Fantastic credentials; RNC, CIA, Ambassador, VP, Prez, anointer of Dumya.

for younger generations
W for sure will be hailed the likable cowboy 911 leader president oh schucks kind of guy
Trump may go down as a strong leader it depends on who is talking about him or who writes the history and also, how bad presidents following him turn out to be

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

― George Orwell, 1984

into some infallible saint. Today's picture of Reagan is barely recognizable and is a far cry from the Reagan of the 1980s. Republicans couldn't find an equivalent to JFK, so they made one up by rewriting a two term presidency.

Read through many of the threads on here and you'd think this was RU and not DU. So many posters waxing nostalgic about GWHB and Barbara, and Dubya shedding tears and how they'd come to have a new respect for them. WTF??? The only thing I will consider is that maybe many of the DU posters are too young to have been politically aware of what Reagan and Bush Sr. did to the middle class of our country. Maybe you have to have lived more decades to have witnessed all that we lost with Reagan, Bush Sr. and Dubya. Maybe I tend to be a realist who doesn't appreciate revisionist history.

and also that people's memories grow dimmer as the years pass.

I acknowledge the positive qualities of GWHB and I think it is fair to reinforce them, but I still can't forget the Reagan and Bush years, hardly an enlightened time. Bush the man was a war hero, a devoted husband, and family man. The best I can say about Bush the president, however, is he was unremarkable and uninspiring. He was also a hardcore politician who would use any tactics to win and his record on civil rights and women's rights are deplorable.

In contrast to Donald Trump, George Herbert Walker Bush certainly is a giant, but I'm not going to give him credit for not being as bad as Trump. Pretty much anyone on the planet fits that description.

Unless someone knew him and his family personally, they cannot know if he truly was a war "hero", devoted husband and family man. The family man gives me pause as I find it hard to believe that his three sons, who we know quite a bit about (Neil, Jeb and W) were anything but decent men. How does a decent father raise three "sketchy" sons? Also, there have been other reports of him not being such a hero or devoted husband. Only his closest family and friends know the real truth.

Anyone can be lionized in an obituary or funeral service by those who want to say only good things about a dead person. As I said, I don't believe in revising history or glossing over the truth.

My ex-father in-law served in WWII but never saw real action. He was at a desk somewhere in the Philippines. He was an sob of the highest order and I know an awful lot about him, none of it nice. When he died, his family of two sons and his wife sat around the kitchen table and wrote this glowing obituary about his life, none of which was really true. It read like he was a man who was larger than life itself. They could have kept it to the specifics such as where he worked, his family members etc. but in order to make themselves feel good about the man he was, they had to concoct this untruthful story about him. He didn't talk to his son for over 35 years. He didn't know my two children, his grandchildren because of that. He was a racist. Not every man who served in WWII was a "hero".

the Bush children - actually there were four sons, Marvin was the youngest. I think the blame for the children goes to Barbara as much as George. She's pretty overbearing and intimidating. Of course, I've known exceptional parents who had one kid that was a disappointment, but FOUR sons? Then you think of all that Poppy did to keep GW out of Vietnam. Then there was Neil and the S&L scandal. Marvin isn't so in-your-face, but it appears his business dealings were questionable.

I suppose Americans what to believe their presidents were good people and principled leaders, so they cherry pick qualities or embellish them, sometimes even make them up. I just don't see that any of the Bushs ever contributed anything of value to this country.

Yes, the wealthy can buy influence and that's what irked me the most about GW. I'm the same generation as he is and my husband of the time did what thousands of young men wanted to do back then and that was sign up for the National Guard or the Reserves. However, there were extremely long waiting lists because no one wanted to go to Vietnam. He first tried the Air Force Reserves and the list was too long and then he tried the National Guard and was just lucky enough that they had one position available that he was a good fit for, so he got a slot. It was two days after my first child was born. The requirements were that did four months of basic training and then one long weekend per month for six years and two weeks every June for summer camp training. They made it absolutely clear that there were no excuses for missing even one weekend and to his credit he never did. So for six years we never got to celebrate many holidays together and his two week vacations from his regular employment were always spent going to training. We never had a vacation for those years. He was gone the weekend my father died.

If I remember correctly, no one could ever find anyone who was in W.'s troop to verify that he went to weekend meetings. I'm sure that Bush Sr. had designs on one or more of his sons becoming President and realized that some military service would be necessary for good optics, so he got him in a slot without ever having to be on a waiting list. At least President Clinton was up front about his feelings about the war.

Yeah, Barbara wasn't the nicest person in the world. I will never forget her heartless comments to those fleeing Katrina.

claimed to have never seen in, most didn't even know he was suppose to be there. For awhile, he got out of training to work on someone's political campaign. All accounts of him at that time were of a heavy drinking, spoiled rich kid.

As for Clinton, I can't fault anyone for being opposed to that war. There were so many, but people like Bush were hypocrites. He supported the war, but he didn't want to fight it. Rich people like sending other people's kids off to war. W has a lot of blood on his hands.

As for Barbara, yeah that was the moment that sealed it for me. Just plain nasty.

It's connected to our tendency toward nostalgia.

Trump too no doubt. And you know what? Next to dearly departed and his idiot son Trump looks like Abraham Moses Lincoln. The scale of evil they perpetrated is too big for most humans to comprehend.

It happens. I've seen it. Quoting Santayana one day and then rationalizing praise for a piece of shit another day.

I didn’t like how Saint Ronnie was canonized either.

Than the actual dead. Yes, we know x, you, and z happened but there is no need to discuss it once the person is dead. Just my opinion on that.

Same does not apply to Trump though since there has been nothing good about him unless you count how he brought us together to protest him.