How Doonesbury helped turn George HW Bush into a mass-murdering war criminal

George HW Bush was a mass murderer and a war criminal and now he is dead.

In some ways, Bush I was fated to be a terrible person. His family fortune sprang from his father's willingness to cozy up to Hitler and sell him the steel he needed to re-arm Nazi Germany. As a young man, Bush I distinguished himself by desecrating indigenous graves.

But it was when Bush I's national political career took off in earnest, first as Reagan's VP and then as a presidential hopeful and finally as a one-term, failed president that he began to performatively inflict cruelty upon innocents, lying to the American people, victimizing people both retail and wholesale, all in the service of shaking off his media image as a "wimp."

Matt Taibbi (previously) is in characteristically fine form in tracing the path to dishonor pursued by George Herbert Walker Bush, the petty, spiteful campaigns he waged after being stung by mockery in the panels of Doonesbury (reminding us on the way of the enormous political power Garry Trudeau has quietly wielded down through the years, including the infliction of much-deserved psychic trauma on Trumplethinskin himself). Multiple sources, including George W Bush, have stated that Jeb Bush was so enraged by the toll this mockery took on "Poppy" that he vowed to go to New York City and kick Garry Trudeau's ass.

But Bush I's pricked ego didn't stop at stewing over Garry Trudeau. He and his team entrapped a young Black man into trying to sell crack in front of the White House, merely so he could go on TV and complain about the crack epidemic getting so bad that someone had been arrested for selling crack outside of the White House. Read the rest