Bush Kinder Quotes

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle,” he said. “We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

Nikkie, a chimpanzee, once showed me how to manipulate attention. He had gotten used to my throwing wild berries across the moat at the zoo where I worked. One day, while I was recording data, I had totally forgotten about the berries, which hung on a row of tall bushes behind me. Nikkie hadn’t. He sat down right in front of me, locked his red-brown eyes into mine, and—once he had my attention—abruptly jerked his head and eyes away from mine to fixate with equal intensity on a point over my left shoulder. He then looked back at me and repeated the move. I may be dense compared with a chimpanzee, but the second time I turned around to see what he was looking at, and spotted the berries. Nikkie had indicated what he wanted without a single sound or hand gesture.

The problem with this is that Americans who’ve opted for this tack seem to have one eyebrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and really tall hair and in general just seem like an excellent crowd to want to transcend. Besides, the rise of Reagan/Bush/Gingrich showed that hypocritical nostalgia for a kinder, gentler, more Christian pseudo-past is no less susceptible to manipulation in the interests of corporate commercialism and PR image. Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

Soon it became more clear that Bush’s appeal for a “kinder and gentler America” was little more than rhetorical appeal to an aging voting population. The Bush who occupied the White House moved quickly to establish his “tough guy” policies, by creating a major media pretext for a military invasion of a tiny Central American republic, Panama, during the Christmas days of his first year as President, December 1989. By eyewitness accounts, upwards of 6,000 Panamanians, most poor civilians, were killed as U.S. Special Forces and U.S. bombers invaded the small country on the pretext of arresting General Manuel Noreiga on charges of being a drug cartel kingpin.