The Bush Massacre of the Reaganites

CHQ ^ | 1/23/15 | Richard A. Viguerie

[xzins]

This week marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of the “massacre of the Reaganites” by newly elected President George H.W. Bush that effectively ended the prospect of institutionalizing Reaganism as the governing principle of the Republican Party and America.

We call it the “massacre of the Reaganites” because, in a well-thought-out and carefully crafted purge, on Inauguration Day 1989 practically every conservative who remained in government at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, and certainly any conservative of any political consequence, was fired or forced to resign from their post in the federal government.

Even those who had worked tirelessly to elect George H.W. Bush President in the expectation that a Bush presidency would be effectively the “third term of Ronald Reagan” were dismissed.

Within hours of Bush’s inauguration establishment Republicans, such as James Baker III, who had opposed many of Reagan’s initiatives from within the administration, were promoted. But throughout the government Reagan’s conservative appointees, many of whom were loyal Republicans who had supported Bush, were forced to resign, were stripped of their duties, or were summarily fired by a new administration that wanted no part of the relatively few movement conservatives left in the government on the day Ronald Reagan departed Washington for California.

The few that were left were relegated to the dim reaches of various federal office building and given a few months to find another job or left on the payroll, but given no responsibilities in the new administration. Their in-boxes filled with only magazines and with nothing substantive to do they soon left.

While Bush partisans argued that the new president was justified in putting his own people in place, the 1989 “Inauguration Day Massacre” firings were more akin to political executions; lists of those to be “executed” were drawn up, and they were fired before sundown of the first day of the new Bush administration in a well-planned agenda to replace conservatives (be they Bush supporters or not) with establishment Republicans.

While most conservative critiques of George H.W. Bush tend to focus on “Read my lips,” and Bush’s abandonment of his pledge not to raise taxes, the result of the “Inauguration Day Massacre” firings were with no conservatives left to say “hey wait a minute,” Bush quickly walked away from conservative principles on a long list of policies and decisions.

• Bush reversed himself and imposed a temporary ban on semiautomatic rifles—so-called assault weapons—after first opposing the idea.

• He signed and advocated the Americans with Disabilities Act, creating a whole new realm of litigation nightmares for businesses large and small.

• He bailed out the troubled savings and loans banks.

• He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, making it easier for employees to sue employers.

• He bought into global warming by signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

• He created a “no net loss of wetlands” policy out of whole cloth, with little legislative authority, outraging farmers and landowners across the country.

• And, in what was perhaps his most lasting and damaging betrayal of conservatives, he appointed an obscure state judge, David Souter of New Hampshire, to the Supreme Court.

The “massacre of the Reaganites” should serve as a caution to conservatives who look at Jeb Bush and listen to his “right to rise” rhetoric and think “he sounds pretty good, how bad could a third Bush administration be?” During Reagan’s presidency conservatives frequently said, “Personnel is policy,” and Bush’s Inauguration Day massacre was a sure sign that he intended to abandon Reagan’s policies, and his principles.

Despite all of Bush’s rhetoric about “the transformative power of conservative ideas,” Jeb Bush is the “great white hope” of the Republican establishment.

No one else in America, save Hillary Clinton, starts the 2016 political season with a larger Rolodex of Washington insider supporters than does Jeb Bush. In addition to supporting all of their major policy goals from Common Core to amnesty for illegal aliens, a Bush candidacy will send millions of dollars in consulting business and lucrative lobbying contracts to a small, but powerful, coterie of Bush family supporters and acolytes.

We limited government constitutional conservatives must recognize up front that a successful Jeb Bush campaign would ensure that the Republican establishment stays in power for at least another decade, and it would also ensure that, no matter if Jeb or the Democrat wins, Big Government will continue to get bigger.

[xzins]

I will not be party to further establishing a Bush dynasty in the USA. Jeb, the poor little rich kid, might think it’s his turn to play with the family ‘white house toy’, but supporting an American aristocracy is one of the many reasons to oppose Bush....and Hillary, too, for that matter.

[greyfoxx39]

Interesting article. Comments?

[SpaceBar]

History would have been quite different if...

A: Hitler had been spat on by wealthy muslims while painting watercolors in Vienna, and

B: Reagan had chosen a different running mate.

[Dahoser]

My comments are the same ones I've been saying over and over: the GOPe hates conservatives far more than they dislike Democrats and have never forgiven conservatives, especially Ronaldus Magnus, for ruining their good times as a permanent minority with safe seats and all the pork and hookers they could want.

To further reinforce the point, note how W did not conduct a similar purge of RATS when he took office. In fact, he went out of his way to keep many Clintonistas, most notably that swine Richard Clarke, in the name of continuity, and, of course, he set about romancing the Cape Cod Orca. What, his father forgot to tell him to clean house? Not bloody likely.

[boycott]

Another I didn’t see on the list is abortion. George H. W. Bush was pro-choice before he got on the ticket with Reagan. He had to flip to get on the ticket.

At the time, abortion didn’t seem to be as high a profile issue as it is today. I guess that’s one reason it was largely unnoticed.

George’s father, the late Senator Prescott Bush, was on the board for the organization that later became known as Planned Parenthood. And Senator Prescott Bush was their first treasurer. Several in the Bush family (mostly wives and daughters not seeking votes) are still pro-choice.

—

Another thing I’ll mention is George H. W. Bush sold us down the river with all these free trade agreements.

“New World Order” G.H.W. Bush was on the plane with Kissinger and others that secretly set up the meetings between Nixon and the Chinese. G.H.W. Bush was an ambassador to China. He had a lot to do with taking China from being a 3rd world nation to being the industrial and military power they are today.

GHW Bush was knee deep in transferring so much of our strength and greatness to other nations. He sold us down the river. He’s got oil all over his hands.

---

Reagan was told that he needed Bush on the ticket to win in 1980. I believe Reagan could have won without him. Reagan’s appeal certainly wasn’t Bush. Either way, it has come back to hurt us.

---

Out of the Bushes, W is the most conservatives and likeable to me but he made way too many mistakes. I certainly won’t be voting for Jeb.

[tanknetter]

There are plenty of reasons (amnesty, common core, etc) to oppose Jeb Bush, without resorting to his last name. The fact is that if he had an established rep as the Reaganite black sheep of the Bush clan, he’d be appealing. But he has anything other than that rep.

That having been said, in the mid-1990s I worked and socialized with a lot of Movement Conservatives who had started in the Reagan Administration and risen to mid to senior level (including Senate confirms, not just Sched Cs) in the later Reagan Admin and Bush Administration (having been carried over). They were universally ticked off at Bush for two big reasons: the breaking of the no new taxes pledge and not putting up a real fight against Clinton (”if he didn’t want to fight for it, he shouldn’t have run” was the common sentiment)

So the assertions made in this piece don’t really mesh with my own recollections and experiences having lived through that era. It strikes me as a piece intended to apply blood guilt/guilt by association to Jeb Bush using what’s at best a very weak argument about his father.

Which isn’t needed in Bush’s case. There’s PLENTY of stuff to disqualify him as a Conservative and as the GOP nominee, on the merits of the policy positions he holds.

[nathanbedford]

The article describes the palace revolution conducted by George HW Bush upon his inauguration. I would like to offer my contribution which is an assessment of the character of his son, George W. Bush.

Please accept that this is a long post and a movement of the mouse will avoid overexposure. Please further except that these combined posts were written during the incumbency of George W Bush and should be judged in that context. Without context they might appear a bit naïve but I think they do capture the essence of the man. That is important because I think they also capture the spirit of the Bush clan. They are not of party politics they belong to a different culture and they are certainly not ideologues.

Here is a compendium of those replies:

The problem with George Bush is that he is not primarily a conservative, he is primarily a Christian, and he does not have a calculus that is congruent with yours or mine, even though both of us might be Christians. George Bush sees partisan politics as petty and ultimately meaningless. We see partisanship as the indispensable stuff of freedom. At election time the Bushes will hold their nose and dip into partisanship. But it is not in their essential nature to wage war for tactical political advantage.

George Bush wants what Bill Clinton wanted: To fashion a legacy. He does not want to be remembered as the man who cut a few percentage points from an appropriation bill but as the man who reshaped Social Security. I've come to the conclusion that the Bushes see politics as smarmy, fetid. It must be indulged in if one is to practice statesmanship but it is statesmanship alone that that is worthy as a calling.

They are honest, they are loyal, they are patrician. There would've been admired and respected if had lived among the founding fathers. But it is Laura Bush and Momma Bush who really and truly speak for the family and who tell us what they are thinking and who they are. There's not a Bush woman who does not believe in abortion. They believe in family, they live in loyalty, they believe in the tribe, but they do not believe in partisan politics.

I believe it is time for us to decide no longer to be used by the Bush family as useful idiots and instead to begin to use the Bushes as our useful idiots . I say this with the utmost admiration and respect for everything the Bushes stand for. Who would not be proud beyond description to have a father or an uncle who was among the first and youngest of naval aviators to fight in the Pacific and to be twice shot down. Not a stain or blemish of corruption or personal peccadillo has touched the family(except for the brother whom I believe was cleared of bank charges). They are the living embodiment of all that is good and noble in the American tradition.

THE CHARACTER OF GEORGE BUSH

Let me make it quite clear from the very beginning that I do not assail the virtuous character of George Bush. To the contrary, I admire it. In September 2006, I posted this:

I believe the author missunderestimates George Bush. If he acts, he will not act to protect his legacy, he will act to protect his country.

In recent weeks, no FReeper has been more harsh, even bitter in his criticism of President Bush. But I have never accused him of low or base motives. I have abandoned George Bush over Harriet Meir, spending, McCain Feingold, and the foolishness and ineptness over Valerie Plame, the ineptness over Katrina, validating Democrats by pandering to the likes of Teddy Kennedy, the need to change course in Iraq, and above all, over immigration, but I never thought that Bush was wrong because he would sell us out or because he was ambitious.

Bush will act, or not act, because he believes it is right and because he is a patriot. Unlike the author, Bush is not a neocon, his agenda is strictly America’s future.

If one considers the list of failures for which I indict George Bush in the preceding quoted paragraphs, not one of those actions that so troubled me occurred because George Bush is a small man. To the contrary, they happened because George Bush chose options congruent with his faith. They were animated out of a fullness of heart, not a meanness of character.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HARRIET MEIR

Looking back, I think the nomination of Harriet Mier was a profound disillusionment for me as it was for George Will and other conservatives. I quote a reply in the context of that nomination to demonstrate that I am not personally opposed to George Bush, to the contrary I admire his character:

[Quoting George Will:] “As for Republicans, any who vote for Meir will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch’s invaluable dignity.”

As a result of the policies of the Bush administration, Republicans have forfeited their formerly kryptonite hundred year claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility.

Thus we have wantonly kicked away one of the legs of our stool. Another leg of the stool was comprised of our ability to go to the electorate, as George Bush did successfully in the last two elections, and persuasively argue that we were the party of judicial integrity. That we were the party which manned the threshold to the Constitution like the Patriots at Thermopylae to check the ravening horde of liberals who would sack the Constitution.

The Harriet Meir nomination in a stroke has needlessly compromised our ability plausibly to appeal to the electorate as a the party which stands on constitutional principle and eschews judicial opportunism.

Why did we saw off two of our three legs? On the issue of spending some would say it is because Bush was never a conservative. Others would say that it was the war that did it but that would not be the whole truth, at least that would not be the whole explanation. Others would say that it is simply the nature of a politician to buy votes with other people’s money and the temptation, even to Republicans, is irresistible.

WHAT THE NOMINATION OF HARRIET MEIR REVEALED OF GEORGE BUSH’S CHARACTER

My own view is that our present dilemma is the product of a little bit of each of the above. For years now I’ve been posting my view the George Bush is not essentially a movement conservative but a committed Christian. Here’s what I’ve been saying recently:

“The truth is straightforward, as usual. Bush is first a committed Christian, then a devoted family man who values personal loyalty to an extreme, and third, a conservative when that philosophy does not conflict with the first two. In this appointment, Bush believes he has satisfied all three legs of the stool.

“On the limited evidence available, I do positively believe Bush appointed her because she has been reborn. I mean that quite respectfully. I mean that he is counting on her being a new person. Most of the time it means she will vote conservative. But I honestly do not think Bush appointed her to vote conservative. I think he appointed he to vote in the SPIRIT.”

The sad thing for us conservatives is to contemplate just how unnecessary the debacle over Harriet Meir really was. The whole nomination fiasco is almost uniquely unrelated to identifiable political or policy considerations. In the absence of such temporal explanations, I am left with the conclusion that Bush has selected her because she is Christian.

FAITH TRUMPS PARTY

If one accepts that Bush’s Christian character is the key to understanding the man, it explains both your support of him and his virtues and my support of him and his virtues, but also my disillusionment with him-equally because of his virtues. If George Bush gives billions of our taxpayer dollars away to fight AIDS in Africa it is a noble gesture out of the impulse of a Christian heart. If he toasts Bill Clinton in the White House and by the gesture implicitly tells the world that the entire Republican effort to impeach Clinton was misplaced, he does so out of the Christian duty to love his enemy. If he panders to Teddy Kennedy in the White House, he sees himself not as sleeping with the enemy but as turning the other cheek. If he is “compassionate” in his conservatism, he sees it as the outworking of his Christian duty to give alms. Finally, if he consigns his whole administration to disintegration as he watches his approval numbers descend into the 20s because he declined Karl Rove’s advice to defend the administration’s Iraq policy and thus wrecks his administration along with his party’s chances, he does so because as a Christian he knows he will be called to account for his actions in another venue.

If George Bush and his family think that politics is “smarmy” and that party politics are even more smarmy, it comes from his epiphany with Billy Graham which made him a new man, a man which sees another world, a larger vision. The world of party politics is grimy and transitory and not a worthy place to store up one’s treasure. It is as nothing against the overwhelming contemplation of eternity.

THE PROPER ROLE OF PARTY IN GOVERNANCE

The founders designed a government which they hoped would function entirely without parties, indeed, it is the job of parties to bridge over the obstacles to power which the founders installed as checks and balances in our Constitution. The founders called partisanship “factionalism” but whatever the label they feared parties because they saw them as another name for the mob. Parties are in business to overcome the checks and balances which frustrate their ambitions.

It is hardly politic for an essayist today to openly declare that the founder’s got something wrong but that is undeniably so when it comes to the issues of parties.

Today, no administration can effectively govern if it permits itself to be frustrated by the checks and balances in the Constitution. The degree to which the Congress will do the president’s will largely depends upon the degree to which he can exercise party discipline. George Bush was a profound failure in this respect and Republicans paid terrible forfeits in 2006 and 2008. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were able to enforce enough party cohesion to escape impeachment. George Bush simply could not, or would not, control the Rinos in his own party except perhaps on the issues of maintaining the fight in Iraq and tax cuts.

So there is always a tension, thank God, between the politics of effective government on the one hand and the constitutional rights of our citizens on the other. If we drift too far toward one party government we risk our liberty. If we drift too far from party discipline, we risk the failure of government.

All this brings us to an examination of your assertion:

First of all, all Presidents have a duty to be above party politics, Presidents represent all Americans, not just their particular party. President Bush upheld that discipline in an exemplary manner and it was good for the country.

For all the reasons I’ve expressed above, I am bound to say that I find your sentiment noble in conception but very, very naïve when it comes to application. What George Bush did was not good for the country because he put us in the mess we are in. When political scientists write the history of the election of Barak Obama they are going to write that it was lost not by John McCain’s haplessness but by George Bush. It was lost because Bush abandoned party, not the other way around as you assert, and without party the president becomes so confounded by the checks and balances put in place by our founders that he simply cannot govern effectively. If he cannot govern effectively, he cannot “represent all Americans.” No party means no president, no president means no governing for America.

Nobility of character explains George Bush but it does not excuse him or relieve us of the consequences.

[Jabba the Nutt]

"Stay out da Bushes!" Probably the only thing ever said by Donna "white boys" Brazile that I ever agreed with.

Ronald Reagan's biggest mistake was the first decision he made, to make George H.W. Bush his VP candidate.

If you take comfort that the Bushes have learned from their mistakes, you're in for a cold shower. All the mistakes Bush The Elder made took place after he sat at Reagan's right hand for 8 years. Then he was determined to go out there and show them how to do it right with moderation. 8 years.

I wouldn't vote for a Bush for dog catcher. Never, no way.

[McGruff]

on Inauguration Day 1989 practically every conservative who remained in government at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, and certainly any conservative of any political consequence, was fired or forced to resign from their post in the federal government.

About the only positive thing since then was the arrival of Sarah Palin on the scene. McCain probably still regrets that decision.

[Lisbon1940]

Which conservatives were purged? No names in the article.

[1010RD]

Excellent and true. GHW Bush was Reagan’s worst mistake. A real poison pill of GOPe.

[section9]

They hate Reagan, and always have, because his landslide victories remind the Establishment how weak they are.

The Bushies lost the popular vote to a Cigar Store Indian and beat Kerry by 100,000 votes in Ohio to win.

Reagan never had that problem. Ever.

[KoRn]

Our nation has been looted, ruined, and its people sold out by a few generations of power elites that set about enriching themselves, their families, and associates.

After our population was dumbed down by the poisoned education system, it was easy for them to do it. The people just sat still and watched it happen, and some of them were so stupid, they even helped make it happen!

[Will88]

No doubt, GHWB was a Rino Trojan Horse at the outset of the Reagan presidency. They’ve all worked to stamp out conservatism ever since 1981.

[tanknetter]

There’s actually a (in retrospect) funny story about Lyn Nofziger completely whigging out when he was told Reagan had chosen Bush as his running mate. Apparantly there was a drawing of straws to determine who got to tell him. And his reaction could be heard clear down the hall of the hotel they were staying in.

[T-Bird45]

Well done on the historical expository!

I’m done with voting for any more Bush candidates but it’s hard to overcome their basic patrician geniality. This especially applied to GWB due to his mastering alcohol addiction through faith. I also can’t overlook the exemplary WW2 service of GHWB. Yet, the American people have to realize (and vote accordingly) that our government was not devised to serve the aspirations of some for dynastic rule.

[Dr. Sivana]

Bush I lost me when he made abortionist Louis Sullivan head of HHS.

[no-to-illegals]

Something that continues to puzzle me to this day is was HW in front of the schoolbook depository at the time of the assassination 1963? Mrs. Kennedy, at the time, blamed lbj from what have read and left the country shortly afterward with her children but what if this was a ruse and HW was involved? What was HW doing, (also) a puzzle to me, at the time of the attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. HW at one point was Head of CIA. IIRC, prior to being VP. Know this not to the point of jeb but there are Many questions. No answers, as always.

[Rappini]

After reading this piece I’m going to move to Cananda,A.