{"id":12786,"date":"2018-12-04T10:42:59","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T15:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=12786"},"modified":"2018-12-05T11:02:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-05T16:02:29","slug":"usa-today-president-george-h-w-bushs-disastrous-policies-and-precedents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/04\/usa-today-president-george-h-w-bushs-disastrous-policies-and-precedents\/","title":{"rendered":"USA Today: President George H.W. Bush’s Disastrous Policies and Precedents"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>USA Today, December 4, 2018<\/h1>\n

George H.W. Bush was a little Trumpy well before we had Donald Trump<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/section>\n
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by James Bovard, <\/span><\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Those who laud President Bush forget he limited trade, escalated our drug war, and obstructed a special counsel.<\/em><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Tributes are pouring in for former President George H.W. Bush, who passed away last week at the age of 94.\u00a0Bush\u2019s gentlemanly manners and reasonable rhetoric are being lauded by many people repulsed by the current White House occupant.\u00a0But for all the differences of style between Donald Trump and the first president Bush, the two men have more in common than we’d like to remember.<\/p>\n

Bush was the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover.\u00a0Like Trump, he spoke of the need for level playing fields\u00a0and fair trade.\u00a0But Bush-style fairness gave federal bureaucrats practically endless vetoes over Americans\u2019 freedom to choose foreign goods. Bush\u2019s Commerce Department ravaged importers with one bureaucratic scam after another, using the dumping law to convict\u00a097 percent\u00a0of imports investigated<\/a>, claiming that their prices were unfairly low to American producers (not consumers).<\/p>\n

Bush also ordered the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate after ice cream imports<\/a> threatened to exceed one percent of the U.S. market. And he\u00a0perpetuated import quotas on steel <\/a>and machine tools.<\/p>\n

Bush implemented restrictive trade quotas<\/h3>\n

While Bush declared that trade was the key to spreading prosperity to poorer nations, he slapped new textile import quotas<\/a> on\u00a0Nigeria, Indonesia, Egypt, the Philippines, Burma (now Myanmar), Costa Rica, Panama, Pakistan\u00a0and many other nations.\u00a0Mexico was allowed to sell Americans only\u00a035,292 bras in 1989 \u2014\u00a0part of a byzantine regime that also restricted imports of tampons, typing ribbons, tarps, twine, table linen, tapestries, ties\u00a0and thousands of other products.<\/p>\n

A 1989 White House report concluded that the trade restrictions added 50 percent to the price of imported clothing.<\/a><\/p>\n

Though Bush called for a \u201ckinder, gentler\u201d nation while campaigning for the presidency in 1988, he turned federal drug policy into a holy war, demonizing drug users while hailing Drug Enforcement Administration agents as America’s “greatest freedom fighters<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s choice for drug czar, William\u00a0Bennett, endorsed public beheadings of drug dealers <\/a>while his administration began deluging law enforcement with surplus military equipment<\/a> that would lead to no-knock raids and wrongful killing disasters around the nation in the following decades.<\/p>\n

The Bush administration turbocharged asset forfeiture, spurring seizures of\u00a0private property on the slightest pretexts from individuals who were never convicted of crimes. Abuses became so widespread that a September 1992 Justice Department internal newsletter <\/a>lamented: \u201cLike children in a candy shop, the law enforcement community chose all manner and method of seizing and forfeiting property, gorging ourselves in an effort which soon came to resemble one designed to raise revenues.”<\/p>\n

Despite the news media exposes of gross injustices, the forfeiture juggernaut continues ravaging the rights of innocent Americans decades later and spurring delusions of absolute power in law enforcement. Last week in a Supreme Court hearing, Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher<\/a> even asserted that forfeiture laws entitle police to confiscate any car going more than 5 miles over the speed limit.<\/p>\n

Bush is being praised this week for his inclusive rhetoric, but his drug war converted low-income Americans into third-class citizens. In a Supreme Court case, Bush\u2019s Solicitor General Kenneth Starr effectively championed police sweeps <\/a>and warrantless searches of interstate bus passengers for illicit drugs. The Florida Supreme Court had compared such sweeps to Nazi and Soviet abuses,\u00a0<\/a>but the Bush administration swayed the Supreme Court to define down the freedom of Americans<\/a> who could afford nothing better than a Trailways ticket.<\/p>\n

Bush had his own special counsel scandal<\/h3>\n

Many people who are praising Bush this week hope that special counsel Robert Mueller annihilates President Donald Trump.\u00a0But Bush\u2019s most perilous precedent might\u00a0have been his de facto demolition of the work of independent\u00a0counsel Lawrence Walsh.<\/p>\n

On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush pardoned six Reagan administration officials for their roles in Iran-Contra, the illegal arms-for-hostage deal that blighted the final years of the Reagan presidency. Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was scheduled to go on trial two weeks later on charges of lying to Congress.<\/a><\/p>\n

Walsh denounced the pardons as part of a cover-up\u00a0and said that they undermined his investigation of possible criminal conduct by Bush himself. Walsh also reported that the president\u2019s pardons prevented Bush from having to testify in court and face \u201csearching questions\u201d<\/a> on his own conduct.<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s pardons greatly reduced the likelihood that his co-conspirators would ever turn state\u2019s evidence against him.\u00a0If Walsh\u2019s investigation had led to Bush\u2019s conviction, the Bush brand name might have been sufficiently damaged that his son would not have captured the presidency in 2000.<\/p>\n

As the funeral oration in Shakespeare\u2019s “Julius Caesar” warned, \u201cThe evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0Unfortunately, America remains imperiled by Bush\u2019s\u00a0trade, drug\u00a0and pardon policies and precedents.<\/p>\n

It is possible to applaud the 41st president\u2019s World War II\u00a0heroism and decades of government service\u00a0without placing a halo over his four years in the White House. The mere fact that George H.W. Bush isn’t\u00a0Donald Trump should not expunge\u00a0Bush\u2019s failures. Democracy cannot afford to deify deceased politicians whose precedents pose continuing perils<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

James Bovard,\u00a0author of “Attention Deficit Democracy,<\/a>” is\u00a0a member of\u00a0USA TODAY\u2019s\u00a0Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter:\u00a0@JimBovard.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

+++<\/p>\n

Thanks to Canva<\/a> for that free quote jpeg.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA Today, December 4, 2018 George H.W. Bush was a little Trumpy well before we had Donald Trump by James Bovard, Those who laud President Bush forget he limited trade, escalated our drug war, and obstructed a special counsel. Tributes are pouring in for former President George H.W. Bush, who passed away last week at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nUSA Today: President George H.W. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12786"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12798,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12786\/revisions\/12798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}