George H.W. Bush Destroys Cheney And Rumsfeld As ‘Ironass’ And ‘Arrogant’

Former President George H.W. Bush has harsh words for the engineers of his son’s wars.

Like most former presidents, George H.W. Bush has remained largely silent on political matters. But in a new biography the man who succeeded Ronald Reagan offers harsh rhetoric on his son’s advisors who brought the nation to war, on the rise of the Tea Party, and he also shares his thoughts on same-sex marriage.

“I don’t know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with,” George H.W. Bush tells author Jon Meacham in Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Cheney’s reaction to 9/11 and “what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East …” 

Fox News reports that Bush “objects to how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reacted to 9/11. He feels they were too hawkish, taking a harsh, inflexible stance that tarnished America’s reputation around the world.”

And as the Bush family is known to do, Bush senior does not hand Bush junior blame, as he speaks in a passive tense.

“The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department,” Bush 41 says, not mentioning it was his son who made that mistake.

Bush 41 also blames Vice President Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, and their hawkish, anti-Islam daughter, Liz Cheney.

“You know, I’ve concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here … tough as nails, driving.”

The former Vice President “laughs off that last claim, taking full responsibility for his actions,” Fox News notes.

“We smile about it, we laugh about it,” Cheney told the conservative news network. “Same with my daughter, with Liz. It’s his view, perhaps, of what happened, but my family was not conspiring to somehow turn me into a tougher, more hardnosed individual. I got there all by myself.” 

In the book, the former president attacks his son’s Secretary of Defense as well.

“I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the President,” Bush says of Rumsfeld’s actions while in President George W. Bush’s administration.

“I’ve never been that close to him anyway,” he says of Rumsfeld. “There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow …” 

Bush also has harsh words for the Tea Party.

“There’s something ter­rible about those who carry (polit­ic­al views) to ex­tremes,” Bush says in his biography, after meeting a Tennessee Tea Party Republican, according to the National Journal. “They’re there for spooky, ex­traordin­ary right-winged reas­ons. They don’t care about Party. They don’t care about any­thing. They’re the ex­cesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Com­mun­ists, they could be whatever. In this case, they’re re­li­gious fan­at­ics and they’re spooky. They will des­troy this party if they’re per­mit­ted.”

Fox News adds what it wrongly calls a “recent revelation — so recent it’s not included in the Meacham biography. While Bush still believes in traditional marriage, he claims to have ‘mellowed’ on same-sex marriage, stating people have a right to be happy without discrimination.”

Of course, longtime NCRM readers know well that former President George H.W. Bush not only attended, but was the official witness at the wedding of his friends, a same-sex couple in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 2013.

 

Image by U.S. Department of Defense via Flickr