Stay Quiet!

At Instapundit, Ed Driscoll writes,

Next decade, the DNC-MSM will have a field day comparing the warmongering neocon alt-right President Nikki Haley with their nostalgic look back at the carefully calculated nuanced centrism of the Trump era.

Then, he links to this article by Victor Davis Hanson.

It’s an evergreen media strategy for disparaging the sitting GOP executive.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, many in the media considered him a dangerous extremist.

Some reporters warned that Reagan courted nuclear war and would tank the economy. He certainly was not like the gentleman Republican and moderate ex-president Gerald Ford.

But by 1989, the media was fond of a new adjective: “Reaganesque.” Reagan in retirement and without power was seen as a senior statesman.

Not so for his once-centrist and better-liked vice president, George H.W. Bush, who suddenly was reinvented as a fool and a ninny in comparison.

The transformations had already started in Reagan’s last year as president. In 1987, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story about Bush, who was running to succeed Reagan. The headline blared: “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’”

“Wimp” was an odd take on someone who by age 20 had flown dangerous fighter missions in World War II, and had been shot down and nearly killed. Nonetheless, the cover story hyped “a perception that [Bush] isn’t strong enough or tough enough for the challenges of the Oval Office. That he is, in a single mean word, a wimp.”

Once elected president, Bush was variously trashed by the media as a warmonger, a whiny nerd, and a Reagan wannabe. After he lost re-election bid to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush was dismissed as a failed president.

During the tenure of Democratic president Barack Obama, George W. Bush in retirement was trashed for eight years. Hurricane Katrina was allegedly his fault alone. So was the 2008 economic meltdown.

Then, a strange — or rather, predictable — metamorphosis followed in 2016.

...Eight years after Bush had left office — and had kept professionally quiet during the Obama years — he (like Ford, Reagan, and his father) was wondrously rehabilitated by the media.

The supposedly failed Bush presidency was reinvented by journalists to contrast positively with President Trump’s purportedly disastrous ongoing tenure.

The media now praised the former president as a moderate. Bush — whom they had once dubbed a war criminal, racist, and incompetent — became a bipartisan wise man in retirement on his Texas ranch. Compared with Trump, both Bushes were now said to have ruled compassionately from the center.

Critics no longer made fun of George W. Bush’s mangled words and phrases. They were seen as misdemeanors compared with President Trump’s felonious overuse of “tremendous,” “terrific,” or “loser.”

Such reinvention insidiously works to keep former Republican presidents quiet.

Former Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama never quite left politics behind and often editorialize and politick from retirement.

Their retired Republican counterparts, such as Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes, each assumed a quiet, nonpartisan senior statesman role. That way, they eventually saw their presidencies mysteriously reassessed as better than the supposedly disastrous Republican administration in power at the time.

The public should grow wise to the progressive media’s formula: Once-awful Republicans are always renovated to make their party successors look worse — and thus less likely to be successful.

And the more retired Republican presidents stay quiet and nonpartisan, the faster their rehabilitation will be.

Read more here.