Yup.
You read that right: George Herbert Walker Bush has been honored by the J.F. Kennedy Library Foundation with the prestigious "Profile in Courage Award."
What for, you ask?
For raising taxes! For reneging on his famous "read my lips" pledge to enact no new taxes.
Grover Norquist and his like-minded friends are not amused. ""Courage would have been standing up to the spending lobbyists in Washington and saying, 'No.' Doing what official Washington and its spending lobbies want is not courage. It is a failure of nerve."
In 1992, GHWB himself called the move "a mistake," and wished he hadn't done it. How heroic is that?
"I thought it would result in total control of domestic discretionary spending. And now we see Congress talking about raising taxes again. So I'm disappointed, and given all of that, yes, a mistake."
Link
With political courage a scarce commodity these days, the JFK Library probably had a limited field from which to choose. But GHW Bush? Really? Here is what the Kennedy center says about President Bush:
In 1990, with the federal deficit at $200 billion and the Congressional Budget Office suggesting it could double, President Bush negotiated with congressional Democrats to enact a budget deal which included spending cuts and tax increases aimed at reducing the deficit by approximately $500 billion over the following five years. The 1990 bipartisan budget agreement set annual limits on discretionary spending by Congress on defense, domestic programs and international affairs. It also, for the first time, created “pay as you go” rules for entitlements and taxes. In order to reach the deal, Bush agreed to a tax increase as part of the compromise, and he was pilloried by conservatives for doing so. Although he recognized the 1990 budget deal might doom his prospects for reelection, he did what he thought was best for the country and has since been credited with helping to lay the foundation of the economic growth of the 1990s that followed.
Do you have any worthy public servants who might have been a more deserving pick?
I'm thinking….I'm thinking...