Discussion for article #237219
¨Report: George W. Bush Raked In Millions Through Speaking Gigs¨
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet - just wait till Sotheby’s auctions off his paintings!
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IOKIYAR, I guess.
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He’s right about one thing:
“History will ultimately judge whether I made the right decisions or not,” he said at a gathering put on by the Advertising Specialty Institute in Dallas.
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History will ultimately judge
It already has and Dubya knows it.
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An Op-Ed from 2007:
Ex-presidents’ big payday
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | February 28, 2007
WHEN HARRY Truman left the White House in 1953, historian David McCullough records, “he had no income or support of any kind from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month. He was provided with no government funds for secretarial help or office space, not a penny of expense money.” To tide him over for the transition back to private life, Truman had to take out a bank loan. One of the reasons he and his wife moved back into their far-from-elegant old house in Independence, Mo., “was that financially they had little other choice.”
Nevertheless, Truman refused to cash in on his celebrity and influence as a former president. He turned down lucrative offers, such as the one from a Florida real estate developer inviting him to become “chairman, officer, or stockholder, at a figure of not less than $100,000.” He wouldn’t make commercial endorsements, accept “consulting” fees, or engage in lobbying. He wouldn’t even take the free car that Toyota offered him as a gesture of improved Japanese-American relations.
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If he was doing public events, he’d have collected a Payless’s inventory of shoes.
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A this story failed to ID Ronald Reagan as the one who started this trend of X-Presidents demanding high fees for speaking.
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History done come and gone. Even Jeb knows that it was a mistake.
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Hastert did something similar.
Apparently, it’s okay to make millions on a speaking tour as long as you keep it all for yourself and don’t use it to attack global problems of disease, hunger and poverty.
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Thanks for that link. Anything McCullough writes I read. But another president who did something no other has done or will do again was Theodore Roosevelt. He was called Colonel after he left office, not President,
Money for NOT speaking. HA!
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Eisenhower preferred to be addressed as “General” after he left office.
Well, obviously, if you keep all the money for yourself rather than having most of it go to a non-profit foundation to fight global disease, hunger and poverty, you are much less likely to have your decisions and actions influenced by that money.
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Isn’t it interesting that money and real pyramids followed in the post war period of Hoover’s greatest mental illness and the CIA’s still not well-documented domestic shenanigans…
“Evil is real,” he said at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.
“Bowling is fun,” he said at a get-together for the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America in Orlando.
You’re sh*tting me, right? He’s being PAID to try and form coherent sentences to audiences?
They really think EVIL REAL, BOWLING FUN is worth paying anything more than bitcoin for??? Whatever…
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what was the title of his speeches…how to phuck up an economy screw a country and get us into illegal wars for fun and profit ???
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Slight correction: Jeb knows that he has to say it was a mistake.
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$100,000 sounds kind of cheap for a 2-term US President, wouldn’t be surprised if some of the GOP clown car candidates make that.