George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

irritation to the New York banking community, and Tom Clark, who was Attorney
General under Truman and who later went on to the US Supreme Court, and whose son,
Ramsay Clark, has been distinguished by his denunciation of the war crimes of the Bush
regime in the Gulf war of 1991. A later generation of this same circle was represented by
former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, who was hounded from office during the first
year of George Bush's Presidential tenure, and by Congressman Henry Gonzalez.
Gonzalez stands out as one of the very few of the old Texas populist Democrats left in
elected office today. Gonzalez has put new luster on the time-honored maverick tradition
by offering a bill of impeachment for Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Iran-contra
revelations of 1986, more recently by submitting a bill for the impeachment of George
Bush for his illegal conduct of Operation Desert Shield, and by raising his voice as first
in the Congress for the cause of humanity against genocide with a call for the lifting of
the economic sanctions against Iraq to prevent the needless slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of children after the bombing campaign had ended. And even today there are
still others of this tradition left in positions of key influence: for example, Congressman
Jack Brooks of the ninth district of Texas, the salty chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee, who dared to subpoena Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to appear
before his committee with a ducis tecum of the documents of the Department of Justice
theft of computer software in the Inslaw case.
One of the continuing projects of George Bush's life has been the extirpation of precisely
this populist and sometimes dirigist group of Democrats, and their replacement with "free
enterprise" Republican ideologues, or financier Democrats of the Lloyd Bentsen variety.
The Texas and Oklahoma populist Democrats must be distinguished from their
colleagues of the Old South of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But for the Eastern
Liberal Establishment, it has proven more convenient to lump them all together under the
purveyed image of the racist, bourbon-swilling southern Congressional committee
chairman conspiring in cigar-clouded rooms to defy the popular will as expressed by the
television networks. All southern Democrats of the old school tended to have crippling
weaknesses on the race issue and on the question of union-busting. But on the other side
of the ledger, many southern Democrats had an excellent grasp of infrastructure in the
broadest sense: internal improvements like highways, canals, water projects, rural
electrification, quality accessible public education, health services, electric power
generation.
The nascent southern Republicans of the fifties and sixties, by contrast, were generally as
bad or worse than the Democrats on race and labor relations, and were at the same such
fanatics of Adam Smith's "free market" mystification that all government committment to
maintaining infrastructure, health care, and education went by the boards. The only
positive point left for some of these emerging southern Republicans, such as those who
folllowed Barry Goldwater in 1964, was a patriotic rejection of the machinations of the
Eastern Liberal Establishment as embodied most graphically in the figure of New York
Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was indeed a Goldwater man in those days, as we
will see. But since Bush was himself an organ of that same hated Eastern Liberal
Establishment, he stood utterly bereft of redeeming grace.