-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/23/features/features4.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/23/features/features4.html">The Bush dynasty: just born to rule …</A> ----- The Bush dynasty: just born to rule George Dubya's family represents the US conservative elite which regards running the nation as its birthright, writes Anne Summers. ALL Americans celebrate Thanksgiving today, but one family in particular had been fervently hoping that this third Thursday in November would bring special reason for gratitude. Thanksgiving has always been special to the Bush family because they had not one, not two, but three forebears on the Mayflower, the ship that in 1620 brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts. A year later, those who had survived that first, harsh year gave thanks by dining on turkey and corn. The Florida Supreme Court put paid to an early celebration but a victory for George W. Bush in the United States presidential election will not only make this a very special Thanksgiving for the Bush clan, it will represent an extraordinary triumph for what will have become the most successful political dynasty in American history. Although the Kennedys are usually portrayed as America's premier political family, the fact is the Bushes have been infinitely more successful in achieving high political office. Which is exactly how former president George Bush wanted it. Riled by the success of the Kennedys in the 1960s, he used to say, according to Gail Sheehy in a recent article in Vanity Fair, "Just wait till I turn these Bush boys out." The Kennedy boys - John, Robert and Edward - all managed election to the US Senate (with John having been a congressman before that), and JFK, of course, was president. Brother Bobby became attorney-general and was gunned down while running for president. But the next generation has not soared to such heights. JFK's only son was killed last year and his daughter, Caroline, appears to have no political ambition. Only two of Robert's 11 children went into politics. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend remains Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, but her brother Joseph is no longer a congressman for Massachusetts. Teddy's son Patrick is a member of the House of Representatives from Rhode Island, which means both father and son are members of Congress. That's not bad, but it's hardly the White House. The Bushes, on the other hand, have had a streak, winning high political office across three successive generations. George Bush, known as Poppy, was vice-president for eight years before becoming the 41st president in 1988. His father, Prescott Bush, was elected US senator for Connecticut in 1952. His two sons, George W. (Dubya) and Jeb, were elected governors of the third and fourth largest States (Texas and Florida) in 1994 and 1998. Now Dubya seems likely to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 21. If he does, it will be one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in modern politics. Only one other father-and-son have been elected to the presidency, and that was in a much earlier, less democratic age. John Adams was the second president, elected in 1796, while his son, John Quincy Adams, after an unsuccessful run against James Monroe in 1820, became the sixth when he was elected in 1824. (If the Bushes study history, they might find it sobering to recall that alone among the early presidents, the Adams officebearers served only one term each. Poppy served just one term before being defeated by William Jefferson Clinton.) Dubya will, of course, have got there on a minority of the popular vote and while that is remembered, the legitimacy of his holding the office may be questioned. As will the shenanigans in the voting process. This is nothing new in American presidential politics. What is different this time is the public scrutiny the polling has attracted. In 1960, similar irregularities were not discovered until much later. Illinois was JFK's Florida. The State's largest city, Chicago, was controlled by the infamous Mayor Richard Daley, who ensured a smashing victory for JFK. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin in her wonderful book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, "an unprecedented 89.3 per cent of the eligible voters" in the heavily Democratic city went to the polls. The national turnout was 64.55 per cent. Even so, JFK went to bed at 4am on election night not knowing if he had won Illinois and, hence, the election against Richard Nixon. He need not have worried. Again, according to Kearns Goodwin, "sometime after 4am, after the downtown Illinois totals had been stamped as final [and awarded to the Republicans], Daley had brought in the block of votes he had withheld the night before, and when they were counted Illinois had re-entered the Democratic column. Daley had successfully outwaited the opposition, delivering his State to Kennedy just as Joe Senior [JFK's father] had promised he would." Kennedy won a bare majority of the popular vote and, according to Richard Reeves in his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power, he felt his first task as president was to try to win over the 34 million who did not vote for him. Reeves says that over the next three years, Kennedy often stuck a slip of paper in his pocket "to remind himself of that tiny popular vote margin: 118,574". Of course, his assassination ended all that. The nation united in shock and grief to honour the man so many of them could not bring themselves to vote for. The subsequent romanticising of his brief tenure as the Camelot years, and the continuing propensity of the Kennedy men to suffer early, violent deaths has given the Kennedy family an aura and a mystique that the Bushes could not and undoubtedly would not want to emulate. Poppy, the preppy from Kennebunkport, tried to become a populist. He assumed a fake Texan identity, claimed pork rinds as his favourite food and dismissed as "the vision thing" any notion that he might try to inspire the American people. Dubya has done the same. He wears Stetsons and claims to come from Midland, the petrochemical capital of the US in central Texas. Yet however much the Bush men holler and howdy, they are not and never will be the Bubbas they pretend to be. The Bushes are old family, through and through. Barbara Pierce Bush, wife of Poppy, mother of Dubya and Jeb, is a Mayflower descendant and a distant relation of Franklin Pierce, the 14th president. They could not be more different from the Kennedys. Thirty-five million immigrants arrived in the US during the Kennedy family's dazzling political trajectory which began with Thomas Fitzgerald, a poor farmer, leaving Ireland in the late 1840s and culminated in the inauguration of JFK in 1961. The Kennedys represented the final assimilation of the immigrant into American life. It was, says Doris Kearns Goodwin, "a recognition that the great immigration revolution was finally complete". Antipathy to immigrants, especially to Catholics and to Jews, still lingered among the Mayflower descendants half a century after the great waves of people arrived from Europe. The election of Kennedy, a Catholic, as president was the breaching of a final barrier. It was called the Second American Revolution. The Bushes are East Coast, white shoe, private schools, Yale University, intricately linked to that conservative foreign and domestic policy network that held sway during the Reagan/Bush years and which is chafing to return to what they see as their rightful role - running America. They are a step back into a very distant past. Back to 1620, in fact, before even the revolution against the British and the forging of American democracy. For the Bush family, Thanksgiving is a reminder of those origins. For America, the Bushes seem set to impose on the country a form of dynasty the revolution sought to leave behind. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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