What Bush really thinks

The headline of an article by Houston Chronicle Washington reporter Julie Mason gets to the truth of the issue:

For Bush, fight over immigration bill is personal

Mason writes:

Growing up in Texas, Bush said, “you recognize the decency and hard work and humanity of Hispanics. And the truth of the matter is a lot of this immigration debate is driven as a result of Latinos being in our country.”

Or to be more specific, an unhappiness about Latinos being in the country. Bush, for the first time, is putting opponents on notice that he’s going to call them out on their xenophobia if he needs to. In last year’s failed effort at passing immigration reform, he never went that far.

Mason is, I believe, correctly interpreting Bush’s intent. I will sum up what I think Bush is really saying:

1. Hispanics are good people, their virtues make them a great addition to America, a Hispanicized America will be a better and more human America, and these are compelling reason to keep bringing in as many Hispanic immigrants as we can.

2. But many Americans, out of deep-seated racial prejudice, dislike Hispanics, do not appreciate their goodness, and resent their growing presence in America; and this resentment against Hispanics is what drives the opposition to the bill. The opponents have no real arguments. All their supposed arguments against the bill are just rationalizations for their racial bigotry.

3. I, Bush, POTUS XLIII, am persuaded that points (1) and (2) are the central and defining issues of this debate, and therefore I am determined to make them the center of my message and push them as hard as I can.

* * *

Of course many U.S. politicians support open borders, but Bush is unique. With other politicians, it’s more of an abstraction. Only Bush pushes open borders out of a specific love for Hispanics as Hispanics and his desire that America be Hispanicized.

It comes down to this: Bush adores Hispanics, as good, human people, and he dislikes white Americans, as nasty, prejudiced people.

We’ve discussed this at VFR many times. We’ve had good insights and speculations into why he loves Hispanics. But as far as I remember we’ve never had a theory explaining why he prefers Hispanics to white Americans, meaning, why he sees only good in Hispanics, and why he sees so much bad in non-Hispanic whites.

Of course, Bush’s reasons for his pro-Hispanic, anti-white position ultimately don’t matter. What matters is that he has that position. Still, it is interesting to speculate why he has it.

- end of initial entry -

Ben W. writes:

I have come to loath the Bush family. Yesterday I saw something despicable on television. Laura Bush had invited contestants from the Scripps Spelling Bee to the White House. She asked some of them to spell some words—not just any words—but words loaded with political implications such as “suffragette.”

Peggy Noonan is right about how the Bush family squanders and destroys any conservative inheritance and momentum:

“One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he’d been elected to Reagan’s third term. He thought he’d been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance.”

What a loathsome family.

Paul K. writes:

“While he poses as the champion of democracy he shows utter contempt for the will of the people in this democracy.”

That’s a good point. In his recent speeches Bush keeps stressing the need for “leadership” and “political courage,” by which he means that our political representatives should forget what the voters want and do what he wants.

I was also struck by this line in coverage about the president’s sales pitch: “Growing up in Texas, Bush said, “you recognize the decency and hard work and humanity of Hispanics.”” If a capacity for decency, hard work, and humanity entitle a population to move into the United States, can Mr. Bush let us know which nationalities do not share those traits so we will have some idea of the extent of our obligations?

Sam H. writes:

You are right, it’s personal for Bush, but since the political is personal for the Bush clan and the personal political, it goes beyond that. Let’s not forget that Jeb Bush is married to a Mexican woman (whose father was a “migrant worker” according to Wikipedia) and their children—the ones famously referred to by Bush pere as “the little brown ones”—thus half-Hispanic.

This is a family that certainly intends to continue to play a role in political life in this country in the next decades.

Their best shots, by most reckonings, are the very same Jeb Bush and his oldest son George P. Bush (now 30, and very much positioning himself for future political ambitions, he is a lawyer and businessman, married a pretty class mate from law school and is going to be a reserve intelligence officer).

It’s very, very personal. The uncle is trying to secure the future political options of the nephew.

Mark Jaws writes:

There are several plausible reasons to explain why el Presidente Boosh is so enamored with Hispanics while ignoring the glaring demographic data clearly indicating that this population group will drag America down. I will provide three reasons, although there are more.

1. As a pampered and privileged blanco muchacho, little Jorge came into contact with many hard working Mexican servants on La Boosh Hacienda. In this unrealistic world, Jorge did indeed see only the good side of Hispanics, because only the good was tolerated. I am certain that none of the Bush ninos ever rubbed elbows with the more typical Chicanos who displayed the typical Chicano behavior.

2. As a marginal intellect who came of age in the sixties and who attended Yale during this time , el alumno Boosh could have fallen under the influence of white-bashing professors who preached “whitey bad, people of color good.” My neighbor was also of the Yale Class of ‘68 and he is a flaming liberal. So is one of my work colleagues who attended classes with El Presidente.

3. Because Boosh has been surrounded since Dia Uno by ingratiating Mexicans at his hacienda and in his business dealing and governorship, perhaps Jorge really thinks that Hispanics will actually vote Republican if he does right by them. After all, they suck up to him and react favorably, so maybe in the macro view something similar will happen. Here again, this is what happens with the scions of he rich. They hold unrealistic views of the world, but particularly with minorities. I have seen this happen with my affluent Jewish cousins and their children. They are completely out of touch. But then again, so is our much despised Presidente.

Robert C. writes:

Perhaps you could expand on the idea that Bush is a “self-hating Anglo.” As you know the parallel concept is often applied to some Jewish individuals who appear to be acting in ways “Not Good for the Jews” and perhaps that literature could be mined for concepts that explain Bush’s strange behavior. For example, some Jews have been criticized for seeming to be Anglophiles and correspondingly, they thought, anti-Jewish.

LA replies:

I don’t see Bush as a self-hating Anglo. It’s other Anglos he hates. He likes himself just fine.

By the way, what I just said about Bush is also a good response to the charge that one is a self-hating Jew: “But I’m the one I like!”

Howard Sutherland writes:

Not a pleasant topic, but a timely one, unfortunately. This is a good thread, and reminded me of some speculations I offered VFR about President Bush’s Mexiphilia in May of 2006. I think they are still fairly relevant. If George and Laura wind up spending a lot of time, post-White House, in a nice walled-and-gated house at Lake Chapala or near Puerto Vallarta, we’ll know I was on to something in my last paragraph… Of course, if Mexican oligarchs or, worse, narcos have been bankrolling GWB and they find that fact inconvenient once he returns to private life, his ultimate destination might be less pleasant, and they might send him there quite suddenly. But why Mexico? Throughout his life, Bush has been exposed to nice Mexicans. At the lower end, there were probably nice maids and ranch hands who helped out around the place and, in their way, helped raise him. For all I know, the Mexican maids were nicer to him than his mother, who is a formidable woman. At the upper end, there were the elegant, erudite, fun and mind-bogglingly rich Mexican oligarchs with whom his father did business and politics, and whose playboy children would have been some of Bush’s playmates in his partying days. He just likes Mexicans. I think he likes them better than Americans. The Mexican functionaries he meets are a lot more like the people he goes hunting with in Texas (some are the same people) than any of his geek Washington advisers. Like many people I know in Texas, he is very comfortable with Mexican culture seen through a tex-mex lens. I like it myself, and I am a sworn enemy of the Mexican government. Bush probably has better memories overall of relations with Mexicans throughout his life than he does with Americans. I would bet that while his personal experiences of his fellow Americans have been good and bad, his experiences of Mexicans have been almost all good from his point of view. He won’t see the bad in Mexico; he hasn’t experienced it and, anyway, to criticize Mexico on social or cultural grounds would be racist. Not gonna happen… Bush also has those Mexican in-laws, and his half-Mexican nephew, who for years now has been an explicitly Hispanic political campaigner. He may well see all those Mexicans as potential George P. votes down the road. His family is more important to him than all those other Americans he doesn’t know, and he believes that Bushes ruling America is exactly as it should be. The family solidarity of the Bushes, in public and private life, reminds me more than a little of those same Mexican oligarchs, although the Bushes are not as rich as the Mexican top tier. Finally, there is the possibility that Mexicans are paying him to keep the border open. The gringo safety valve is enormously important to them as it allows them to do business as usual while not bothering with inconvenient domestic reforms. If so, it might not be the government, it might be oligarchs like the Slim or Hank families. The Bushes have been accused of being in bed with corrupt Mexicans (and Arabs) before. Perhaps the payoff is less in cash than in a secure, luxurious, extradition-proof post-White House Mexican residence for GW and Laura. Who really knows? Such determination to do Mexico’s bidding, and the willingness to do it openly, must have an explanation—a Mexican explanation.

LA replies:

Normally I wouldn’t post such rank and unfounded speculation as that the president of the U.S. is in the pay of Mexicans. But given Bush’s unprecedented and fixed pattern of siding with Mexico and Mexicans against America and Americans, I believe that speculation about his motives, even if some of it seems to go far afield, is perfectly proper.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2007 12:13 PM | Send