Bush 41 coverage reveals 2-faced media

Rush Limbaugh said it as well as anyone: The elite media's "fawning" coverage and "phony" praise of George H.W. Bush since his death – mostly as a device for attacking Donald Trump – has been a stupefying contradiction to their nonstop "vicious and partisan" treatment of the 41st president when he was in office.

As the Media Research Center documents: While Bush 41 was president, the media mercilessly attacked him for everything from the Iran-Contra affair to the "Willie Horton ad." They mocked and pressured him to renounce his most famous campaign pledge not to raise taxes, which cost him his re-election. But perhaps most egregiously, throughout his presidency they relentlessly accused Bush 41 – whom today they claim to have loved and admired – of being a despicable racist sympathetic to David Duke and the KKK (while ironically condemning his choice of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court).

To summarize all this a little more crisply: The media hated Bush when he was alive, but loved him once he was dead. Such is the modus operandi of the massive left-wing propaganda machine euphemistically known as "the mainstream media."

In fact, what we are witnessing today is precisely what we saw when Bush's predecessor, President Ronald Reagan, passed away in 2004.

Allow me to briefly whisk you back, in my time machine, to June of that year.

Just like today, most Americans were swept up in the week-long memorial, full of poignancy and praise, eulogies and processions, stories and jokes – all sustained by a deep wellspring of love for the 40th president.

Joining in the pageantry were all of the familiar stars of the news media. With "Hail to the Chief" trumpeting in the background, they memorialized Reagan's paramount role in ending the Cold War, his revitalization of America's stagnant economy after Jimmy Carter's "malaise," his rekindling of Americans' faith in their country and its enduring values. And they took obvious pride in sharing stories of their personal experiences with "the Gipper."

It continued all week. Gushing references to the "Great Communicator," the "shining city on a hill," "morning in America," and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" flowed effortlessly from silver-tongued media orators echoing the deepest sentiments of the vast majority of Americans.

Yes, the big media loved Reagan in death. But just as with George H.W. Bush, they reviled and mocked him in life.

Here's what these same media icons were saying just a few short years earlier, at the end of Reagan's second term as president:

"I predict historians are going to be totally baffled by how the American people fell in love with [Ronald Reagan] and followed him the way we did." – CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl, Jan. 11, 1989

"Ronald Reagan presided over a meltdown of the federal government during the last eight years. Fundamental management was abandoned in favor of rhetoric and imagery. A cynical disregard for the art of government led to wide-scale abuse." – CBS News reporter Terence Smith in the New York Times, Nov. 4, 1989

"On behalf of [the Nicaraguan Contras'] cause, Reagan sold out his oath of office and subverted the Constitution. Oliver North presented himself as the immortal boy in the heroic green uniform of Peter Pan. Although wishing to be seen as a humble patriot, the colonel's testimony showed him to be a treacherous and lying agent of the national security state, willing to do anything asked of him by a president to whom he granted the powers of an oriental despot." – PBS series "America's Century," narrated by Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham, Nov. 28, 1989

"A hundred years from now – long after Ronald Reagan has been lumped with other ineffectual Dr. Feelgoods like William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge who swam with the tide of their times – the last fourth of the 20th century will be remembered for the demise of imperial communism, and the Soviet Union's president will be remembered for both making and letting it happen." – Boston Globe Washington reporter and columnist Tom Oliphant, Dec. 28, 1989

"Ronald Reagan and Madonna. On the surface, he stood for the fundamental American values that she parodied. But underneath, they conveyed the same Horatio Alger myth: Self-image over reality. Say it or sing it enough, and any dream of yourself might come true, at least in the public's perception." – U.S. News & World Report Senior Editor Donald Baer, Dec. 25, 1989

"The '80s were the years of excess. We swaggered through the portals and grabbed as much as we could. We were greedy and gluttonous. As long as we wore starched shirts, we could belch at the dinner table. And Ronald Reagan led us." – USA Today's Debbie Howlett, Nov. 27, 1989

"The decade had its highs (Gorbachev, Bird) … and the decade had its lows (Reagan, AIDS)" – Boston Globe headlines over '80s reviews by the paper's columnists, Dec. 28, 1989

Let that last one sink in: Barely six weeks after the historic fall of the Berlin Wall began, thanks to the leadership of President Ronald Reagan who somehow defeated the nuclear-armed U.S.S.R. without firing a shot, the "mainstream media" summed up the '80s this way. The decade's top good guys were Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and basketball star Larry Bird. And the worst of the worst? AIDS, a much-feared, incurable and fatal disease … and President Ronald Reagan.

The good news is, at least now Republicans finally know how to get good press coverage from the elite media. All they have to do is die.

Get David Kupelian's bestsellers on the hidden workings of evil in America, including the culture-war classic, "The Marketing of Evil," its acclaimed sequel, "How Evil Works" and his latest, "The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture."