“Well, my girl’s in the next room,

Sometimes I wish she was you,

I guess we never really moved on”

~ Hinder (Austin Winkler; Cody Hanson; Brian Howes), “Lips of an Angel”, Extreme Behavior (2005)

America has just witnessed the near canonization of George H.W. Bush by Democrats and an institutional media (aka the Demmedia) that once mercilessly savaged the man and his service.

The man now praised for his even tempered, even handed, low key method of governance, his foreign policy brilliance, for being immensely qualified due to his 40 years of public service and a genuine war hero (for being the Navy’s youngest fighter pilot and being shot down in combat), is the same man who, during his presidential term, was said to be a wimp, a warmongering neocon CIA stooge who lied about Iran-Contra, a religious sexist ideologue who wanted to ban abortion, a racist (for the infamous “Willie Horton” ad), a misogynist for nominating Clarence Thomas and an out of touch elitist patrician who was so disconnected from common people, he didn’t understand supermarket scanners.

The infamous ad that made Horton the avatar of a dangerous Massachusetts furlough program was run by a third party not connected with the Bush campaign – and the first person to mention that program was none other than Democrat Senator Al “Climate Savior” Gore, as he fought Michael Dukakis for the 1988 Democrat presidential nomination. The supermarket scanner slam was made up by a lazy reporter who never even researched the event before he wrote the story – but the narratives fit, so off to publication the stories went.

Lavish praise profusely and insincerely offered isn’t praise because it says little about its beneficiary as it is not meant to applaud them, it is issued to highlight the failings of another. A condemnation often utilized by passive-aggressive people – drawing attention to subject by pretending to ignore it – is a form of a rhetorical device called apophasis (also known as paralipsis).

The Demmedia’s praise is way over the line, flowing from every Demmedia orifice and mucous membrane like blood oozing from an Ebola patient but the obscene and mendacious “my old girlfriend was so much hotter than my new girlfriend” orgy of hyperbole and subsequent flood of crocodile tears says far more about the Democrats than it does either Bush 41 or Trump.

The Demmedia comes not to bury Caesar, they come to praise him.

The Demmedia propaganda machine is saying, “Bush 41 was such a great, saintly and praiseworthy president for the ages, a model American, and we passionately yearn for the wonderful “kinder and gentler” days of yore when unicorns frolicked freely across the fruited plains, but we’re not going to mention just how craptastic of a person and president Trump is. No, we’re not even going to mention that and if Trump thinks our effusive praise of H.W. Bush is about him, it isn’t – and neither was our slobbering, two-week-long, wet kiss of John McCain’s dead butt. So, there.”

David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon highlighted it well when he wrote:

“A panel on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” engaged in a bizarre bit of logic on Wednesday while covering the funeral of former President George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C., declaring in the same segment that the posthumous praise of Bush was an implicit rebuke of President Donald Trump, that Trump probably took it as criticism because of his narcissism, and that it was wrong for Trump to think everything was about him—before saying that the funeral was not about Trump.”

But Democrats are masters of atrocity by apophasis. They have never been shy of proselytizing for progressivism while standing over a dead body (or bodies).

Those of a certain age (like me) will recall how, on the cold Minnesota Tuesday night of Oct. 29, 2002 – 11 days before the mid-term elections – Democrats turned a memorial service for Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone and the others who died in a terrible plane crash into an obscene, nationally televised, radical progressive campaign rally. The lavish praise offered for Wellstone was less about Wellstone and more about how evil Republicans were. They said, “Wellstone was just so fantastic, we aren’t even going to tell you how bad Republicans are. Every Republican should simply shut up, accept how evil they are, and bow down to help Democrats elect him posthumously.”

A Michael Goodwin piece in the New York Post this past week was accurately headlined: “Democrats really do love Republicans — when they’re dead”.

As always with when dealing with progressives, it’s never about what they tell you – it is always about power.