***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
During Sunday’s Global Public Square, CNN host Fareed Zakaria’s tribute to former President George H.W. Bush involved him touting the President’s famous leadership and demeanor. But it was a backhanded compliment seeing as Zakaria attributed those aspects of Bush 41 to his pervasive white privilege.
“The death of George H.W. Bush has occasioned a fair amount of nostalgia for the old American establishment, of which Bush was undoubtedly a prominent member,” he began. “It’s also provoked a heated debate among commentators about that establishment whose membership was determined largely bloodlines and connections.”
Zakaria suggested that Bush received everything in his life because of his “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” (W.A.S.P) background. “Surely there is nothing good to say about a system that was so discriminatory towards everyone else. (…) For all its faults, and it had many, it was often horribly bigoted, in some places segregationist, and almost always exclusionary,” he continued.
“At its best, the old W.A.S.P aristocracy did have a sense of modesty, humility, and public spiritedness that seems largely absent in today's elite,” he noted. The CNN host proceeded to opine about how Bush was allowed to make decisions (such as hiking taxes) because “[t]he aristocracy was quite secure in its power and position so it could afford to think about the country's fate in broad terms and look out for the longer term, rising above self-interest because its own interest was assured.”
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