George H.W. Bush got the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday. Here he is, from the official White House Flickr account, meeting beforehand with Obama in the Oval Office:
I’ll always have a soft spot for 41, who, as vice president, wrote (or at least signed…or had somebody stamp his signature on…shh, don’t shatter my childhood delusions) a letter to me in 1988, after I, at 6 years old, wrote him a letter congratulating him on winning the Republican nomination for president. (Money quote: “When Daddy said Dole quit, I said YAY! because I want you.”) That letter is still framed and hanging in my childhood bedroom in Connecticut. Anyway, I proceeded to bore my entire second-grade class to tears by rambling ceaselessly about George Bush’s awesomeness throughout the fall. He was the first politician I ever supported. Well, him and Lieberman, who won his first Senate term that year, and who I thought was the coolest guy ever because he shared my dad’s first name. 🙂 Joementum FTW!
By 1992, I was not only supporting, but volunteering for, the Clinton campaign — but we won’t talk about that. I was a good little Republican, and Bushie, at age 6 and 7! 🙂
Anyway, hooray for Poppy Bush!
P.S. This got me thinking about what my party affiliation / ideological journey over the years would look like if you drew it on a chart. So I drew it on a chart!
Well, it’s a rough chart. Heh.
Probably an auto pen…
You conveniently left out your flirtation with voting for Nader, which I so thoughtfully talked you out of. 🙂
LOL! True. I suppose I should have a green line underneath the blue one. But my flirtation with voting for Nader was brief, and Medea Benjamin (the Greens’ U.S. Senate candidate from California that year, and a big-time Code Pink type nowadays, constantly getting photographed pulling various protest stunts) played at least as big a role as you in talking me out of it. When she introduced Nader at his campus event that October, talking about a “maximum wage” and whatnot, I was like, holy shit, these people are nuts.
I don’t see LaRouche on there anywhere…
Heh. Yeah, there should be a few dozen little movements in the graph indicating that whenever the LaRouche people at USC talked to me, I moved away from whatever position they were advocating at that particular moment.
David #4 – tell me it ain’t so ! Tell me that Brendan wasn’t a LaRouchi’ite !
Even *you* are smarter than that, are you not ?
David’s joking, Alasdair. The LaRouche people are f***in’ nuts. I would occasionally engage them in debate on campus (they had a little booth every Monday at the corner of Jefferson and Trousdale), but I would never in a million years align myself with their loony-tune cause.
P.S. Two of the few times in my life that I’ve ever truly been tempted to either punch somebody or spit in their face involved the LaRouchies. The first time was in a discussion of the 2000 election, when I brought up my dad’s 30 years as an elections official, and the LaRouchie basically implied that all elections officials are corrupt, conspiratorial cronies — thus directly implicating my dad in the Grand Global Conspiracy to, uh, do whatever it is that Lyndon LaRouche thinks the conspirators are up to this week. I got very angry at the guy, and actually caused him to back off his position a bit because I was so pissed.
The second time was, I believe, the Monday after 9/11. The first articulation I ever heard of the “9/11 Truth” concept came from the LaRouchies on 9/17/01. Their little idiot campaigner guy was asking “What did Bush know?” or words to that effect. I walked right over and was like, Are you seriously suggesting the American government did this? I was utterly incensed that anyone would suggest such a thing without any evidence whatsoever. My thought, although I don’t know if I said it in so many words, was, as Bill Clinton said a couple years ago on the same topic, “How dare you?!?” I still feel that way about Truthers, but it was quite a bit rawer six days after the attack.
I trust that Venerable Loy was more sanguine about the suggestion ?
(grin) Did he at least admit to the “crony” part, even if not the “corrupt” ?
When LaRouche equivalents make such accusations, I tend to point out to ’em that ‘projection is seldom a healthy trait’ …
Back when you were on Pajamas Media I thought you would have been at least a little north of the central line on that axis. I assumed they employed a leftist filter.
LOL! Well, if they’d seen this chart at the time, they might not have done business with me. 🙂 But they had to at least know I voted for Kerry (reluctantly, as a member of “Kerry Haters 4 Kerry”), because I think Glenn Reynolds was aware of that fact.
Really, though, it depends on the issue. On foreign policy, I suppose I was a bit north of the central line. On social issues, in particular gay rights, I’m well south. On fiscal/economic/regulatory issues… I don’t know. It’s hard to generalize. I see a lot of merit in both liberal and conservative viewpoints, depending on the specific topic under discussion.
But of course, PJM hired me to write about hurricanes, which, for the most part, know no ideology. But the extent they do, I guess I’m conservative in such things as demanding accountability from local/state officials (and putting more onus on them than on the feds, though I criticized all parties roundly in re: Katrina), but liberal, I guess, in insisting that it’s silly to jump up and down about how there haven’t been too many landfalling U.S. hurricanes since 2005 so clearly global warming is a fraud. Though my writings on that topic for PJM have been largely agnostic, more of a, both sides should stop making stupid arguments.
Brendan #11 – can you support the concept that both sides need to start making verifiable/falsifiable arguments, and share data upon which such arguments are based (to allow verification/refudiation) ?
Alasdair @12:
I have a couple of questions:
A) What evidence would be acceptable/necessary to prove AGW wrong? Or, is it impossible to prove a case against AGW? (which would then make it a religion, not science)
B) Is there any type of weather or climate that is not evidence that climate change is occurring?
gahrie #13 – off the top of my head …
A) Evidence that the Medieval Warm Period didn’t happen, but instead was due to falsified/made up/”adjusted” data could make it more likely that AGW could be real … we are currently seeing the *planet* proving AGW to be incorrect as it *doesn’t* continue getting warmer and warmer … each AGW prediction that is falsified – eg The Seas Have *Not* Risen ! – is another nail in the coffin of the Cultists of Anthropogenic Global Warming …
With that said, for the AGW Cultists (and the cynical folk like Al Gore who are coining it hand over fist selling
IndulgencesCarbon Credits), there is no way to prove AGW wrong because they believe …B) A reasonably accurate alternate term for “climate change” is weather … Great Britain (and Hawai’i) do not have a climate most of the time – they have weather … Southern California (most of the time) doesn’t have weather – it has a climate … so you can put me down as a believer in climate change (even if I seldom see it in the Los Angeles area) …
I don’t use a word like “never” lightly – and I *NEVER* put any credence in AGW …
Earth has had periods with CO2 over 2000 (compared with our current <400) during which Life was abundant …
AGW fanatics kept insisting that, if the North Polar icecap melted, sea levels around the planet would rise by 20-60 FEET … the fact that the North Polar icecap is pretty much floating just didn't/doesn't matter to 'em … so low-lying Pacific Ocean island chains may get washed away by ocean storms … but they are NOT being inundated due to the seas rising … and the Low Countries are *still* not underwater … Oh – and, NO, the election of Teh One does *not* explain why the Dutch aren't underwater – no matter what our First Occupant believes …
Logically, if CO2 is such a catastrophic threat, the AGW folk should either be practising Luddites, or they should be marching on DC to get the US producing at *least* as high a %age of its domestic electricity needs from nuclear as France manages to do year in, year out … (and France's exports of nuclear-generated electricity to other European countries allow those other countries to dabble with windfarms and other "green " jobs) … they shouldn't be buying big houses at current sea level …
Need I go on … ?
(Yes, scientific integrity matters to me)
Brendan – this cartoon immediately made me think of you …
(innocent grin)
Been a long time since I have read your blog. This post cracks me up. Only you would make a chart. I love the chart !
I wonder what the cart would look like if you were my age 50!
If Regan, Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy were there… HM….