an excellent short video showing that the United States’ support for Israel derives, at least in part, because of its own ingrained racist legacy and settler colonialism.  The affinity between Israel and the United States is best evidenced not only by the $38 billion subsidy of Israel over the next decade (itself a fraction of actual US support) but by things like the training of America police forces by their Israeli counterparts. After all if you want to deal with hostile Blacks in the USA where better to train them than in Israel which has so much experience of hostile natives.
Also included is the excellent video from Richard Silverstein’s Tikkun Olam on what being Jewish really means in an America where Zionism is increasingly being challenged within the Jewish community. Israel calls itself a Jewish state but the values it displays owe more to hostile anti-Jewish regimes, Nazi Germany included, than Jewish history or tradition.
Telling Jewish anti-Zionists is not hate speech according to Twitter whereas comparing the siege of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto is
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the recent murders of 11 Jews at Pittsburgh where far-Right Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett was sent to ‘reassure’ American Jews. This was a good example of how Zionism is tone deaf. The murderer at Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers gave as his reasons for the murders the fact that the synagogue he attacked, the Tree of Life had supported HIAS (Hebrew Immigration Advisory Service) which supports refugees in America. Bennett has led the campaign in Israel for deporting the 40,000 Black African refugees in Israel and led the fightback against a deal which Netanyahu did with the UN in which half would have stayed in Israel permanently. Israel sent someone whose politics are no different from the murderer of Pittsburgh’s Jews.
Below are a collection of short items illustrating key aspects of Zionism today and its Racist, Apartheid nature
Zionists said that the image of this dead 21 year old medic, gunned down by Israeli snipers was 'antisemitic'
Another Zionist attack on free speech - Zionists Launched Campaign to Remove Billboard “Honoring the First Responders of Gaza”
Nearly 3 weeks into a planned 4-week run, an electronic billboard honoring first responders in the Gaza Strip was pulled on November 13th because the billboard company received threats and abuse calling their staff terrorists, anti-Semites and threatening a boycott. (Yes there are some boycotts Zionists like!).
The Palestine Advocacy Project sponsored the billboard on Interstate 93 near Boston to highlight the desperate situation in the Gaza strip. The billboard included a photo of 21 year old Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar and read: “Honoring the First Responders of Gaza. Saving Lives. Rescuing Hope.” Razan was murdered earlier this year when tending those who had been injured by Israeli gun fire.
It was estimated to be viewed by over a half million motorists each week and met with positive media coverage.
A Zionist bomb threat derailed the Premiere of Jackie Walker's film 'The Lynching' strangely enough this threat to free speech passed by unremarked in the yellow press
According to Sarah Gold of the Palestine Advocacy Project:
“This campaign is neither engaging us nor our perspective. Instead it is attempting through intimidation to eradicate the avenues of free speech we have endeavored to use; to silence us.”
The billboard is another casualty in an ongoing attack on free speech in the US. Palestine Legal states in their 2017 report
“The Israeli state and its proxy organizations in the U.S. are investing heavily in punitive measures to intimidate and chill the free speech of those who wish to express criticism of Israeli policies.”
The report documents 308 attacks on U.S.-based Palestine-related free speech in 2017 alone.  One complaint accused the billboard of
glorifying those who try to kill and destroy our People and Homeland! Anti Semitism is as old as time itself, Hate of Israel is hate of Jews, completely unacceptable!”
In other words any criticism of Israel is criticism of Jews. Richard Colbath-Hess remarked that the Billboard
does not even mention Israel. Instead it was a celebration of Palestinian heroes. Apparently, there cannot be Palestinian heroes without some advocates of Israel feeling attacked.”
How would the New York Times SUPPORT for the murder of 200 Palestinians have played out 75 years ago when the Nazis laid siege to the Warsaw Ghetto?
This brilliant cartoon transposes what the NYT columnists said about those executed by Israeli sniper fire - they brought it on themselves, even the children - it was a photo op. etc.  the moral blindness of these apologists for murder is thrown into stark relief by the comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto
This is a quite brilliant cartoon depicting how NYT columnists like Thomas Friedman, who justified Israel’s murder of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, would have treated the Nazi murder of the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto if they had been exercising their talents on behalf of Joseph Goebbels.

This demonstration against the sale of a house to an Arab is not racist - it is merely the assertion of Jewish identity - notice how the Jewish Labour Movement has nothing to say about this but if Jews experienced this in England the air would be thick with 'antisemitism' accusations
The Jewish residents of Afula are good Zionists.  Noone can deny them that. In keeping with the spirit of Zionism they wish to preserve the ‘Jewish character’ of Afula. That was why, in June this year, hundreds of Jewish demonstrators protested about the sale of a house in Afula to non-Jews.  You can, of course, understand their concern.  Afula is, or was, a 100% Jewish city like most towns and communities in Israel. After all Israel is a Jewish state
Of course, without a formal declaration of Apartheid this is not possible everywhere and a few places, such as Haifa, are mixed although even there Arabs live in their own areas. That is why the presence of Black Africans is so resented in South Tel Aviv.
The need to preserve Israel’s Jewish Zionist character also explains why Israel is concerned with maintaining its demographic majority, a policy that is common to all Zionist parties. The Israeli Labour Party is as concerned about separating off from Arabs as the right-wing Zionist parties. The following article from Ha’aretz explains why the newly elected Council in Afula has lost no time in barring Arabs from its local park (dressed up as barring only non-residents).
The swearing-in ceremony Thursday in which the Afula City Council vowed to maintain the city’s Jewish character is a nationalist rite with dangerous potential. On Facebook the new mayor, Avi Elkabetz, proudly stated that he had closed the city park the day before to everyone but city residents. Elkabetz is keeping his election promise. After all, he pledged to maintain this northern city’s Jewish character and fight the “conquest of the park.”
This isn’t the first attempt to “maintain the Jewish character” of Afula. A protest once arose in the city after Arab families won the bidding process to have dozens of housing units built. And Afula isn’t alone. A few months ago, Kfar Vradim in the Western Galilee hills tried to halt a bidding process after it emerged that half the winners of the previous tender were Arabs.
Israel has a long history of insularity, exclusion and discrimination – in allocating land and other resources, in distributing the population around the country, and in residential screening committees – not only toward the Arab minority but also toward Mizrahi Jews and other groups.
The ceremony in Afula is another warning sign against dangerous processes underway in the Jewish community under the most right-wing government in the country’s history and a prime minister who, at the ballot box, feeds on incitement against Israel’s Arab citizens.
This swearing-in ceremony is a direct continuation of the nation-state law. This legislation, contrary to what people say on the right, expresses a breakdown of the ideology crafted by the country’s founders. It’s a betrayal of the Declaration of Independence’s values and a renunciation of equality as a fundamental value.
Against the backdrop of the enshrining of Jewish supremacy and Arab inferiority, and the racist incitement that has become typical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, not only should we not be surprised at shows of nationalist insularity and incitement, we should get used to the terrible idea that these will only spread.
Citizens in a democratic country have the right to live wherever they want. No local authority has the right to prevent any person from living in its jurisdiction, or to close a park to Arabs on the pretext of promoting an “atmosphere of Afulaites.”
Hopefully this racist, inflammatory government will pass away soon. Until then, the only hope to stop the illness’ spread is in the opposition that, against all odds, will spring everywhere Jews and Arabs live side by side in peace, Afula included.
Revisiting Naz Shah
The 'antisemitic' map of Israel inside the USA that Naz Shah tweeted came from a Zionist site, Information Regarding Israel's Security (IRIS) 
One of the mysteries of the affair of Naz Shah MP was where her map showing Israel as part of the United States came from. The Zionists screamed ‘anti-Semitism’ but as Mandy Rice-Davies of Christine Keeler fame once remarked, ‘they would say that wouldn’t they?’.
It has been variously claimed to have originated on Norman Finkelstein’s web site and Mike Sivier has claimed it originated on the anti-Semitic Redress site.
Just to remind people Naz Shah posted comments at the time of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014 one of which said that since the United States loved Israel so much maybe they could accommodate them.  She even provided a map to demonstrate how the USA could quite easily accommodate Israel.
To most people this was a humorous meme about a warmongering, racist state but to the Zionists it was, yes you’ve guessed it anti-Semitic.  Unfortunately Naz Shah didn’t step up to defend herself and displayed the same mentality as the victims of Stalin’s purges.  She apologised, never a good thing to do when Zionists are on the attack.
I have previously stated that the map appeared on the Jewish Virtual Library site.  In fact it originated on the site of an organisation called Information Regarding Israel's Security (IRIS) although Redress clearly redrew it and passed it off as its own idea.
Israel’s Warrior Foetus – Israel gets them young
The sickness of Israel's militaristic society is captured in this graphic
An article in Newsweek in May told of how an ‘ad for the Lis Maternity Hospital in Tel Aviv featuring a foetus wearing a beret with the caption underneath reading “received the President's Award for Excellence, 2038.” The award is a high military honour handed out on the eve of Israel's Independence Day. 
The article quoted Israeli journalist Mairav Zonszein who wrote on the Tel Aviv-based website +972 Magazine
“Portraying an unborn child as a soldier is disturbing in its own right, regardless of country.
"In Israel, an occupying power whose military has for over five decades been primarily concerned with maintaining control over a civilian population, this ad is even more charged and offensive," she said.
“The notion that a good hospital will produce good soldiers is pathological. That a top hospital believes the best way to get women to choose their maternity ward is by convincing them their baby is destined to be a successful soldier in the Israel Defense Forces is also a genuine indication of just how militaristic Israeli society is,” Zonszein added.
I seem to remember that child soldiers have gone out of fashion.  Except it would seem in Israel where they start even before the baby has left the womb.  No doubt another accomplishment of Israeli technology.
Brighton’s Christian Zionists
James Dyer - one of the madder Christian fundamentalists and a noted bigot, part of Sussex Friends of Israel attempts to disrupt Palestine solidarity stall
Brighton's Zionist Christians - Daniel (in glasses), Dyer and Gill Young, a fruitcake in any language
And here are the mugshots of 3 of Brighton’s Christian Zionists.  They are part of the EDL supporting Sussex Friends of Israel. As good fundamentalist Christians they are devoted to the Book of Revelations and the idea that the Jews will all ‘return’ to Israel whence the majority of them will perish on the plains of Armagedon and the uber-racist amongst them will Rapture themselves up to heaven alongside the Chosen.
Socialists Against Lizards– Lansman Concentrates on the Eccentric David Icke rather than Tommy Robinson who is a fascist menace
Momentum and Lansman's idiotic video which can only boost Icke
David Icke is a right-wing crackpot not a fascist menace - yet Lansman's Momentum treats him as an equal threat to Black, Jewish and Asian people
First it was the actress Tanya Shew’s video for Momentum which was panned by everyone.  The Zionists didn’t like it because she said she supported BDS and Palestinian free speech should not be inhibited by false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’.  We didn’t like it because it concentrated on something that wasn’t a problem in the first place and raised the old bogey about why Jews should dissociate themselves from Israel when Israel claims them as its own.
Lansman's tie up with Progress, the JLM and AWL - the fight against fake antisemitism is on
Now Lansman has got into bed with Progress and the AWL and various hangers on from the Right to form Socialists Against Anti-Semitism. The only problem is that it doesn’t include any socialists and is a pale pink version of the Tory run Labour Against Antisemitism which includes such luminaries as Jonathan Hoffman, a friend of Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer of Britain First.
Anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice in today’s Britain. Jews are privileged not economically discriminated against. Jews aren’t the victims of Windrush or subject to stop and search and they aren’t under represented in Parliament or the Establishment. If Anti-Semitism was a problem does anyone seriously think that the Mail and Sun – which employed Katie ‘refugees are cockroaches’ Hopkins would have been so concerned about it?  When people are accused of ‘Anti-Semitism’ today it is akin to accusing them of Communism 60 years ago.  The fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ is the new McCarthyism which is why the right-wing of Labour, which didn’t concern itself with May’s hostile environment policy, is so concerned about anti-Semitism.
Tania Shew's self indulgent video was universally panned - someone should tell Lansman that it's not Jews but Black people who are the subject of the Windrush Scandal - its Mosques not Synagogues which are being attacked
Lansman seems to have taken leave of his senses. His new video on David Icke, who is certifiably mad, with his lizard obsession, is complete madness.  Certainly Icke is anti-Semitic however he doesn’t pose a threat to anyone.  It is Tommy Robinson and his thousands of supporters in the Football Lads Alliance who are the real threat. Lansman’s demonstration, with his Zionist Labour Movement friends outside Icke’s meeting is a complete diversion from the demonstration against Tommy Robinson called for this Sunday. 
It would seem that the Jon Lansman, believes that Jews are equal victims of racism to Muslims and Black people today. That is a simple lie.
Luke Akehurst and his Zionist Shitlords
'Shitlord' is not a word I'd come across.  Apparently it is a meme for bigot or racist.  I prefer to think of Akehurst and friends as Zionist Shits
Tony Greenstein

2 December 2018

George H.W. Bush - The Death of a War Criminal

How the Mainstream Media Turn Villains into Saints



It is sickening the way the press eulogise dead war criminals and US Presidents in particular.  I can remember the BBC gushing over Ronald Reagan when he died and making a tribute programme to the man who unleashed the Contras in Nicaragua and supported the death squads in El Salvador. Ronald Reagan was seen as a beacon of hope for democracy even whilst he did his best to impoverish the poorest Americans.  But this is how our opinion makers work.
George Bush was the man who headed the CIA, a criminal organisation which subverted democratically elected governments in Latin America and brought the regimes of Pinochet and Videla to power in Chile, replete with their torture chambers and mass disappearances.  Bush represented all that was most vile in American politics and the fact that the Clintons are gushing all over his memory should teach us that when it comes to US politics there is no essential difference between Republicans and Democrats.

George Bush was the son of Senator Prescott Bush, a businessman and banker who made much of his fortune trading with Nazi Germany even after war was declared.  But as one of America's leading families, almost akin to  royalty, he escaped prosecution for aiding the enemy at a time of war despite financing Fritz Thyssen one of the largest steel and coal barons who organised finance for Hitler.
People won't remember the shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes of the US Navy. 290 people, including 66 children, were murdered. George H W Bush was not the kind quirky, friendly soul that is made out today.  George H.W. Bush in 1988 responded to the mass murder by saying: "I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are." was his Trumpian response. 
The USS Vincennes
Below is an article by Mehdi Hassan on Bush’s legacy.

Tony Greenstein

December 1 2018, 4:38 p.m.

President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 16, 1991, after U.S. forces began military action against Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm. Photo: Charles Tasnadi/AP
The tributes to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man “of the highest character,” said his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. “He loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to another former president, Barack Obama, Bush’s life was “a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.” Apple boss Tim Cook said: “We have lost a great American.”

In the age of Donald Trump, it isn’t difficult for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of him as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with “class” and “integrity.” It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a “blowhard,” and that he eschewed the white nationalist, “alt-right,” conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said, “firing a shot.” He spent his life serving his country — from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and eight great-grandkids.

Yes I know this was written for his son but it is equally applicable  to the father
Nevertheless, he was a public, not a private, figure — one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen way. “When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms,” as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued, because it leads to “false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts.” The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him — his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent — than much of the political and media classes might have you believe.
Consider:
He ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should forever be associated with Bush’s 1988 presidential bid. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts — where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor —  had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called “Weekend Passes, released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.
As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater bragged, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” Bush himself was quick to dismiss accusations of racism as “absolutely ridiculous,” yet it was clear at the time — even to right-wing Republican operatives such as Roger Stone, now a close ally of Trump — that the ad had crossed a line. “You and George Bush will wear that to your grave,” Stone complained to Atwater. “It’s a racist ad. … You’re going to regret it.”
Stone was right about Atwater, who on his deathbed apologized for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did.
He made a dishonest case for war. Thirteen years before George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Keating concluded, “was sold on a mountain of war propaganda.”
For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait without provocation or warning.” What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an effective green light to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a week before his invasion, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed that he was doing so in order “to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” As Scott Peterson wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, “Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated … that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.”
Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert. “It was a pretty serious fib,” Heller told Peterson, adding: “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”

President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to discuss the Persian Gulf War. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP

He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, “a serious violation of the laws of war.”

U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”
Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.
By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information. (Sound familiar?)
He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet his vice president’s involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention. “The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete,” wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his final report on the Iran-Contra affair in August 1993.
Why? Because Bush, who was “fully aware of the Iran arms sale,” according to the special counsel, failed to hand over a diary “containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/contra” and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — on the eve of Weinberger’s trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. “The Weinberger pardon,” Walsh pointedly noted, “marked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.” An angry Walsh accused Bush of “misconduct” and helping to complete “the Iran-contra cover-up.”
Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn’t it?

 A U.S. marshal, left, looking for a suspect, shows a mug shot to a man found allegedly using drugs in a crackhouse, according to police, in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1989. The police raid was part of President George H.W. Bush’s war on drugs. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
He escalated the racist war on drugs. In September 1989, in a televised address to the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House . … It could easily have been heroin or PCP.”

Yet a Washington Post investigation later that month revealed that federal agents had “lured” the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that they could make an “undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity” (the dealer didn’t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions). Bush cynically used this prop — the bag of crack — to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.
The result? “Millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS — all in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ that did nothing to reduce drug abuse,” pointed out Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014. Bush, he argued, “put ideology and politics above science and health.” Today, even leading Republicans, such as Chris Christie and Rand Paul, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure.
He groped women. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, in late 2017, at least eight different women have come forward with claims that the former president groped them, in most cases while they were posing for photos with him. One of them, Roslyn Corrigan, told Time magazine that Bush had touched her inappropriately in 2003, when she was just 16. “I was a child,” she said. The former president was 79. Bush’s spokesperson offered this defense of his boss in October 2017: “At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures.” Yet, as Time noted, “Bush was standing upright in 2003 when he met Corrigan.”
Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility; he engaged in race baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe.