President Bush – RESOLVE

Hurricane Deception

By Steve Woodward

The tweet was snarky, as is to be expected. It speculated that President Donald Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Poland, not because of the looming threat of Hurricane Dorian, but because he is lazy and needed an excuse to spend the holiday weekend playing golf, as usual.

Imagine the false outrage had Trump made the trip to Poland? The twitter-sphere would have condemned him for abandoning the homeland amid yet another climate change-generated natural disaster. Dorian is Trump’s Katrina!

Over on Facebook, we’ve encountered a chorus of whiners reacting to Trump’s forthcoming appearance in Fayetteville, NC (Sept. 9), on the eve of a special election for a U.S. congressional seat in NC-9. The outrage centers on a narrative that Trump’s 2020 campaign is saddling municipalities with unprecedented costs, closing in on $1 million, for additional security and other logistical needs when he rolls into to town for his signature rallies.

Naturally, no one mentions how the campaigns of sitting presidents seeking re-election handled these costs in the past. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were called out for similar fiscal “abuses”. Obama used Air Force One to travel with then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a 2016 joint campaign appearance, but a Bush era ethics lawyer had no issues with the arrangement.

It’s an unavoidable problem, Richard Painter said in an interview with ABC News, for presidents who are simultaneously commanders-in-chiefs and the leaders of their respective political parties.

“I don’t think this is controversial,” Painter said. “A president that won’t campaign for his own party isn’t the leader of his own party. If someone claimed that President Bush was abusing taxpayer money to campaign, we would have laughed at that.”

But in the era of Trump this type of reasoned analysis is no longer possible. The narratives build one upon the other in the media’s endless quest to diminish him and marginalize his administration and supporters. His campaign doesn’t reimburse? Of course not, as a businessman he was famous, or so it goes, for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed. Everybody knows that (because it has been repeated for three years running). He’s lazy because he plays rounds of golf despite working more hours than any president since perhaps Abe Lincoln (never mentioned), and granting more media access than any president ever (not even close).

Authors Gary Marcus and Annie Duke explain how unrelenting fake news perpetuates Trump delusion syndrome in a piece they co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, which lays out how the Left and its compliant media hold the truth hostage so effectively. It is a simple matter of exploiting behavior.

In a world of information overload and distraction wrought by technology and daily life as we know it “we tend to assume that whatever we hear is true.” Admittedly, this is an objectionable generalization but it is not aimed at readers of this blog. It is aimed at the growing sector of society identified by Rush Limbaugh as the “low information voter.”

The authors site numerous studies that have demonstrated how vulnerable human beings are to being snookered. A 2017 study by faculty at New York University examined around 500,000 social media messages. Subtle words such as “hate”, “destroy” or “blame” accelerate the spread of these messages by 20% per emotional word.

“Fake news tends to avoid nuance or neutral language and frequently adds layers of emotion and moralizing — all of which makes false items spread much faster than the real thing,” Marcus and Duke wrote. They conclude a war can be waged on fake news by teaching “information literacy” across all age groups.

In WSJ August 31 – September 1 editions, the newspaper profiles prolific novelist Salmon Rushdie. His 14th just-published novel is a contemporary version of a 17th-century classic, “Don Quixote”. His motivation for writing it partially draws on the fake news and reality TV phenomena from which almost no one readily escapes.

“We live in a moment in which truth is stranger than fiction,” Rushdie says, “and so the fiction has to decide how strange it needs to be in order to get close to the truth.”

This week’s fictional thread, which inevitably will work its way back to the Trump White House, is that Hurricane Dorian is another in a series of monster storms delivering “unprecedented” fury.

“The truth is that the storms that are hitting the Caribbean with this intense magnitude are historic, unprecedented, and these storms are manmade storms,” contends Emory University Prof. Tiphanie Yanique in a televised interview with the independent news hour Democracy Now.

The guest and her interviewer, both clearly in lockstep with the climate change narrative, failed to address a well documented chronology of Category 5 hurricanes. The first Cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin was recorded in 1924, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), followed by 34 more through this year. Only four have hit the United States as a Cat 5 across 95 years.

Now, test your information literacy as you read this concluding sentence: The most intense Cat 5 hurricane to make U.S. landfall hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. President Roosevelt was blamed, along with climate change.

Thanks, Tiger

By Steve Woodward

Joining millions of television viewers as golf legend Tiger Woods defied insurmountable odds to win his fifth Masters green jacket, 14 years after claiming his fourth, was intensely nostalgic.

I love the game of golf. Yet Tiger’s Masters resurgence had nothing to do with golf. Close your eyes. It’s 2005. Tiger was invincible. America was great, the indispensable nation. Our kids were still kids. Our backs were not stiff and sore. The media was, mostly, committed to journalistic integrity. Saddam Hussein was defeated in Iraq. The U.S. economy had roared back from the dot-com bubble. 9/11 still united us as a nation. George W. Bush had begun his second term as our 43rd President.

Tiger 2019 — Tiger Woods wins fifth Masters.

Less than two decades ago, when Tiger Woods was the undisputed No. 1 golfer in the world, we took so much for granted that today, in 2019, is up for grabs, in jeopardy of demise.

Marriage was defined, as through the ages, as a union between a man and a woman. Gay marriage was not legally recognized.

The U.S.-Mexico border was secure.

A male was a male; a female a female. He, she. Men’s and women’s rooms.

No one faced a penalty for refusing to purchase medical insurance they either did not need or could not afford.

Speakers invited to university campuses rarely were uninvited due to the threat of violence posed by other student groups; and those who fulfilled their engagements rarely required security or feared for their well being.

There were no openly anti-semitic or progressive socialists serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Elected federal servants were duty bound to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Barack Obama was a junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, working on a book in his spare time. Hillary Clinton was a junior Senator from Arkansas representing New York.

Tattoo shops were not very busy. Men wore suits and ties to work. Comedians were funny, entertaining.

I closed my eyes on Masters Sunday. Those harmonious Augusta National birds were chirping as if outside my window. Crowds roared as Tiger moved into a lead he would not relinquish. If only for a moment, it was 2005.

Bush 41

By Steve Woodward

Fox New Channel political analyst Chris Stirewalt, a marvelously plain talker, provided a first take in the moments after President George Herbert Walker Bush was memorialized and commended to God inside the Washington National Cathedral, December 5.

“It made me very proud of my country,” Stirewalt said, because the service was a demonstration of civility by and between political enemies in a polarized age. “We should hold (elected officials) to it.”

In other words, Bush 41 is gone but his legacy has a chance, albeit slim, to thaw the ideological cold war that is poisoning our nation and corrupting our media.

There were moments perhaps we never thought we’d see during the eulogies. Hillary Clinton smiling, really glowing. Who else could possibly evoke joy from such an embittered, tormented human being? She is. This not criticism. Or, James Baker crying uncontrollably as he contemplated spending the finals hours of his dear friend’s life at his bedside. Baker’s public image is stalwart, serious. He is a man with a Texas-style stiff upper lip.

It also was impossible to overlook that traditional marriage is alive and well in both parties in an era of endless pandering to gay marriage and transgenderism. George W. and Laura. Donald Trump and Melania. Barack Obama and Michelle. Bill Clinton and Hillary. Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn. The institution of marriage remains, for now, bi-partisan, at least among our leaders.

Historian Jon Meacham, probably not a Republican, but a celebrated presidential historian, author and, as exhibited in the Cathedral, master orator, was pointed in his praise of Bush 41 as a fighter, a man firm in his convictions, one who did not merely settle into what was to be a life of privilege.

George H.W. Bush could have been an oilman, period. He could have done anything he wanted to do. Bone fishing. Golfing at the world’s most exclusive venues. Hanging out at the family compound in Maine. Living a private life with his beloved Barbara. Attending philanthropic galas.

But instead he chose to serve his country, subject himself to media taunting (remember when he “lost his lunch” at a ceremonial dinner in Japan), immerse himself in the unification of Germany, the final chapter of the Cold War, despite its risks. He was not afraid to take on the toughest challenges of his times.

The man with an aisle seat in the front row of the Cathedral at the memorial is repeating the choices Bush 41 made. Lead. Take risks. Go full-throttle. Forsake a life of comfort and privilege. Subject your spouse to the unrelenting scrutiny cast upon a First Lady.

Trump haters never will buy into it, but the parallels are inescapable. No, Trump never flew a military aircraft into a perilous mission. He never worked in Washington’s corridors of power. He is not a George H.W. Bush in demeanor.

But if a President is to be judged by playing the hand he is dealt and marching toward the fight, fending off the arrows of naysayers and incoming media fire, I’d guess Bush 41 is from a distance rooting for Trump 45 now that Bush is free of the vexing nature of living in an imperfect world, as someday we all will be.