The Bushes & The Clintons : The Best Of Friends

George W. Admits He Took Advice On Being President From Bill Clinton

In a follow-up to the story here yesterday about Bill Clinton's bizarre claim that the very first priority of a Hillary Clinton presidency would be to send Bill and Pappa Bush on the road to repair the international damage wrought by George W. here's some interesting photos and details of the close relationship between the Bushes and the Clintons :



From Your New Reality :

Hillary Clinton likes to give the impression that she stands utterly opposed to President George W. Bush, and that she believes he has ruined the United States during his seven years in power.

But it's all a lie. The Clintons and the Bushes are really the best of friends, as we pointed out on this blog almost two years ago.

They're supposed to be enemies. But they're really good friends

From Your New Reality, January 2006 :

Mr Bush said he checked in with Mr Clinton occasionally.

"And you know, he says things that make it obvious … that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency," he said.

And what "wavelength" is that? President Bush didn't explain.

More on the very close relationships in the Bush-Clinton Presidential Family :

US President George W. Bush thinks it's funny that Senator Hilary Clinton could be the next President of the United States.

Despite the fact that both her and her husband Bill Clinton have savaged the Bush 2 Administration, and mocked the President for being dumb and careless and out of touch, there are no hard feelings from the Bush Family.

Bill Clinton spends an awful amount of time doing charity gigs with his former rival and fellow ex-President George Herbert Walker Bush. They've become great friends and current President Bush thinks of Bill as a member of the family now.

"That's a good relationship," Bush said of his dad's flourishing mateship with "my new brother".

President Bush thought it was "fun" to watch his father and Clinton together at the funeral of Pope John Paul.

When asked about who might be the next President of the United States, Bush mused about how future historians might look back and view the decades when only a few key members of two old American families held the most powerful office in the world as "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton", he said.

Who needs elections?


Guess who they're laughing at? YOU

The Bush-Clinton Family Album : W. On Bill "He's My Brother"

Bill Clinton : Me And Pappa Bush Will Repair US International Image Damage Wrought By George W.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton

Bill Clinton is claiming that when Hillary 'wins' the White House, he will be sent on a world tour with George W. Bush's father to announce that the US is "open for business and cooperation again".

So voting for Hillary Clinton will launch the original Bush The Destroyer back onto the world stage?

The fake attacks by Hillary Clinton on President George W. Bush are clearly part of the theatre that they hope will keep the Bush-Clinton families at the top of America's political and power elite. They're not enemies. It's a con, a jape, an odious scam.

Hillary has refused to back ending the Iraq War and is opposed to President Bush's impeachment. She also backs President Bush on his railing against Iran, and has refused to rule out opposing air strikes on Iran if it comes to that. She is just as militarily-minded as President Bush, and will keep bushing the shared Bush-Clinton agenda for as long as she stays in the White House. If she even gets there. And her husband sure ain't helping.

That Bill Clinton would announce this tour, as part of the celebrations of another Bush-Clinton victory, and as though it were a good thing, as though it would help to win his wife votes, is just plain bizarre.

Considering how deeply unpopular the former President Bush was, and how staggeringly unpopular his son now is, most Americans would rather have acid poured in their eyes than to see any Bush representing their country on the world stage. Which is why Jeb Bush has decided to stay away from running for the White House for another decade or so.

Truly, truly weird :

Former President Bill Clinton said Monday that the first thing his wife Hillary will do when she reaches the White House is dispatch him and his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, on an around-the-world mission to repair the damage done to America's reputation by the current president - Bush's son, George W. Bush.

"Well, the first thing she intends to do, because you can do this without passing a bill, the first thing she intends to do is to send me and former President Bush and a number of other people around the world to tell them that America is open for business and cooperation again," Clinton said in response to a question from a supporter about what his wife's "number one priority" would be as president.

This would be Hillary's Number One Priority on becoming president?

What planet are these people from?


UPDATE : To the surprise of absolutely no-one, except perhaps Bill Clinton, Pappa Bush has now nixed the idea of hitting the road with Clinton to badmouth his presidential son's legacy.

Father And Son, Not As Distant As Some Might Think

President Talks To Bush Snr Almost Every Morning

Former President Still Controlling America Through His Son

Sons who still live at home with their parents don't talk to their dads as often as President Bush talks to his. This fairly revealing feature from the New York Times has plenty of details on the relationship between the former president and the current president. You have to wonder, however, how much of this is image polishing.

Then again, learning that the old story that the president never talks to his father about the running of the United States, or the Iraq War, or Washington politics, is complete rubbish should come as a surprise to no-one.

George HW Bush wanted his sons to continue the American political dynasty that began with his own father, Prescott Bush, an American senator. When Jeb Bush failed to hold onto Florida, his father was so distraught he wept in public. That son George W. became president was never an accident, or of his own initiative.

Bush Snr started preparing the ground for either Jeb or George W. to become POTUS within weeks of his own miserable failure to score a second term in the White House in 1992.

The Bush family matriarch is presented to us now as an aging, soft-hearted old man, probably losing his memories and clarity to Alzheimer's or some other malady. But this, too, is part of an all too cynical spit-and-polish of the old man.

Now we're supposed to feel sorry for George HW because Americans dare to confront him with the nasty, and correct, truth about his son, and his appalling failures as leader of the free world.

But George W. is his father's son, and some would say, his father as his own son - a vicious, political machine who took no prisoners and pretended to tolerate Christian conservatives because George W. convinced him, and rightly so, that there were plenty of votes to be found amongst the true believers.

It worked for the dad, and it worked for the son.

But with less than seventeen months left in the White House, there will be repeated attempts by sympathetic media, and the usual well-placed "sources" to burnish anew the Bush political dynasty, which should go down in history as the most damaging, most destructive in American history :

The official line from the White House is that 41, as he is known in Bush circles, gives advice to 43 only when asked. But interviews with a broad range of people close to both presidents — including family members like the elder Mr. Bush’s daughter, Doro Bush Koch, and aides who have worked for both men, like Andrew H. Card Jr. — suggest a far more complicated father-son dynamic, in which the former president is not nearly so distant as the White House would have people believe.

They talk almost every morning by phone, and Mr. Bush studiously avoids saying anything critical of his son, close associates say. But he has privately expressed irritation with some of his son’s aides. At times, he has urged White House officials to seek outside advice, and he has passed on his own foreign policy wisdom to the president, even as he makes a point of saying his son’s administration is not his.

It is a balancing act. The former president keeps up his contacts with world leaders — last year, for instance, he invited President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to spend a night at Kennebunkport — but is discreet. Once, during an intimate dinner with the king of Morocco, he called the White House and got the president on the phone.

“He put the king on, just like that,” one startled guest recalled. “No national security advisers, no nothing, just the president talking with the king of Morocco.”

He is a frequent visitor to the White House. He still loves eating at the White House mess and has breakfast or coffee with Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist, whenever he comes, mostly to chew over political gossip. From time to time, he picks up the phone to talk policy with Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff. He called Mr. Bolten’s predecessor, Mr. Card, about every other week.

Mostly, said Mr. Card, who was transportation secretary to the elder Mr. Bush and views himself as “a bridge” between the generations, the father was simply checking on his son. But sometimes the ex-president would raise a foreign policy question, or suggest the White House reach out to those “in his circle,” like James A. Baker, the former secretary of state, or Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, who has been openly critical of the war in Iraq.

In a sense, the elder Mr. Bush is traversing uncharted territory.

Their relationship is undoubtedly the most scrutinized father-son bond in Washington, especially given the well-publicized foreign policy rifts between their two camps.

Tensions between aides to 41 and 43 ran especially high when Mr. Baker was co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. When President Bush rejected the group’s recommendations, some in the 41 camp viewed it as an outright rejection of the father. When Mr. Scowcroft spoke out against the war, some thought the father was sending a message to the son.

Some authors have asserted that there is rivalry between the two; the journalist Bob Woodward, for instance, reported in his book “Plan of Attack” that when asked if he sought his father’s advice before going to war, the president said: “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.”

The rivalry theory flared up again last year, at the christening of the Navy’s newest Nimitz aircraft carrier, the George H. W. Bush. The president joked that given the ship’s qualities — “she is unrelenting, she is unshakeable, she is unyielding” — it should have been named for his mother. The line brought a laugh, but some close to the elder Mr. Bush winced at what seemed a subtle dig.

....father and son are described as extremely close. When the clan is in Kennebunkport, all the Bush children, the president included, stream into their parents’ bedroom at the crack of dawn for coffee. When the president is not there, the other Bushes call.

As to what is said in private conversations between father and son, no one can be certain. When phone calls come in from Houston or Kennebunkport, White House aides make themselves scarce. But Mr. Card says it is clear to him that family talks were not always confined to family matters.

“It was relatively easy for me to read the sitting president’s body language after he had talked to his mother or father,” Mr. Card said. “Sometimes he’d ask me a probing question. And I’d think, Hmm, I don’t think that question came from him.”

The former president is often asked how he steers clear of second-guessing his son, and his answer is always the same: that he is not qualified to second-guess because only the occupant of the Oval Office has complete access to the kind of intelligence reports that inform presidential decisions.

Even so, those close to the former president say it is clear that the father has been dissatisfied with the performance of some of his son’s aides, notably Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense.

“I think it is accurate to say that there’s a feeling that a lot of the aides around him have not served the president well — Rumsfeld is one,” said one person close to the elder Mr. Bush who, like all interviewed on this topic, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

His children worry about him. Last December, at an event honoring his son Jeb in his last days as Florida’s governor, the elder Mr. Bush broke down crying at the memory of Jeb’s bitter defeat in 1994. Mrs. Koch says her father is growing more emotional as he ages — “he has a tender heart that is getting tenderer” — which makes criticism of his eldest son that much harder to take.

Late last year, at the aircraft carrier christening, he grew emotional again, this time with President Bush in his presence. Before a crowd that included political luminaries from both administrations, as well as dozens of family members and friends, the father made a point of saying he supports his son “in every single way with every fiber of my body.”

So the former president talks to his The President almost every morning.

They talk about the state of the nation, the Iraq War and Washington politics.

Former aides to Bush Snr are now advising the current president, or in the case of defence secretary James Baker, in control of one of the most important desks.

Bush Snr goes to the White House on a regular basis, and eats in a staff dining room, where he talks with senior advisers and the president's right hand men.

The former president peppers his son with questions about issues of national security, and classified intelligence, which the president then echoes to his own advisers and aides and agency heads, no doubt telling his father what they said in their next morning phone call.

All of that paints a portrait vastly different to the one commonly known : that the former president is "not well", rarely talks to his son, does not meddle in the affairs of the White House, or the nation, and never discusses the Iraq War, or the 'War on Terror' with his son.

George HW Bush may no longer be President of the United States, but he still hasn't left the White House.

And his remarkably close relationship with Bill Clinton, and the next most likely president, Hilary Clinton, means that he may retain his access to the White House inner circles even after his son leaves in January, 2007.

Remarkable.

Papa Bush's Murky Dealings In Oil, The CIA And The Kennedy Assassination

Don't even pretend to be shocked.

From the Real News Project :

Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer. Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.' But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency. According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963. “Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency. It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns. While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported. The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency. Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial. Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” When this document was first uncovered in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush." When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride approached the CIA in 1988, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing. It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days. "After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good." In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a minor yet significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”

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