Tag: George W. Bush

In 1994, I traveled to Texas to write about George W. Bush’s challenge to incumbent Gov. Rove was happy to talk about the governor’s race, but what he really wanted to show me, a political writer who covered races across the South, was the ad he’d just cut for Perry Hooper, a Republican candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court. They have tough ads in Alabama, but nothing like this had ever been seen in a judicial race. An actor portrayed a lawyer with a thick Southern accent, questioning Democratic incumbent Judge Sonny Hornsby over the phone about a campaign contribution request he’d received while he had a case before the court. This is a long way to get around to talking about what everybody else is talking about, but many threads connect the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle and last week’s Senate hearings with that moment years ago. Bush’s victory over Richards that year was his first long step toward the White House, where Rove and Kavanaugh worked together on a number of issues. Last week, former President Bush was making calls to senators on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The Hooper race and its dramatic aftermath was a brash announcement to the rest of the country that races which until then had been only mildly political could now be intensely political. Last week on Fox News, Rove worried that the politics of the hearings weren’t going Republicans’ way. What seems without question is that the hearings produced as clean a cleavage between red and blue as any news event in memory.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary, "Fahrenheit 11/9" opened over the weekend at about 1,700 theaters nationwide. It was an unusually wide release for a documentary, suggesting hopes for a hit much like Moore's 2004 "Fahrenheit 9/11," a scathing take on the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. Some films become political by accident. Take "RBG," the story of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “The political landscape, #MeToo, Time’s Up — all of those events make Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life story that much more interesting to people,” West explained. The movie grossed $14 million at the box office and made Ginsburg a kind of cult figure. Here’s a list of some of the most popular documentaries and movies based on box office numbers. Documentaries "Fahrenheit 9/11" Who’s involved? "2016: Obama’s America" Who’s involved? Feature films "All the President’s Men" Who’s involved?

If you are a Republican candidate in 2018, chances are pretty good that you’re running hard on the politics of fear. Elsewhere, Republican candidates are running “stop illegal immigration now” ads blaming Democrats for purported crime waves, drug dealing and the spread of gangs such as MS-13. So egregiously did they politicize the killing of Mollie Tibbetts that her own father was compelled to intervene and tell conservatives to stop using his daughter’s death for their gain. After the 9/11 attacks, fear was marshaled to rally support for the invasion of Iraq, to reshape American foreign policy and to sanction the use of previously banned torture techniques. Shout the big lie often enough and people will believe it; make people fearful enough and they will follow you down any dark road. Too many Americans are following the Trump administration and GOP down their dark roads, tolerating what should be intolerable. But, he continued, “even if it doesn’t work, they deserve it.” And his audiences, primed to be both fearful and wrathful by an increasingly shrill media and online culture, rewarded him time and again for these tirades. Make enough people fearful about enough things, GOP strategists seem to believe, and you can neutralize distaste for all the chaos and cruelty of Trump’s administration and its enablers. Bombarded with rhetoric about violent crime, 7 in 10 Americans believe crime is going up. In fact, the violent crime rate today is barely a quarter of what it was in the early 1990s.

Amid sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee, former President George W. Bush releases a statement saying he stands by past comments praising the pick. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking…

Image Recently, Interview magazine published a conversation between the actress Kerry Washington and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accompanied by photographs of the young politician wearing a fitted blazer with wide lapels and green piping; a slim, matching set of trousers; and an elegant pair of black stilettos from Manolo Blahnik, the total cost for which was somewhere around $3,500. Just as the left spun into fury when Melania Trump boarded a plane to the Mexican border to tour a shelter for immigrant children wearing a jacket that read, “I really don’t care. Do U?,” the right found outrage in what it regarded as discordant messaging — a democratic socialist who looked as if she were going to Davos or Balthazar. Here was “someone who pretends to be a champion of the people,” as the conservative activist Charlie Kirk put it on Twitter, dressing in clothes worth a few months rent, all the while “saying the rich have too much power.” The hosts of “Fox & Friends,” had a great time telling everyone they didn’t own, or want, $600 shoes. Appropriating signifiers from across class lines is, of course, a standard political move used to memorable advantage by, among others, George W. Bush, who successfully masked his patrician origins every time he put on a pair of Wranglers, a cowboy hat and a barn jacket. While authenticity is a sought-after characteristic in contemporary American politics, its currency is fairly limited. It is hard to imagine someone like John V. Lindsay, coming up in today’s system, persuading the poor he understood their suffering while looking as though he had started each morning on the squash court. The imperative to mirror the demographic you are trying to court will always be called out as hypocrisy by the opposition when it seems phony or betraying and yet often it is simply the deployment of tactical ingenuity. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez needs the center-left — surely emboldened by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s primary victory last week — to warm to her, to imagine that she isn’t going to tear down the castles.

Bob Woodward’s new book and the anonymous op-ed by a senior official have merely confirmed, albeit in hair-raising new detail, the long obvious: Mr Trump is so blatantly unfit to be president that those who work for him ignore or thwart his orders. His ability to maintain his position could yet depend on the other individual in the spotlight: Brett Kavanaugh. That was by design. What we did learn, despite a process legal scholars have described as unprecedented in its “hurried and defective” nature, came largely thanks to disclosures by the Democratic committee member Cory Booker and a leak to media. It was in essence confirmatory rather than revelatory. It will put conservatives in firm and likely long-term control of the supreme court, endangering both voting and abortion rights, and incidentally putting it out of step with public opinion. And despite disingenuous attempts to blur his position on abortion law, Planned Parenthood said: “We already know how Brett Kavanaugh would rule on Roe v Wade, because the president told us so.” As a candidate, Mr Trump vowed to appoint supreme court justices who would overturn the landmark abortion ruling. And it is critical in maintaining his position now. The real issue is not individuals, but the rottenness of those backing them. We did not need the last week to tell us that Mr Kavanaugh is bad news on the supreme court and that Mr Trump is much more so in the White House.

Washington (CNN)Washington luminaries, former presidents and the family of John McCain gathered Saturday at Washington National Cathedral to honor and remember the late senator in a grand display of pomp and unity in the nation's capital. Among the tributes -- including from former McCain rivals and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- was an emotional remembrance from McCain's daughter Meghan that included several pointed and unmistakable references to Trump. "We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. The former President acknowledged the contrast between himself and McCain, saying, "We were standard-bearers of different American political traditions." But Obama spoke of a deep respect for the late senator. "For all our differences, for all the times we sparred, I never tried to hide, and I think John came to understand, the longstanding admiration that I had for him." He said that the late senator responded with some impatience, saying: "That's the point Joe ... You're a Democrat, I'm a Republican, we could give our country the bipartisan leadership it needs for a change." Sarah Palin, who was McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election was not invited to any of the memorial services. The service followed a public procession that brought McCain's body from the US Capitol to the cathedral. On Sunday, a private service will take place at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and then his body will be laid to rest in the US Naval Academy Cemetery.

Donald Trump’s name was never mentioned but Barack Obama delivered a broadside at the president when he spoke at the memorial service for John McCain in Washington on Saturday and decried “insult and phony controversies” in politics and public life. John McCain: bipartisan leaders gather to say farewell to senator Read more Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late Republican Senator from Arizona who died last Saturday, also issued blistering criticism of Trump’s politics when she spoke at the event at America’s national cathedral. He called on us to be better than that.” Play Video 0:50 At the start of the service, Meghan McCain had delivered a tearful, bitter denunciation of Trump’s politics to the gathering of the Washington elite, including the president’s own daughter, Ivanka Trump. He fought a rancorous public feud with Trump until his last breath. Most dramatically, he sank his own party’s attempts, not long after Trump took office in 2017, to repeal Obama’s flagship Affordable Care Act that allowed millions more Americans to have health insurance. Trump was not at Saturday’s memorial service, at McCain’s own discretion. Instead the president, who has said only a few grudging words about the Arizona senator all week, reportedly left the White House while the event was under way, not even watching on television. As Bush and then Obama, by McCain’s invitation, gave eulogies, the White House reported that Trump had arrived at his golf course. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both senior White House advisers, and several members of the administration were at the cathedral. Obama also said: “While John and I disagreed on all kinds of foreign policy issues, we stood together on America’s role as the one indispensable nation, believing that with great power and great blessings, comes great responsibility.

Former President George W Bush paid tribute to the late Senator John McCain at his funeral service in Washington.

In a new interview with Bloomberg, President Trump calls the Mueller probe an “illegal investigation” and says Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ job in safe until at least the November midterm elections. Former Federal Prosecutor John Flannery says Trump’s reportedly wanting…