HBO's new documentary on our 41st president will air tonight:
In the film, Bush apparently defends his administration's tax hikes, just as his son Jeb just did. And they are both right. The tough decisions George HW made – to raise taxes and to stop at the border of Iraq – look in retrospect far wiser than they did at the time. His attempt to nip the settlement movement in the bud was also the last time any president seriously stood up to the Greater Israel lobby (Bush went much, much further than Obama). But the embrace of tax increases is new, and a direct rebuff to Norquist madness. Kornacki reminds us that "Bush hasn’t always been this proud of what he did" and that during the 1994 election he told "Americans that he’d made a mistake and regretted ever doing it":
There was a serious consequence to this, because it allowed the anti-tax absolutists in the GOP to claim vindication. The idea that taxes should never be raised for any reason became popular in the GOP in the late 1970s and ‘80s, but it was only after the ’90 saga that it became an article of faith. As a result, when Clinton proposed his tax hike/spending cut deficit reduction plan in ’93, not a single Republican was willing to vote for it, nor have any Republicans been willing to compromise on the issue since.
Lloyd Grove fears that the film "trivializes the former president's impact." He has some evidence for that:
As a married student at Yale, he liked to go to the roof of his apartment building to ogle his 75-year-old landlady: "Hurry on up! Mrs. Seymour is taking a shower and you can see her naked!" Bush recounts. "It wasn’t very mature of us."
But any soft focus is worth the following MoDo bait:
No longer running for anything, Bush finally ends the politically expedient fiction that he’s a pork-rind-loving Texan instead of an Eastern establishment blueblood. Touting his qualifications for the presidency, including jobs as U.S. envoy to China and director of the CIA, he tellingly remarks: "It wasn’t like out of the clear blue sky some hick from West Texas coming in."
Ouch.
The Dish 