Dear Commons Community,

I am trying to catch up on some of the news especially my favorite columnists.  Maureen Dowd had a column on Sunday comparing George Herbert Walker (Poppy) and his son, George W. Bush.  She is kind in her praise of her father and not so much for the son but this is territory that has been covered many times.  Here is a samle:

“It made me sad to see him (George Senior)  in a wheelchair, his lower legs weakened by Parkinsonitis. He had once been so kinetic that the Chinese press described him as “ants on a hot pan.”

“A new CNN/ORC International poll found that Bush the senior is far more respected than Bush the junior, who is the least popular among the living ex-presidents.”

“Poppy had to watch W. distance himself, run as the heir to Ronald Reagan and then tar the family name by governing destructively, egged on by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (41’s old nemesis).”

“Because his son tacked so much farther right into crazy neocon bellicosity, Poppy … is now nostalgically viewed as an emblem of lost bipartisanship and centrism.”

“Poppy spoke fondly of his new pal, Bill Clinton, and highly of President Obama. (His only tart word was reserved for Donald Trump, the birther agitator.)

Bush [Senior] is so reluctant to use “the big I,” as his mother called displays of ego, that he never even cashed in with a proper presidential memoir. It would have required a sustained first-person singular.”

She concludes by quoting Bush Senior’s Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, Jon Meacham:   “He’s a really important historical guy.”

Tony