Contrary to critical analysis, Bush 41 did have a vision thing, it was just a mistaken vision.
He imagined a kinder gentler America full of kinder gentler people, at the expense of a sober estimation of human nature which recognized and reckoned with the baser instincts residing in every human heart.
Conservatives are supposed to specialize in that, but Bush 41 did not.
This mistaken example of liberalism wasn't just a one-off, either. The lack of sobriety extended also to his hate crime legislation.
Bush 41 imagined you could eradicate hate by criminalizing it, as if America ought to become a theocracy with "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer" becoming the law of the land. But who doesn't kill except out of hate? "Nothing personal, just business" is for the movies, not reality. It's as if long established laws differentiating involuntary manslaughter from murder never existed. Now the damn idea has metastasized into the force which is at the heart of America's perilous polarization, and its insanity. We aren't allowed to hate anything except the haters, while entertaining our hate secretly all the while. Enter cognitive dissonance on a national scale. Everyone knows the truth, they just can't say it.
So they're saying Bush 41 was a patrician as they bury him today. Puritan was more like it.
No one expected that more Americans with disabilities would be dependent on government 25 years later, but that’s what has happened. ...
The ADA made no change to Social Security, yet there has been a substantial increase in the number of people who saw the offered hand described by President Bush bearing a monthly check.
The number of workers who receive Social Security disability-insurance payments has almost tripled. At the end of 2014, 9 million workers had a disability award that entitled them and their dependents to a monthly government check. This was a 197 percent increase over the 1990 number; over the same period the working-age population had increased by only 29 percent.
The disability path out of the labor market has become much more inviting since the ADA became law. More claims point to pain and other conditions whose diagnoses largely rely on patients’ subjective experiences rather than the self-evident disabilities of those who have appeared in coverage of the ADA’s 25th.
