Bush 41 Blames Blogs For Amplifying Adversarial Politics

Posted on November 15, 2006

Think Progress reports that former President George H.W. Bush told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News that blogs and electronic media have made adversarial politics worse today than they used to be. However, he admitted that that the uglier side of politics has always been there.

GRETA: Why do you think it's gotten so adversarial? Tonight is literacy. Everybody comes in from all different sides and wants to help. It seems like oftentimes in Washington, you know, on something we all want to work towards it's not necessarily so civilized. It's not so pleasant.
H.W. BUSH: It's true but that's not new really. I mean, you go back in history and you'll find that there was always adversarial politics. There was always gut fighting. And it's probably a little worse now given the electronic media and the bloggers and all these kinds of things. But I don't despair about it. I think things - there is a pendulum at work at times so you swing away from the incivility back to more normal climate.

It had to be the blogs because it certainly could not have been any of those "positive" campaign ads. The political blogs will have to be watched closely to see if there is any moderation in tone now that both parties share some of the political power.