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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 1 June 2008

George W. Bush got to be president by riding on his father’s name while promising the dubious that he had nothing in common with his father besides that name, but they do share a close, dysfunctional relationship with the concept of loyalty. By the time he was ready to run for president as Ronald Reagan’s heir presumptive, the older Bush—a man with no spine and no deep beliefs in much of anything, a man willing to say anything and wipe out what personality he had if it would get him enough votes—claimed to have nothing in him but loyalty. It was his only characteristic. If you liked Ronald Reagan, it was your duty to vote for him, because he had been loyal to Ronald Reagan, to the point of throwing many things he’d once claimed to believe overboard, and as president he showed that he was prepared to take a chance when it meant showing his loyalty—to the Chinese government, with whom he’d worked as Ambassador, after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, to the CIA, which he’d once been in charge of, when there were calls that maybe it could use some housecleaning given how thoroughly it had botched its reports on the dying years of the Soviet Union. Now his son has reached the point where the only grounds for supporting or defending him is…loyalty. Phil Nugent

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