Well … one son is currently serving as President (and a horrible one) and another is governor of Florida. You think they both got there on their own merits? I mean, Dubya? Merit? :dubious:
I bet that Rolodex got a REAL WORKOUT during the Clinton administration and what we are seeing now is the fallout from all that Rolodex twirling.
So in other words, you got nothing.
I know of at least a couple of times that he’s flown into Bangkok on some sort of business. He’s on the board of several major international corporations, as is dollar-billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, the fellow who was ousted as prime minister in our military coup the year before last. Could be they were just talking business, but the US ambassador was on hand, too, by all accounts, as were several other US and Thai government officials. Don’t know if that all means anything, though; just sayin’.
The wife and I were in Siam Square once in the mid-1990s when Bush Sr. drove by in the back of the ambassador’s limo, complete with escort. We saw someone’s arm in the back seat; dunno if it was Bush’s or the ambassador’s.
I didn’t claim the strawman that you are expecting me to defend. I claimed that he still has power when he is not President. I never claimed that he has MORE power. As anyone in the business or political world knows, your power is derived based on who you know, and what you can get them to do for you. In some cases there is power derived from the chair, i.e. the seat of the Presidency or Senate or Judge or whatever. You are asking me to prove that he still hangs out with and does business with his buddies after he leaves the office. I never made any specific claim that requires defending.
Oh, Pappy Bush called me and tried to use his skull and bones connection with me to get me to help Dubya take the election in Georgia, but I told him no, man, I’d never do that, even if he did have proof that I didn’t declare an eclair I had fro dinner in 1997 on my income tax records. I’m just that kinda guy.
C’mon, how ya gonna prove something like Bush calling people to influence his son’s political fortunes? And how would he not do that? Dubya is his son, after all.
Like I said, you just have conjecture with nothing to back it up. It’s a pretty big accusation to make, and I have no problems with believing that besides the few public appearances he made, GHW Bush did very little to help his son’s election campaign.
My apologies if I misread your post. I thought you were saying that GHW Bush was just as influential after losing re-election as he would have been if he had won. That he came out just fine regardless of the loss. This I have a problem with. His scope of influence would have been much greater as a two term president IMO, but that may not have been your point.
Do you have any evidence for this theory? It seems to me that families like the Kennedy’s, Rockefellers, DuPonts, Hiltons, etc seem to have no problem maintaining their wealth for generations.
The Bushes will fade from the public spotlight in about a year, but I’m sure they will stay wealthy.
Explain this, then, and I won’t accept “Well, that’s because Bush is stoooopid and couldn’t do it right” or “Well, he’s relinquishing personal wealth to throw people off the scent” or any other such tin foil malarky.
Yes, dammit, I said malarky.
Well, then there is no point in discussing conspiracies with you. Conspriracies are conducted in SECRET as I keep saying. That is their nature. That makes it very hard to come up with evidence of what they’re up to. That’s why it’s always a huge sensation when a conspiracy – like the Catholic conspiracy to protect child-molesting preists, for exampe – is exposed.
If you have to have hard evidence before you can discuss a conspiracy, or the possibility of a conspiracy, you are limited pretty much to after-the-fact discussion of exposed (and therefore probably failed) conspiracies.
It seems reasonable to me that people can look at clues that indicate the existence of conspiracies and discuss whether it is reasonable to believe some conspiring is going on. In the case of the Bush family, there is ample evidence (Florida 2000) that they are capable of rigging an election. Compared to what was done there, a little arm-twisting on the phone by Pappy Bush seems a mild effort. It also seems very likely that the Justice Department firings and the pressure to go after Democrats and not Republicans was an effort to transform the Justice Department into a political tool of Dubya’s white house (i.e., Karl Rove). Drawing the conclusion that the Bushes conspire in secret to advance their political fortunes as well as make public efforts seems an almost inevitable conclusion.
I think the OP’s being paranoid, but I’m damn glad that someone’s paying attention, just in case.
I’ll be willing to take the OP seriously if and when we ever again hear from Jeb, Og forbid.
Probably; wealth has a sort of inertia.
But dynastic families do tend to undergo a certain fading over the generations. You have a founder who’s exceptional in some way or another; and over the next few generations whatever made him exceptional is diluted into mediocrity.
The question as I see it, is of who the founder is. Do we consider it to be Samuel who made the fortune? Do we consider it Prescott who setup the political influence?
Personally I consider it to be George HW Bush, who secured the highest levels of power, utilized the familial power and wealth left to him highly effectively, and passed on the power to the next generations. It isn’t until after HW that we see the diffusion that makes the theory posted above plausible. That progression of dynastic wealth doesn’t work too well. I don’t think it’s quite long enough. If it were extended a generation or two, it would work better. The reason it works somewhat like that is because as new generations are born the wealth has to be diffused more and more. Now, with George HW, he has a number of children who take the wealth in different directions, but can maintain some cohesion. His grandchildren however are unlikely to carry the torch in the same way.
A good corrollary would be the Rothschild’s (Not because of a grand Jewish conspiracy) after Mayer Amschel Rothschild, they maintained their banking interests up until right after World War II. I’d say the end of their dynasty as a dynasty occurred around Guy de Rothschild who had his French bank nationalized out from under him, a good century after Mayer Amschel. The Rothschild’s of course kept their wealth very close to the family for the first couple of generations succeeding Mayer Amschel. He setup a very ingenious method of containing the dynastic wealth.
The Bushes didn’t do it that same way, but I don’t think we see the decline until now with George HW Bush’s grandchildren.
I am going to be very dismissive when the evidence you provided in the OP are:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651
http://economistsview.typepad.com/e...lot-agains.html
I will be equally pessimistic when I have read the argument of your OP all before.
I refuse to allow myself an emotional rather than rational response to the question of the the qualifications and platform of one Barack Hussein Obama. The whole point of this thread without it being stated is the ‘old way is bad and the new way is good’, which on its face is Propaganda, a concerted set of loaded messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people.
Trotsky was exiled for his opposition to Josef Stalin’s policies. His 1940 assassination in Mexico was carried out by a Soviet agent at Stalin’s behest.
Terrorism, those acts which are intended to create fear (terror), are perpetrated for an ideological goal , is a form of psychological warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism
Psychological warfare, "The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior. Also known as infowars. The press is one of the most commonly used weapons for spreading propaganda. Psychological warfare - Wikipedia
This is my final post on this thread. But I reserve the right to start a new thread .