Charlie Tells The Truth

Charlie Pierce is a national treasure.

"Battlefield courage and political courage can be quite different things"

His piece on Poppy Bush at Esquire:

However, as Bush rose in the Republican Party, its power base swung south and west. It slowly embraced empowered radical religious fundamentalism. And, most significantly, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, it made a conscious decision to energize itself through the splintered, but still powerful, remnants of American apartheid. 

Bush never appeared comfortable with these developments, but he never could quite bring himself to denounce them, and he had very little compunction about using them when he needed to do so. Because of this, and because of the starchy aloofness of his basic mien, he struggled mightily against the impression that he was inauthentic. He did not often win that battle.

My lord, the man enlisted to fight in World War II when he was still underage and he came back a genuine hero. (Say what you will about those old WASP families, but there are a lot of their names on the wall in Memorial Hall and in the Memorial Church at Harvard.) Why did he feel that, to be president, he had to butch it up against Dan Rather, or tell an audience after his debate against Geraldine Ferraro that he’d “kicked a little ass last night.” Why did he feel he had to flip flop on reproductive choice as baroquely as he did? He felt he had to act in this ridiculous fashion, and he wasn’t strong enough to fight against his own ambition. Battlefield courage and political courage can be quite different things.

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He could have been one of the most powerful voices against the slide of Republicanism into movement conservatism, religious fanaticism, and irrationality in general. Maybe nobody could have stopped it. (Even his son, George W. Bush, made a kabuki stab at it. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? But, because he was a Bush, W handed this phantom philosophy over to Karl Rove, who had been too much of a ruthless ratfcker for the elder Bush. We ended up as a nation that tortures.) But he could have tried. His stature would have counted against it.

But he could never muster enough political gumption to overcome his own ambition.