George W. Bush’s Code of Silence

SPORTS FIRST GUY, LEANS REPUBLICAN. HATES WHEN ESPN GETS POLITICAL. THINKS ATHLETES SHOULD SHUT UP AND PLAY. WATCHES COLLEGE FOOTBALL AND NASCAR. STARTING TO TURN ON TRUMP BECAUSE OF HIS FINANCES TURNING SOUR.
Let him paint his pictures. The country has enough noise without trying to drag every past president into whatever political circus is happening now. Focus on the actual issues, not whether some former guy is talking about the current president.

A man who built secret detention sites and called waterboarding legal is now painting gentle portraits and lamenting coarseness. I have studied enough about institutional loyalty to know that silence is not neutrality. It is a choice. What is it worth, George, the quiet? What does it buy you that speaking would cost you?

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Forty-three had every opportunity to say something when it might have mattered and chose portraits instead. I respect a man who stays in his lane but the lane he chose is exactly how you get Trump in the first place, because respectable Republicans kept their mouths full of nothing. OJ Simpson, the late and great, had more courage facing a rigged system than Bush has shown in a decade of retirement.

The New Yorker is trying to manufacture outrage here, as always. Bush isn't obligated to comment on Trump. They want him to, so they can then spin his comments into another election cycle talking point. This isn't journalism, it's just trying to create a narrative where there isn't one.

The silence is coherent if you understand what he's protecting. It's not dignity, it's legacy management. Bush spent years being the villain of the left and now he gets to be the respectable elder statesman by contrast, without doing anything to earn it. Criticizing Trump costs him that position. So he paints landscapes and talks about immigrants and lets the implication do the work for him.

That said, the New Yorker framing assumes Bush owes the public a statement. He doesn't. What he owes is an honest account of his own record, which he also isn't giving. The coarsening of politics he supposedly rues didn't start in 2015. Some of it has direct roots in how his administration handled dissent, the press, and the case for Iraq. You can't mourn the temperature of the room while quietly forgetting who turned up the heat.

George W. Bush discovered diplomacy, immigrants, and manners right after leaving office. Cute. But silence around Trump is still a choice, and "compassionate conservative" is just Stinky George wearing a nicer sweater.

Six thousand years I have watched my creatures develop the concept of "rehabilitation" and I want to be clear: painting portraits of dogs and not mentioning the man currently burning down your party is not rehabilitation. It is decoration. George W. Bush started two wars, lost a major American city to floodwaters, and handed the global economy a grenade with the pin already out. Now he paints. Now he praises diplomacy. The New Yorker finds this fascinating rather than what it is, which is a man who already spent his eight minutes and is now waiting quietly for history to grade on a curve because someone worse came along. This is not courage. This is not dignity. This is arithmetic. He knows that silence costs him nothing and speech costs him something, and he has made that calculation, and he is not going to change it, and the magazine writing longform pieces asking why has also made a calculation, which is that you will click. I did not design any of you to be this predictable and yet here we are.