# Former President George Herbert Walker Bush Has Died At Age 94



## TrulyBlessed (Dec 1, 2018)




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## Belle Du Jour (Dec 1, 2018)

May he rest in peace.


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## VeryBecoming (Dec 1, 2018)

Good age to go.


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## BklynHeart (Dec 1, 2018)

He and Barbara were together for 73 years. After she passed I wondered how long before he would.


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## TrulyBlessed (Dec 1, 2018)

We know doggone well he didn’t write or say any of this lol.


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## Nalin (Dec 1, 2018)

RIP


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## Kiowa (Dec 1, 2018)

TrulyBlessed said:


> We know doggone well he didn’t write or say any of this lol.


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## Laela (Dec 1, 2018)

^^^  !!
(Apologies for laughing, but that was hilarious!)


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## justNikki (Dec 1, 2018)

Ok


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## Tamrin (Dec 1, 2018)

RIP G.Bush. I knew he would not last long after his wife died. They lived a lifetime together.


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## greight (Dec 1, 2018)

Tamrin said:


> RIP G.Bush. I knew he would not last long after his wife died. They lived a lifetime together.



It’s amazing; their marriage has outlasted some people’s lives.


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## JFK (Dec 1, 2018)

Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t he the head of the CIA when the CIA was secretly assisting Latin American cartels to flood Black communities with drugs?


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## ebonysweetie (Dec 1, 2018)

Kiowa said:


>


I came back for this.  

RIP to Daddy Bush.  Prayers for the family during this difficult year.


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## giigii613 (Dec 1, 2018)

Bye Bush.  Just a couple more to go.


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## Sosoothing (Dec 1, 2018)

I don't know why, but I thought he had already passed.


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## SlimPickinz (Dec 1, 2018)

Sosoothing said:


> I don't know why, but I thought he had already passed.


The wife passed earlier in the year.


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## Kiadodie (Dec 1, 2018)

Tamrin said:


> RIP G.Bush. I knew he would not last long after his wife died. They lived a lifetime together.


He loved that woman so much. RIP


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## ScorpioBeauty09 (Dec 1, 2018)

JFK said:


> Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t he the head of the CIA when the CIA was secretly assisting Latin American cartels to flood Black communities with drugs?


He was head of the CIA from 1976-77 but...

*The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice*
Mehdi Hasan
December 1 2018, 8:38 a.m.





President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 16, 1991, after U.S. forces began military action against Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm.


THE TRIBUTES to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man “of the highest character,” said his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. “He loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to another former president, Barack Obama, Bush’s life was “a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.” Apple boss Tim Cook said: “We have lost a great American.”

In an age of Donald Trump, it isn’t difficult for his hagiographers to paint a picture of the late Bush Sr. as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with “class” and “integrity.” It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a “blowhard,” and that he eschewed the white-nationalist, alt-right, conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said, “firing a shot.” He spent his life serving his country — from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and 8 great-grandkids.

Nevertheless, he was a public not a private figure; one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen way. “When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms,” as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued, because it leads to “false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts.” The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt and right-wing Republican figures who came after him — his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent — than much of the political and media classes might have you believe.

Consider:

He ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should forever be associated with Bush’s 1988 presidential bid. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts — where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor —  had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called “Weekend Passes,“released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.

As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater bragged, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” Bush himself was quick to dismiss accusations of racism as “absolutely ridiculous” yet it was clear at the time, even to right-wing Republicans operatives such as Roger Stone, now a close ally of Trump, that the ad had crossed a line. “You and George Bush will wear that to your grave,” Stone complained to Atwater. “It’s a racist ad… You’re going to regret it.”

Stone was right about Atwater, who on his deathbed apologized for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did.

He made a dishonest case for war. Thirteen years before George W. Bush liedabout weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Keating concluded, “was sold on a mountain of war propaganda.”

For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait “without provocation or warning.” What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an effective green light to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a week before his invasion, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed he was doing so in order “to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” As Scott Peterson wrote  in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, “Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated… that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.”

Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert. “It was a pretty serious fib,” Heller told Peterson, adding: “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”







President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to discuss the Persian Gulf war.

He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil-defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, “a serious violation of the laws of war.”

U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance…Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”

Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.

By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.” (Sound familiar?)

He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet his vice president’s involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention. “The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete,” wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his final report on the Iran-Contra affair in August 1993.

Why? Because Bush, who was “fully aware of the Iran arms sale,” according to the special counsel, failed to hand over a diary “containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/contra” and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — on the eve of Weinberger’s trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. “The Weinberger pardon,” Walsh pointedly noted, “marked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.” An angry Walsh accused Bush of “misconduct” and helping to complete “the Iran-contra cover-up”.

Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn’t it?







A U.S. marshal, left, looking for a suspect, shows a mug shot to a man found allegedly using drugs in a crackhouse, according to police, in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1989. The police raid was part of President George H.W. Bush’s war on drugs.

*He escalated the racist war on drugs. In September 1989, in a televised addressto the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House . . . . It could easily have been heroin or PCP.”

Yet a Washington Post investigation later that month revealed that federal agents had “lured” the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so they could make an “undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity” (the dealer didn’t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions). Bush cynically used this prop — the bag of crack — to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.”

The result? “Millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS – all in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ that did nothing to reduce drug abuse,” pointed out Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014. Bush, he argued, “put ideology and politics above science and health.”* Today, even leading Republicans, such as Chris Christieand Rand Paul, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure.

He groped women. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, in late 2017, at least 8 different women have come forward with claims that the former president groped them; in most cases, while they were posing for photos with him. One of them, Roslyn Corrigan, told Time magazine that Bush touched her inappropriately in 2003, when she was just 16. “I was a child,” she said. The former president was 79. Bush’s spokesman offered this defense of his boss in October 2017: “At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures.” Yet, as Time noted, “Bush was standing upright in 2003 when he met Corrigan.”

Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility; he engaged in race baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01...war-crimes-racism-and-obstruction-of-justice/


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## Menina Preta (Dec 1, 2018)

Ya. People have very short memories. He was a typical American politician beholden to the race and class views indicative of conservatism and did his best to uphold them.  

Still though, Rest In Peace.


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## rileypak (Dec 1, 2018)




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## LaughingOctopus (Dec 1, 2018)

Week long funeral canceling daytime tv shows in 3,2,1.....


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## Kiowa (Dec 1, 2018)

LaughingOctopus said:


> Week long funeral canceling daytime tv shows in 3,2,1.....



Yup..looks like my DVR will get a breather this week...


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## ladysaraii (Dec 1, 2018)

justNikki said:


> Ok



That's all I came to say.


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## Adelta89 (Dec 1, 2018)

RIP


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## negrita desesperada (Dec 1, 2018)

Oh.


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## lavaflow99 (Dec 1, 2018)

TrulyBlessed said:


> We know doggone well he didn’t write or say any of this lol.



There are too many big words and it actually makes sense.  Nope not written by Drump.


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## CrimsonBelle (Dec 1, 2018)

ScorpioBeauty09 said:


> He was head of the CIA from 1976-77 but...
> 
> *The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice*
> Mehdi Hasan
> ...




Yep! Black people are a little too forgiving about things like this when presidents pass. I understand you shouldn't talk badly about people in death. But when former presidents are  responsible for the downfall of a group of people and thousands of deaths, I tend not to feel one ounce of empathy. I don't care how much that he agreed and worked with Bill Clinton, he was careless and cruel and targeted minority groups. And his wife was crass and uncaring about the issues of of Hurricane Katrina survivors as well. So for the black  celebs posting condolences and ridiculousness they can keep that.


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## Everything Zen (Dec 1, 2018)

I think in the era of Trump it’s easier to be more sympathetic to the presidents/politicians of yesteryear. Also when it comes to the accusations of sexual harassment and groping, I heard he suffered from vascular Parkinsonism which can cause a lack of impulse control and acting out of character especially when treated with medications. I’m not surprised by anyone these days but I thought that information was significant.


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## FelaShrine (Dec 1, 2018)




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## EagleEyes85 (Dec 1, 2018)

RIP to him, but I just can’t find the same respect that I mustered up for McCain. I never liked the Bushes. Maybe people are outpouring support because the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Idk , but meh. The only thing I’m looking forward to from this news is of Trump will make the ban again


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## fifi134 (Dec 2, 2018)

Ecoli is trash 99.99% of the time, but sometimes, there are some gems


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## SoniT (Dec 2, 2018)

Rest in peace but I'm already sick of the news coverage.


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## Virtuosa (Dec 2, 2018)

Cool.


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## awhyley (Dec 2, 2018)

FelaShrine said:


>



Success! 

I didn't realize that they were the same age.  94 years young.


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## IslandMummy (Dec 2, 2018)

FelaShrine said:


>


The laugh, the strut, the SUCCESS


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## HappilyLiberal (Dec 2, 2018)

I posted this in the other thread, but imma leave it here just in case....

Before anyone comes in here rewriting history on #41 just because he ain't 22.5 x 2:

(1) This man unleashed the Willie Horton ads vis-a-vis Lee Atwater...

(2) Actively supported then continued it when elected President, Reagan's trickle-down economic theory despite calling it "voodoo" economics during the primaries...

(3) Actively participated in Iran/Contra...

(4) Reportedly ordered the hit on JFK when he was head of the CIA...

(5) Unleashed Dubya, #43, Michelle's new BFF, the village idiot, the second worst President in history on the USA...

Need I go on?


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## Leeda.the.Paladin (Dec 3, 2018)

^^^ I think Trump just makes any other president look so good that people are remembering him in a different light


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## ElegantPearl17 (Dec 3, 2018)

Are federal workers off on Wednesday or nah???


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## sunnieb (Dec 3, 2018)

ElegantPearl17 said:


> Are federal workers off on Wednesday or nah???



IJS


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## KidneyBean86 (Dec 3, 2018)

Oh...ok


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## Kiadodie (Dec 3, 2018)

George H.W. Bush's service dog to accompany his casket on trip to DC: report


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## ladysaraii (Dec 3, 2018)

Kiadodie said:


> George H.W. Bush's service dog to accompany his casket on trip to DC: report



Poor doggy.

I just hope they don't try to do him like the Egyptians and send him along with him.


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## Kiadodie (Dec 3, 2018)

ladysaraii said:


> Poor doggy.
> 
> I just hope they don't try to do him like the Egyptians and send him along with him.


He’s going to Walter Reed to be another veterans.


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## Kiowa (Dec 3, 2018)

*How President George H.W. Bush Sent A Black Teen To Prison For 8 Years To Set Up A Political Talking Point* 

On September 5, 1989, Bush showed America a bag of crack cocaine purchased in front of the White House, but the human cost behind that talking point has been largely forgotten. 

On September 5, 1989, President George H.W. Bush — who died on Friday at the age of 94 — delivered his first nationally televised address from the Oval Office, a speech designed to announce his administration’s anti-drug policy. During that speech, preserved for history by C-Span, Bush illustrated his point with a dramatic prop. He held up a bag of crack cocaine that he said had been “seized” in a city park directly across from the White House. 

The moment was a memorable one and helped Bush rally support behind his “war on drugs,” but as historian and author Joshua Clark Davis recounted in a detailed Twitter thread compiled by the Thread Reader site on Saturday, *there was a human story behind Bush’s now-famous visual — the story of a 19-year-old African-American Washington D.C. teen named Keith Jackson with no prior criminal record, and who didn’t even know how to get to the White House until he was lured there by drug enforcement agents specifically to make the drug sale that would give Bush his bag of crack — a bag of crack that was purchased for $2,400, not “seized” as Bush claimed. *

*When Jackson was sentenced to 10 years behind bars more than a year later*, after two juries deadlocked and failed to convict him, even the judge in his case lamented the legally required length of the sentence, and implored Jackson to appeal to Bush for a commutation that would shorten his sentence, as the Washington Post reported at the time.
https://www.inquisitr.com/5189609/george-h-w-bush-keith-jackson-prison-crack/


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## SoniT (Dec 4, 2018)

ElegantPearl17 said:


> Are federal workers off on Wednesday or nah???


Yes


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## ElegantPearl17 (Dec 4, 2018)

SoniT said:


> Yes



Nope! Not my organization. We have to report.


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## SoniT (Dec 4, 2018)

ElegantPearl17 said:


> Nope! Not my organization. We have to report.


Aww. My office is closed.


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## awhyley (Dec 5, 2018)

This was lovely, "Bob Dole salutes George Bush's casket".


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## TrulyBlessed (Dec 5, 2018)

I see the Obamas, Clintons, and Carters are front and center chatting and laughing with each other. I hope they sit the Trumps in the cathedral bathroom.


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

TrulyBlessed said:


> I see the Obamas, Clintons, and Carters are front and center chatting and laughing with each other. I hope they sit the Trumps in the cathedral bathroom.



They were all chatting ,laughing and joking and then that Orange Buffon showed up...Michelle went straight to her Inauguration face...no one really acknowledged the Trumps, Obamas did the gracious thing and shook their hand, as they were seated next to them, everyone else just looked straight  ahead...


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## SoniT (Dec 5, 2018)

Kiowa said:


> They were all chatting ,laughing and joking and then that Orange Buffon showed up...Michelle went straight to her Inauguration face...no one really acknowledged the Trumps, Obamas did the gracious thing and shook their hand, as they were seated next to them, everyone else just looked straight  ahead...


That's funny. I'm so glad that Michelle is not pretending anymore. She does not care.


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

Well..Dang


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## TrulyBlessed (Dec 5, 2018)

Kiowa said:


> Well..Dang



I think I’m gonna cry. Their friendship is too cute! I mean at his own daddy’s funeral lol.


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## TrulyBlessed (Dec 5, 2018)

Hillary said not today, Satan!


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## SoniT (Dec 5, 2018)

Dubya's eulogy is funny. I know I shouldn't like him at all but I do.


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

Jimmy Carter's side eye, is what we were all  thinking


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## SoniT (Dec 5, 2018)

Kiowa said:


> Jimmy Carter's side eye, is what we were all  thinking


 That's funny.


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

SoniT said:


> Dubya's eulogy is funny. I know I shouldn't like him at all but I do.



I should not like him...but can't imagine losing both parents in the space of 6 months...

he just took a huge jab at Individual #1, and twisted it all the way around...


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## SoniT (Dec 5, 2018)

Kiowa said:


> I should not like him...but can't imagine losing both parents in the space of 6 months...
> 
> he just took a huge jab at Individual #1, and twisted it all the way around...


Yeah. I respect his strength for even being able to eulogize his father. He broke down at the end though.


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

SoniT said:


> That's funny.



Look at him..sitting on the end of that pew, all clenched up, arms crossed.. sitting there like a toad sitting on a toadstool... He makes me sick..


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## TrulyBlessed (Dec 5, 2018)




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## RUBY (Dec 5, 2018)

I'm just here for the shady pictures and clips


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## MzRhonda (Dec 5, 2018)

Kiowa said:


> They were all chatting ,laughing and joking and then that Orange Buffon showed up...Michelle went straight to her Inauguration face...no one really acknowledged the Trumps, Obamas did the gracious thing and shook their hand, as they were seated next to them, everyone else just looked straight  ahead...


I would love to see that clip.


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## MzRhonda (Dec 5, 2018)

TrulyBlessed said:


> Hillary said not today, Satan!


Can he not sit back in a chair????  He is always sitting at the edge of his seat, ugh!!!!!!


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## Kiowa (Dec 5, 2018)

^^Did you see how Dick "Dark Vader" Cheney was staring Individual 1 down with dagger eyes?..


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## Everything Zen (Dec 5, 2018)

As the “Lord Vader” of LHCF I can at least acknowledge that Dick Cheney has no room to be side eyeing ANYONE. Trump has no blood on his hands- meanwhile Cheney and W. still get refreshed almost weekly and they’ve been out of office for a decade. Let that fact sink in. Trump may be everything but a child of God and a racist BUT the Bush/Cheney WH is still the worst IMO. Trump has flirted with war but I thank God that we have yet to have gone there. Meanwhile how much money has Cheney made off of and continues to make off of contracts from Haliburton? Fact of the matter is Trump sings the quiet parts loud when it comes to the core of the Republican agenda and for that I am grateful. I don’t even look at W. as the true agent of evil in that WH but he will still shoulder the blame as the one being in the position of leadership.


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## awhyley (Dec 16, 2018)

FelaShrine said:


>



@FelaShrine, can you advise where I can find that video?  I really need to send it to someone for the holidays.


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## Laela (Dec 16, 2018)

He's like a coiled cobra, ready to strike! 
reminds me of this commercial





MzRhonda said:


> Can he not sit back in a chair????  He is always sitting at the edge of his seat, ugh!!!!!!


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