Barbara Bush: “George never laid a finger on me.”
Maybe the family members could prevent this sort of thing in the first place rather than making b.s. excuses after the fact. It’s part of elder care. And God knows the Bushes have worked that noblesse oblige thing pretty hard. Part of patrician civic-mindedness is not letting the elderly statesman grab people by the ass. I know that much and I’m as common as dirt.
This ain’t going to happen. No prosecutor in their right mind is going to go forward with any such case against HW at this point in his life. Its career suicide, and as pointed out in the article, they will end up losing.
I haven’t read all the details of of each woman’s encounter with Papa Bush, but the little pieces of info I have gleaned is these women were telling their #metoo stories. It does help that they are coming forward. It does help when the experience of harassment are told and shared.
Except if you think about it, this is not some late life onset thing. This is probably part of the very entitlement of growing up in a hugely wealthy political dynasty, where your father is a US Senator, and you are a multi generational legacy admit to Andover and Yale. This is probably something that started out in his Prep School years, was probably something they did in the Prep School, and he still thinks is cheeky/funny, or gets him off to do. Like refusing to eat broccoli once he was president. I dont think this is some embarrassing geriatric condition like breaking wind or blurting out at inappropriate times.
I know this may be impolitic of me, but leave the old guy alone. He’s obviously in an advanced stage of dementia, and this kind of behavior change is not uncommon for people in his situation. The very conversation about the possibility or non-possibility of prosecution is ridiculous and embarrassing to even see in print.
Could well be that. But now he’s in a wheelchair and the time anyone could get away with this crap for any reason seems to be slipping rapidly away. (I know plenty of abusive stuff still happens, but it’s certainly becoming accepted less.) The family ought to control it.
This is bizarre. How is touching a butt different than touching a lower back? It’s not a sex organ; it’s muscle and fat. Are all the athletes slapping each other’s behinds sexual predators? Due to the way neurology and sexuality work, any contact with skin can evoke sexual feelings in some. The feet are particularly often targets, because in the brain the neural feeds from them are next to those from the genitals. For some the hands are sensitive. Should shaking hands be legally construed as sexual assault?
We have serious problems of what is clearly rape to deal with. Fixating on whether a hand touched a butt is nothing but a serious loss of perspective.
Of course it would be hard to prosecute. Why do you think he’s been doing it all these years.
Mama Bush just needs to whack that fool upside his head. Problem solved!
I agree. I am a lifetime baseball fan and it was galling to me to see him throwing the first pitch out in Houston’s final home game in the World Series. I just dont think this is new. SPY Magazine was the political mag where I believe Joe Conason published an article during the Clinton-GHWB Campaign about the hypocrisy of the Political Press in covering Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades, but totally ignoring GHWB’s lifetime affair with his right hand staffer. Conason did not call attention to her name, but her name was listed in the article among many female names. I dont know why he chose to do that, since the Arkansas Project was in full swing, trying to prove Clinton had caused a former mistress to commit suicide. But George Herbert Walker Bush, like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, got the benefit of genteel Old School Press Cronyism. Not to mention was allowed to rebrand himself from a Preppie whose father was named PRESCOTT into some wild cat Texas pork rind eating oil entrepreneur.
AND I had totally forgotten his quaint, condescending reference to Jeb’s children as “the little brown ones,” I suppose a Kinder and Gentler version of Steve King’s and Donald Trump’s gauche descriptions of Mexican folks. The Preppy is showing there. Dana Carvey made a living out of doing GHWB impressions for a while.
I think if the athletes switched from a slap on the ass to prolonged fondling it might cause a problem.
I could intuitively guess what happened there was more a “narrative” question than a difference in standards. Clinton was famous from the beginning for being a horn dog, and Bush was portrayed simplistically in different ways. Hack journalists are reluctant to muddy up the conventional view of someone and it was probably fortunate for the nation that Nixon looked the part of a conspirator and crook.
The man suffers from dementia, and people want to prosecute? What the hell is wrong with people?
Except not one commenter called for prosecution here, the one woman who falls within statute of limitations has said she will take no action.
I know it’s not right to make fun of anyone’s looks but man if it was…
They want to show one one is above the law? Hell Clinton and Monica were supposedly consensual and we had to go through all that BS and he was the sitting president and really had shit to do and all he was really guilty of was lying under oath about doing something stupid. I don’t disagree that it’s mostly a waste, but maybe not if it stops one dick long enough to decide not to do it and no one else has to live with it the rest of their life.