INNAUGURAL POST: The Essence of George Bush

This passage from the Washington Post, Tuesday, July 27, 1999, tells alot about the heart of the anti-intellectualsim in the White House:

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. "I knew your father," Bush remembers Coffin saying, "and your father lost to a better man."

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father's values were not universally admired.

"You talk about a shattering blow," said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. "Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I'm not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel]."

The protestations of intellectualism from the so-called neoconservatives are merely the vanities of fourth-rate Straussians. We have heard that Rove has longed to take us back to the McKinley era... to the extent that Bush understands history, I believe he would rather take us back to the pre-Enlightenment Era... Feudalism, primogeniture and an unquestioned aristocracy buttressed by the notion of Divine Right. That is the depth of immaturity with which we are dealing.

P.P.P.S. You can read my previous diatribes and soliloquy's at...

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