Behind the IRS Scandal and the attacks on Obama

In what must totally confuse the public, the left leaning, liberal media is now daily hawking a news story that the IRS has been purposely targeting applications for conservative charities and educational non profits.  What?  This is news?  The liberal media has been targeting conservative organizations and personalities for years, so why should they blame the government for doing the same?  Ah, but you see, there is a very good reason.

The media is run by big corporations that count on interest free money from the Federal Reserve and burdening regulations to keep out small business competitors and complete freedom to run their fiefdoms without interference.   In return they pay the politicians, Republican and Democrat, big money to help them get re-elected and they provide priceless air support, by promoting their candidacies of choice on national television and marginalizing anyone who dares to challenge the corrupt arrangement.

Take for example, the Associated Press, a “non-profit” owned by a cooperative of newspapers and television companies, which are owned by big corporations.  The A.P. virtually led the national media in their censorship and misreporting of the Ron Paul campaign in 2012.  (See here The Great Hudsonville Cover-up.)

Now, there is a great irony here for Ron Paul was the one candidate who was ringing the warning bells about our abandonment of the US Constitution.   (By the way, in addition to conservative groups, the IRS was also targeting any non profit that had the word “constitution” in its name.  The IRS can never be too careful in fulfilling its constitutional duty.)

What happened at the A.P. is only an example of what Dr. Paul feared and warned would happen.  The government asked that the A.P. hold back a news story about a terrorist bomb plot planned on the anniversary of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  The Associated Press complied.  But when White House officials then lied to the American people, saying that there had been no threats on the anniversary, well, that was too much.  It was a replay of the Benghazi attack on the anniversary of 9-11, which the government had contended was a spontaneous reaction to an American anti-Islamic movie and had nothing to do with terrorists or 9-11.

The Associated Press ran their story and the government began their spying campaign against them.

Now it may be tempting for Liberty Lovers to let the A.P. stew in its juices but with Rand Paul, now making a serious effort to save the U.S. Constitution and end the culture of corruption in Washington, DC we should stand up for our old antagonist, the Associated Press.  Maybe, just maybe, they will learn that having masses of people supporting the U.S. Constitution is not such a bad thing.  Maybe, just maybe they will make room for Rand and when there are 2,000 at his events they will not say there are 40.

It is amusing to see the A.P. wringing its hands over the issue.  Since 9-11, the millions of intercepts of ordinary citizens have not even warranted a peep from many in the national media.  The drone killing of a US citizen with no connection to terrorism was passed over in a single day.  But listening on the AP?  Well, that apparently violates the “honor among thieves” arrangement of the New World Order.

There are some in the Liberty Movement who will say that this is not our fight.  They will say that the oligarchy is now obviously piqued at Obama and are bloodying his nose a bit to show him whose boss.  And that may be the case.  But the fact that they are using a bias against conservatives in the IRS as the weapon of choice is pure comic theater at its best and should be enjoyed to the hilt.

Just to look into the faces of those serious news anchors as they solemnly tell us that the IRS is biased against conservatives, implying that all good folks, themselves included, are scandalized by this outrageous an unfair behavior, is better than watching Cersei outmaneuver the court in the Game of Thrones.  Enjoy it while you can.  The House of Rand Paul is coming.

The attack on Vandersloot.

Presidents are Mama’s boys

“Well a mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world. She’s the angel voice that bids you goodnight.”

– Wendy to the lost boys of Neverland.

 

Most presidents are mama’s boys.

Many of them are actually named after their mothers.

We all know that John Fitzgerald Kennedy is named after his mother, Rose Fitzgerald.  But Ronald Wilson Reagan is also named after his mother, Nelle Wilson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson is named after his mother, Rebecca Baines.  Richard Milhous Nixon is named after his mother Hannah Milhous.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is named after his mother Sarah Delano.  In fact, FDR’s mother used to tell him, “You are a Delano, not a Roosevelt.”

When FDR had his famous fireside chats with the nation on national radio, his mother was right there beside him.  And on every Mother’s Day, she, herself, addressed the nation.

This phenomenon goes all the way back into our history.  Woodrow Wilson was named after his mothers, Janet Woodrow and Rutherford Birchard Hayes was named after his mother, Sophia Birchard.

Now it isn’t a perfect trend or else John Forbes Kerry would have won the 2004 presidential election.  He is named after his mother, Rosemary Forbes.   And then Marvin Pierce Bush, would have been the Bush brother to win the White House over George or Jeb.  He is named after his mother, Barbara Pierce.  But when I wrote the book, The Raising of a President, it appeared as such a stark statistical anomaly that I had to find an explanation.  I sent the data to several psychologists around the world.

Here was the identical response.  When that mother took that baby to her breast she felt a special connection to the child that bore her name.

Huh?  That’s it?  She felt something?

It reminded me of the German scientist who had studied plants in the 1880’s and insisted that if we talk nice to plants they will respond.  I’ve often thought.  If talking nice to a shefflera Tree will help it grow an extra inch each year, just imagine the damage or the good we do to each other by what we say, especially to our children?

Sigmund Freud wrote that “the man who perceives himself to be the favorite of his mother is empowered for life.”

Abraham Lincoln supposedly told William Herndon, “All I am or ever hope to be I owe to my angel mother.”

Even as an adult President William McKinley insisted that his mother say a prayer with him before going to bed.  At great expense, he had a wire laid from Ohio to Washington, D.C. so the practice could continue even when he was in the White House.

Never underestimate the power of a mother.   Apparently, how she feels, or how you think she feels, can impact the rest of your life.

No wonder William Wallace wrote, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”

 

Rand Paul out front in Iowa and nobody’s laughing now!

He won the CPAC straw poll, he is second in the latest national poll, he leads in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary and now he is the favorite among likely voters in the first in the nation Iowa Caucus.

Senator Rand Paul must be doing something right.

There are still a few of the snubs his father used to get.  Policymic ignored him as a GOP contender, insisting with a straight face that he does not break into the top five contenders.  (Condoleezza Rice who polls 3% in Iowa apparently meets the stringent Policymic threshold.)   But no matter how the power brokers want things to be, Rand Paul, is proving to be popular with the masses, representing the first real political movement since Ronald Reagan.

While the views of the son, Rand Paul and the father, Ron Paul are sometimes different, both represent a strong sentiment against corruption.  The poll in Iowa may show Rand’s campaign picking up right where his father’s campaign ended.

By the way, don’t let anybody tell you that Dr. Ron Paul’s presidential campaign of 2012 was for naught.  Dr. Paul showed great appeal to Independents, Youth and Hispanics.  It was the very crowd that eventually went to Obama and sealed the fate of the doomed GOP ticket.  And it is the group that the GOP now needs for any resurgence.

Astonishingly, in 2012, the smug power brokers in the Republican Party ridiculed and broke their own rules to marginalize and hurt Dr. Paul and his followers.  While publicly proclaiming a “big tent” to Youth and Hispanics, the GOP security guards cut off microphones to Ron Paul Hispanics at State Conventions and escorted duly elected young Ron Paul delegates off the floor of the RNC in Tampa.  During the campaign, Governor Mitt Romney openly laughed at him.  No one’s laughing now.

A recent poll conducted by the McKeon & Associates for Freedom to Choose PAC, found Dr. Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul, with a commanding lead over all other possible GOP, presidential contenders in the first in the nation contest in Iowa.

Here are the results of voters most likely to vote in the 2016 Iowa Caucus.

Kentucky Senator, Rand Paul      39%

Florida Senator, Marco Rubio      20%

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie   11%

Former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush          10%

La. Gov. Bobby Jindal                   3%

Condoleezza Rice                         3%

Support for Rand Paul among Independents likely to vote in the GOP Caucus was striking and bodes well for a general election contest. 67% favored the Kentucky Senator, Rand Paul.  30% favored Governor Chris Christie, all other candidates failed to muster any showing at all among these voters.

In 2012, the New York Times and all of the national network media declared Mitt Romney the winner of the Iowa Caucus.  Only months later did they reverse themselves to say that Senator Rick Santorum had won.  This blogger was told that it took threats from the Governor’s office and from fellow GOP leaders, before the Iowa State GOP Chairman would finally release the votes from selected counties that put Santorum over the top.  The Chairman, a Mitt Romney supporter, resigned shortly after.

For the rest of the year, the New York Times, the Associated Press and all the major networks continued to show that Ron Paul had only 3 delegates from the Iowa Caucus.  Meanwhile, national polls showed him doing better than all other GOP contenders – except for Romney – in a head to head face off with President Obama, and tied within the margin of error with Romney.  These were ignored as the national media continued to marginalize Dr. Paul.

In fact, the Paul supporters openly declared that they, not Santorum, had won the Iowa delegation.  They contended that if the news had been reported truthfully and the following contests had been allowed to take place according to GOP rules, Dr. Paul would have arrived as a force at a brokered RNC.

The final Iowa vote on the floor of the Republican National Convention was 22 for Dr. Ron Paul and 6 for former Governor Mitt Romney.  In a final irony, Dr. Paul’s Iowa state co-chairman was voted in to replace the disgraced Romney operative who had been running the State GOP and had withheld votes to assure that his man would get media credit for a win he didn’t earn.

Most people want fairness and despise the expanding corruption that pervades American society from its food supply, to its national media, to its monetary system to its government relationship with Wall Street and K Street and yes, to the corruption of its two major political parties.  What good is an election if the only two candidates to choose from are produced by a corrupt process?  How is that really democratic or free?

This recent poll in Iowa is a good sign.  It shows that the mood of the people is beginning to reach the flood stage.  It shows that the corruption that has bankrupted this nation and made a very few, very rich at the expense of all the rest of us, has finally been exposed for what it is.

It shows that Rand Paul commands a following much bigger and much wider than his father ever had.  But it also shows that his father’s campaign was more than Quixotic.  Dr. Paul did not run in vain, and all of those thousands of people who were shut out or whose votes were thrown away, or whose bones were broken or whose election was nullified, did not give up a year of their lives in vain.  Dr. Paul was the pace car.  And now the real race for America’s future begins.

Join the discussion on FACEBOOK now.

And who do you favor for the GOP nomination in 2016?  Vote below.

Vote for your favorite for 2016

The Legacy of George W. Bush

Today, the George W. Bush library will be dedicated and a long list of luminaries will laud the life and legacy of our 43rd president.  I first met the future president in 1986, in Corpus Christi, Texas.  I was an independent businessman at the time, and simultaneously, working for his father as an adviser.  As the host of a business event held at the Corpus Christi Convention Center, I invited in George W. Bush to speak to the group.  He did a great job.  And afterward I took he and Laura and the twins to a Mexican restaurant where we talked politics.

Doug Wead, Mike Smith and George W. Bush in Corpus Christi, 1986.

In March, 19987, he joined his father’s campaign and co-opted my work with coalitions so I reported directly to him.  It was then that he learned the power of the evangelical vote and how to tap into it.

I may be the first person, outside of his own random fantasies, who actually thought of him as a future president.  Shortly after his father was elected I wrote a 44 page memo on presidential children.  In the study I learned how many sons pursued the presidency themselves.  Not just the first son born to a president, which was John Quincy Adams, but nine others.  A few of them came close, including John Van Buren and Robert Taft.  So I wrote about that possibility for the young Mr. Bush and talked about him to journalists, including a description in an article dated 1991.  (George Jr. exhibits clout in Bush White House. Denver Post. December 15,1991, p6a.)

George W. Bush has a dynamic personality, a cunning sense of humor and was the most decisive person I had ever met in my life.  While I never stopped praying or rooting for him, personally, I publicly parted ways with him over the war in Iraq.   It was a decision that would cost me dearly in my career.  Even before, when a 1998 CNN/Gallup poll showed George W. Bush as the leading presidential contender, I warned my wife.  ”If he wins the presidency we will go to war with Iraq and we will kill Saddam Hussein and we will kill his sons.”  After 9-11, I watched helplessly as our war against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda shifted to a war against Saddam Hussein, the man who had tried to kill  Bush’s father.

There were many unintended consequences to the war in Iraq and to the subsequent upheaval across the Middle East.   It was called “the Arab Spring” as dictatorships toppled.  But Democracy, offered to voters in the region is routinely voted down as soon as it is won.  The people want theocratic dictatorships.  And they choose them at the ballot box.

Christianity, which existed in Iraq for 2,000 years and traced its lineage to the apostles ,  numbered one million believers before the Iraq war.  It has been cut in half, with churches destroyed and members killed or fleeing to Jordan.   Now the Coptic Christians of Egypt, one of the oldest Christian communities in history faces possible annihilation.

In 2011, when the whole West, including President Obama, were celebrating the change of governments in the Middle East, I was hotly criticized for throwing cold water on the celebration.  It was not out of any loyalty to the dictatorships they replaced.  But rather to the naive confidence with which we so easily brushed aside the tenuous house of cards that were in place.  We did so by what we said and did and what we did not say and did not do.  And we accomplished this without debate or adequate consideration, acting on instinct rather than logic.  The consequences have meant death to many and the blood bath may have only begun.

Today, supporters of President George W. Bush say that he kept America safe and never raised taxes.  Opponents say his war in Iraq had unintended consequences that are unhinging the whole Middle East and his spike in spending wrecked the economy.

Presidents spend their time in office trying to shape what happens and when its over they spend their time trying to shape what we think happened.  Both with limited success.  Today, President George W. Bush  has begun his campaign for his legacy.  What do you think?  How would you rank the president’s time in office?  Today the former president has a a 47% approval rating which is exactly the same as President Obama.

Participate in this poll and learn the results.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DVKPDR6

Behind the Chechen Islamic Terrorist Bombing in Boston

Now we know that American, homegrown, Chechen nationals, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were behind the Boston Marathon bombing.

Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsarnaev.

Remember, the Chechen Islamic terrorists and their war with Russia?  They were behind the school massacre in Beslan, North Ossetia in September, 2004.   380 persons died, including 186 children.

A few years ago I visited Krasnodar where the issues of North Ossetia are still fresh in people’s minds.  After the three day siege in Beslan one of the school teachers who escaped told her harrowing story on French television.  She had been inside the school when the Islamic terrorists wrapped their explosives around the small children.

“How can you justify the killing of children?” she asked one of the terrorists.

“The little girls will grow up to be prostitutes,” he answered, “And the little boys will grow up to be pimps, anyway, so what difference does it make?”

People in the West find it difficult to understand the Islamic mentality of many living in the former Soviet Republics.  While the communists had crushed Christianity, Islam remained much more resilient.  During my visits to Kazan, Almaty, Astana and other such places I met Muslims who had practiced their faith all through the Soviet era.  Others returned to Islam in mass, as soon as the Iron Curtain lifted, just as many in Ukraine and other Republics became instant Christians.  It was as if a light switch were turned on.  As if their faith were in the DNA and they returned to where they had been before Lenin.

A close Muslim friend of mine told of a young Kazakhstan female student attending Northwestern University.  It was learned that during her time in American she had visited a Christian church with some classmates.  Upon her return to her Islamic home she was kidnapped by radicals, raped and tortured for several days and then murdered. My friend said he had attended the funeral.

I am president of Canyonville Christian Academy, a boarding school in Oregon.  We have had Islamic parents urge us to keep their children out of the chapel, even for secular events, for fear of retaliation when they return home.

Our ignorance of Islamic culture and thinking persists years after 9-11 because the American media simply does not want to know.  The American media continues to try to force the world and its news into its own mold of what it wishes it to be.  Objective reporting of facts is dead.  The trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell is ignored.  His mass murders are excused by the media, washed clean by his work as an abortionist.  Wars in Africa are reported, with numbers of those killed, while any explanation for what motivates the killers, including any ties to Islam or the victim’s ties to Christianity is censored.  It is as if the news is embarrassed by the whole idea of Islamic radicalism and refuses to recognize that it exists.

This collapse of journalism in America sometimes leaves giant holes in our understanding of events.  This became clear this morning as newsmakers struggled to understand the motives of the Boston Marathon Bombers.  First they learned that they were Chechen, which absolutely dumbfounded the news anchors.  ”I thought the Chechens were mad at the Russians,” one news reporter asked aloud.  Several hours into the coverage someone ventured that Chechens were Islamic.  ”Could that have something to do with it?  How could young men be living here in America and been turned to terrorism?  Who could have turned them?”

“Poor George,” Ann Smiley, “told her husband, the cuckholded spy for the British Secret Service, “Life is such a puzzle for you, isn’t it?”

One could just as easily say, “Poor America, life is such a puzzle for you.”

The puzzle exists because of the massive denial and outright ignorance of the national media.  A refusal of news companies to let their reporters report.  Rather a desire to shape the news and force it into preconceived opinions of what it should be.  This ignorance, passed onto the public, leaves us vulnerable to the possibility of terror all around us.  And bewildered, puzzled, by our enemies.

Tamerian Tsarnaev. still on the loose.

Rand Paul Now Leads Liberty Movement

It has only been a little more than a month since Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  But it is looking more and more like a defining moment in American politics.  It may be a defining moment in American history.

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The dramatic sight of Rand Paul standing all alone, in the well of the Senate on March 6, 2013, speaking up for the U.S. Constitution, asking the questions that the media and the power establishment was too busy or too indifferent to ask, is a picture that will be forever burned into the psyche of many Americans.  And the key point here was that he was alone.  The rest of Washington, D.C., the politicians, the television producers, the White House staff, had scattered across town to posh restaurants enjoying their cocktails, regaling each other with tales of the day’s successes and making their deals for tomorrow, smugly content that they had put another day of work behind them.

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That afternoon, Senator Rand Paul had begun what would be a 13 hour filibuster, promising to hold up confirmation of the new Director of the CIA until the president answered this simple question. “Does the president’s newly assumed power to kill a U.S. citizen, without arrest or trial, apply to non combatants here in the United States?”

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It was a reasonable question.  Under president Barack Obama, the U.S. government had begun an unprecedented policy of killing U.S. citizens if they were deemed as terrorists.  Forget Miranda rights, they couldn’t even have a trial.  And this could happen anywhere in the world. The United States did not have to be at war with a country.  They could violate the air space and commit these killings in the Middle East, Asia, even Europe. In 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed in a drone missile strike on a desert road in Yemen.  Two weeks later, his son, born in Denver, Colorado, with no ties to terrorism, searching for his father’s body in Yemen, was likewise killed by an American drone strike.  The killing of al-Awlaki was justified because of his rabble rousing sermons which had inspired terrorists.  The son’s killing, was oops, sorry, a mistake.  

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The media has been remarkably silent.

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In February, when asked about drone missiles now circling key locations here in the United States, the White House was asked if the president had the power to kill U.S. citizens  without trial, on American soil, or was this just something he could do overseas?  The White House assured the amazingly docile American media that the Justice Department had agreed that the president had this power.

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President Barack Obama can be thankful that his predecessor, George W. Bush, did not or Obama, himself, might not be around.  By such reckoning, Barack Obama’s own pastor could have been “droned out” for his tirade, when he famously chanted, “God damn America,” from his pulpit.   And Obama, had he been in the audience for those sermons might have been collateral damage, much like al-Awlaki’s son.

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The country seemed to be lulled into a trance.  This included its once fierce and uncompromising, professional, watchdog media, now held tightly by its corporate leashes, reduced to reading press releases and providing entertainment.  The trance included its corrupt politicians, too busy making money off of insider trading to take time to defend something so esoteric as a Constitutional right.  It included its courts, now as malleable to public opinion and as intimidated by American culture as the politicians.   Even the public was silent, too intellectually lazy to care.  No one could move lest they be stamped racist, liberal, conservative, unpatriotic or some other unpopular sticker.

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So Rand Paul, like the sassy kid in the proverbial story, The Emperor Has No Clothes, asked aloud the question that no one else dared ask.

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The White House sniggered.  The media ignored it. President Barack Obama would not answer.  Nor would anyone else.  Former president George W. Bush was silent on the subject, as was former president Clinton and Democrat Party leader, Al Gore.  Republican leaders, John McCain and House Speaker, John Boehner didn’t peep.  This was apparently a tough question.

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And so, as it appeared to the nation, Rand Paul, all alone, without a single ally to hold his water, took to the Senate Floor in a filibuster, demanding that this simple question be answered.  If he was out of line and the rest of the country knew what they were doing, so be it.

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At first there was not much of a reaction.  In the afternoon, when a member of the White House press corps asked about it, the president’s spokesman openly laughed. While Fox News Channel and MSNBC mentioned the event, mostly the national media ignored it, much as they had Rand Paul’s father, when he raised issues of civil liberties. After three hours, fellow Senator, and Liberty ally, Mike Lee finally made an appearance.  Everybody else, including the president, went out to dinner that night and then home for the evening.  The vast Liberty online community was remarkably calm.

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But as the night wore on and Americans finished their meals and sat at their monitors or picked up their I-Phones to answer some mail, word of the drama unfolding on the floor of the U.S. Senate began to spread.  Some called it a Twitter Blizzard, a mocking reference to the snow storm that was not happening as predicted. First it resonated among the Liberty Movement base.  Rand Paul had launched a filibuster.  He wouldn’t stop talking until the President answered his question.  And then it began to spread across political and partisan lines.  What’s a filibuster?  Why won’t the president answer such a simple question?  What happened to the watchdog media?  How could they let such a question go unanswered?  By 9 pm,normal television viewing was skewed. NBC’s popular Law and Order was losing its audience as people rushed to online streaming or YouTube captured videos of the drama.  C-SPAN viewers spiked.  Cable television began to be dominated by the spectacle.

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With the public aroused, the politicians reacted.  A parade of Senators, Republican and Democrat, rushed back to help Rand Paul.  Mike Lee made another appearance, this time with Ted Cruz and likely presidential contender, Marco Rubio.  Mitch McConnell and the GOP leadership fell into line.

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They were all a minute too late and a dollar too short.  Senator Rand Paul, all by himself, without any help, had electrified the nation.

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The next day, the politically savvy and thorough White House hauled out a canned moment that had been carefully preserved in case the filibuster went wrong.  Attorney General Holder had already answered the question to a Senator before the filibuster began, they now insisted.  But one wonders what they would have done with that canned moment if the public had not reacted.  Thursday morning, as Rand Paul began recovering from his 13 hour filibuster, the president finally answered the question.  And his CIA director was promptly confirmed.

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A lot of other things were confirmed as well.

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1.) Rand Paul is an unquestioned leader of the Liberty Movement and can inspire it whenever he chooses. Others will have to wait their turn.

2.) He is no political slouch, he is gutsy.

3.) Rand Paul is the first candidate since Ronald Reagan to actually lead a movement.

4.) The old left-right, Cold War paradigm is dead.  Rand Paul represents a new philosophy back to the constitution and it attracts support across the political spectrum from left to right.

5.) The fact that the country is moving in his direction and the packaging of his message is more palatable than that of his father’s, Rand Paul can win the presidency.

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From a purely historical perspective, one wonders how much further we will go in gutting our Constitution and sacrificing our rights to keep us “safe.”  How much bigger will government get?  How many more powers will be seized by the executive branch and how much future legislation will be accomplished by executive fiat?  At what point will it go so far down this road that we cannot find our way back?  And we learn that our form of government has changed before our eyes, without a discussion?

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Will Rand Paul’s filibuster be nothing more than an empty moment of theater on our way to a future government run by a single chief executive, serving at the pleasure of fifty television moguls?  Or will it mark the hi water mark of the new, post 9-11, tyranny and the beginning of a self examination that will take us back to a renewal of our hard won Constitutional Republic?  We can only hope and pray for the latter.

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George H.W. Bush: Tweets before Twitter, his personal notes

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The Forty First president, George H. W. Bush, has reissued his book All the Best.  And with the new publication come another trove of personal notes and observations.  These were tweets before twitter.  Here is my take.

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What do you think of the notes and personal letters of GHWB?

I think the presidents’ notes and letters constitute some of the most valuable writings of any president in all of American history.   And by the way, only a fraction of those notes are in the book.

And why do you think they are important?

Well, they are more than “stream of conscious” they are “stream of heart.”  As he conducts business, congratulating a birthday or issuing instructions to a staffer, he is also talking about what is going on around him.  It’s a twitter diary before twitter.  Communications reduced to a few words.  But they reveal more than dates and times, they reveal how the president feels about what is happening and what is being said.  And most presidents and politicians guard their feelings.

Give me some examples.

His mounting disgust over Saddam Hussein’s treatment of Kuwait.  Which led to a great miscalculation on the latter’s part.  It was the same miscalculation that Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega made.  Bush, Sr. has a tender heart but a will of iron.  You can read the notes and see that war was coming.

What notes in the book are the most revealing to you?

The president’s constant comments on his pain and deep feelings about the criticism of his son.  Both men, father and son, would rather be attacked themselves than to see the other attacked.

And there are layers of irony in that because some historians will judge one or the other president wrong on Iraq.    Either the father was right to leave well enough alone, after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.  Or the son was right to have a war and get rid of the tyrant, even though Iraq became an Islamic Republic and with that unintended consequences, such as Christians being drven out for the first time in 2,000 years.  One can argue either way.

How will history judge Bush, Sr.?

In the interest of full disclosure, I served in his White House.  But I can tell you that observers in the former Soviet Union credit him as much as Reagan with the collapse of their empire which for us meant the end of The Cold War, and the end of the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Under Bush, Sr. there was a very real chance of a counter revolution.  And he had pressure on every side to act.  But he wisely invoked Napoleon’s dictum, “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”  And in the end, he finished what Reagan started.

There are many football teams that do well for three quarters and then lose the game at the end.  George H. W. Bush, won the last quarter of the Cold War and that sealed the deal.

See Doug Wead on CNN speaking to this topic.

http://startingpoint.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/05/bush-41-opens-up-about-bush-43-in-new-book-author-doug-wead-shares-the-highlights/