Is Bushs Legacy So Different From Trumps? By Domenica Ghanem
(2018-12-06 at 22:50:40 )

Is Bushs Legacy So Different From Trumps? By Domenica Ghanem

Some may mourn Bushs more "respectable" presidency.

But looking back, one sees the very same race-baiting and cruelty.

As the United States federal government closed shop for a day of national mourning for the late President George H.W. Bush, an image of came to my mind.

It is an ad by his supporters claiming presidential candidate Michael Dukakis "allows first degree murderers to have weekend passes," as an image of an African American man, Willie Horton, flashes across the screen. More photos of Horton are shown, along with the words "stabbing, kidnapping, raping."

I was not even born when this ad aired in 1988.

I know it because I studied it in my media classes as a classic example of how politicians stoked racist fears to link black people to crime and further a mass incarceration agenda.

Just last month, President Donald Trumps political team ran an ad inspired by the same race-baiting tactic.

An ad so obviously racist even Fox News stopped running it.

It depicts Mexican immigrant Luis Bracamontes saying he would "kill more cops," and claims "Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay." (These claims were false.)

The ad was designed to link Central American immigrants to crime just as a caravan of asylum seekers from Honduras was headed to the United States-Mexico border.

As I recall H. W. Bushs legacy, the similarities keep coming.

In 1989, Bush had the Drug Enforcement Agency lure a teenager to sell crack cocaine just across the street from the White House.

They chose Keith Jackson, a 19-year-old African American high school student from Anacostia who, thanks to a very segregated D.C., did not even know where the White House was.

After the incident, President Bush showed this bag of crack on national television, calling for more prison funding.

Keith Jackson ended up serving eight years.

More recently, President Trump has been ratcheting up fears about MS-13, a gang.

He has been using the pain and suffering of Ms Evelyn Rodriguez, the mother of a daughter killed by a gang member, as a prop in speeches and roundtables to show people how dangerous "illegal" immigrants are.

"These are not people," he has said. "These are animals."

All the while, he has been separating mothers and children at the border and keeping the kids locked up in detention centers.

It is hard not to see how these two presidents employ politics cut from the same cloth.

One demonizing black United States citizens, the other demonizing brown immigrants, all in an effort to distract from the real crime - money being funneled up to their rich friends rather than invested in public goods.

How quickly we forget.

The celebrations of the Bush legacy even extend to his son, the still living former President George W. Bush.

A recent Tylt online poll asked is "Donald Trump making you finally appreciate George W. Bush?"

Almost 74 percent said they would #RatherHaveBush. Oof.

The junior Bushs climb in popularity is not thanks to establishment Republicans who wish President Trump would just be a bit quieter about his racism. His favorability among Democrats is at 54 percent, compared to 11 percent in 2009.

Why do we condemn President Trump but laud the Bush family? Because they were not as mean-sounding and could take a joke?

That is a pretty low standard of decency for a pair of presidents who, together, killed millions in the Middle East and imprisoned millions of nonviolent drug offenders back home.

And it is a dangerously low standard for us to sustain moving forward.

If we keep forgetting or revising our history, we are destined to repeat it with leaders who may crack a smile and use respectable language, but forge ahead with a President Trump-like agenda nonetheless.

Reprinted here with permission from "Otherwords.org" -Bold Opinions for Newspapers and New Media-