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GEORGE W. BUSH JOINS THE FRAY. The former president stayed quiet during most of Democratic successor Barack Obama’s two terms. But he has occasionally felt the need to speak during Republican successor Donald Trump’s time in office. The Bush Presidential Center released a statement Tuesday amid the nationwide aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25.
Bush began his statement by declaring, “Laura and I are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country.” With that, he appeared to reject the findings of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner on the cause of Floyd’s death. The county coroner ruled Floyd suffered “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Floyd also showed signs of “arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease” and “fentanyl intoxication [and] recent methamphetamine use.” The criminal complaint against fired police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with third-degree murder in Floyd’s death, said that the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.”
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Nevertheless, Bush said he was anguished by the “brutal suffocation” of Floyd. The former president appeared to accept the findings of the pathologists hired by the Floyd family, who said their examination of the evidence showed that Floyd was indeed suffocated by Chauvin. “He couldn’t breathe — asphyxia due to compression of the neck and back,” said former New York City coroner Michael Baden. Perhaps Bush’s writers liked the notion of saying that Floyd was suffocated and injustice and fear are suffocating the country. But the turn of phrase required rejecting the official finding of death.
More remarkable was the fact that Bush said almost nothing — literally, almost nothing — about the riots, violence, and civil disorder following Floyd’s death. At one point in the 507-word statement, Bush said, “Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress.” Perhaps Bush’s writer liked the looting-liberation alliteration. But to devote just nine words out of 507 to the nationwide convulsions after Floyd’s death — the very situation that prompted Bush to speak out in the first place — seemed more than a little strange.
What about the people who have died in the rioting? The businesses that have been damaged and destroyed? The fears of people whose homes and businesses were threatened by violent mobs? To say Bush gave them short shrift would be generous. In his own statement on the riots, former President Barack Obama showed much more understanding and concern about those victims. “Let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it,” Obama wrote.
“Law and order has always been part of George W. Bush’s politics,” the New York Times wrote in 1999, when the Texas governor was preparing to run for president. But where is the balance in former President George W. Bush’s position today? Yes, support punishment for the officer(s) involved in George Floyd’s death. But also remember the thousands whose lives have been affected by the riots that followed.
