Reply #18: Dowd: "Junior Gets a Spanking" (from Poppy Bush) [View All]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB081EFB39590C7B8DDDA10894DA404482&n=Top%252fOpinion%252fEditorials%2520and%2520Op%252dEd%252fOp%252dEd%252fColumnists%252fMaureen%2520Dowd
Junior Gets a Spanking
By MAUREEN DOWD
Aug 18, 2002

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Tissue issues between the two Bush presidents spilled into public view on Thursday when that most faithful family retainer, Brent Scowcroft, wrote a jaw-dropping op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined "Don't Attack Saddam." Mr. Scowcroft gave the back of his hand to conservatives' strenuous attempts to link Saddam to 9/11.

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"Scowcroft is now more critical of Bush's foreign policy than Sandy Berger, which is mind-boggling," says Bill Kristol, a Bush I veteran who edits The Weekly Standard. No one who knows how close Mr. Scowcroft is to former President Bush — they wrote a foreign policy memoir so symbiotic they alternated writing paragraphs — believes he didn't check with Poppy first. Did 41 allow his old foreign policy valet to send a message to 43 that he could not bear to impart himself? "A Republican with close ties to the Bush inner circle said today that Mr. Scowcroft would not have made his warnings so public without knowledge from the first President Bush"


The father is hypersensitive about meddling and reluctant to give advice. He doesn't want his pride to get in the way of his son's making up his own mind on what's right.....But Bush the elder must be fed up with being his son's political punching bag. On everything from taxes to Iraq, the son has tried to use his father's failures in the eyes of conservatives as a reverse playbook.

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But Mr. Cheney brought in Don Rumsfeld, an old rival of Poppy's, and he was joined at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. This group is far more conservative, unilateral, ideological and belligerent than the worldly realists: 41, Scowcroft, Colin Powell and James Baker.....The Bush I moderates worry that the Bush II ideologues will use terrorism as an alibi for imperialism. Bush II thinks Bush I is trapped in self-justification.

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