We all got to accompany the Bush funeral train, whether desired or not

I happened to be spending the afternoon Thursday watching a grandparent and taking in one of her favorite television programs (It’s “Jeopardy,” by the way), so I got to see just how peeved she became when the popular game show was interrupted for special programming.

George Bush (the elder) being removed from funeral train. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

As in the live broadcast by ABC network news of the funeral train taking the casket containing the remains of former President George Bush (the elder) to College Station, Texas.

WHERE THE PRESIDENTIAL libraries for both Presidents Bush are located, and where George H.W. will have his casket laid to rest. People who are political geeks and fanatics of the Bush presidencies will forevermore be able to pay their respects with a visit to the Texas A&M University.

Similar, I suppose, to all those Elvis fanatics who stop by his gravesite whenever they visit Graceland.

Now I point out the grandmother disdain for Thursday’s interruption, because I wonder how many others felt similar thoughts.

Bush family on hand for the burial.

Seeing the broadcasts earlier in the week of the formal funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., was one thing. There may well have been people intrigued by the site of onetime Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole standing from his wheelchair to salute the presidential casket, although I was amused by how President Donald Trump’s very presence made so many feel uncomfortable.

BUT SEEING CONTINUED live broadcasting of the Bush death-related events just seemed like overkill.

Personally, I thought the sight of the funeral train working its way through Texas was weak, and its’ arrival in College Station was way too much.

The flag-draped presidential casket on board the funeral train.

It’s a good thing the Bush family did the actual burial in private, or else I’ve got to wonder if we literally would have been given the chance to see the casket lowered into the ground and sextons dumping dirt atop it for the burial.

There are some things I just question the value of, and perhaps it is the reason I still rely on newspapers (and their affiliated websites) for much of the reporting I read.

I DO HAVE to admit to getting something of a chuckle when I saw the ABC coverage of the funeral train proceedings anchored by George Stephanopoulos – the one-time political operative who, when working for Bill Clinton back in 1992, was a big part of the team that undid the George Bush presidency.

Would he ever back then have envisioned himself in such a public role watching over the Bush funeral? I suppose it’s the ultimate evidence that life isn’t pre-ordained in any role, and any outcome is possible.

But wouldn’t we have been equally, and adequately, informed if Thursday’s activities had been summarized into a minute-long report that was merely included in the network evening newscasts?

Seriously, I don’t remember as much hoopla over the deaths of Ronald Reagan in 2004 or Richard Nixon a decade earlier as we’ve seen this week for George H.W. Bush.

I ALSO EXPECT that when the time comes for Jimmy Carter (he turned 94 back in October), his eventual funeral ritual in Plains, Ga., will also be something simpler and more laid back.

One memory of 2005 World Series was seeing the Bushes in front-row seats watching the ballgames the White Sox played in Houston

Although I suspect things could have been more drawn out. Considering that George Bush was the first former president whose funeral rituals included a train ride since Dwight Eisenhower in 1969, it also made me think of the first president to get such treatment.

As in Abraham Lincoln, whose death in 1865 resulted in a two-week trip to take the body back from Washington to Springfield, Ill. – where he remains interred at Oak Ridge Cemetery to this day.

Modern technology reduced the train trip to a single day. Just envision if it had been a weeks-long event with multiple stops along the way (as was done for Lincoln, who once served as an attorney for the Illinois Central railroad). We’d probably have all the people who didn’t vote for Bush for president back in 1988 and in 1992 rising up in great anger at the very sight.

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Self-promotion taints the Senate debate

It is a sentiment I am all too familiar with from my time as a reporter-type person – filing some piece of copy because its subject matter ties into some “exclusive” story that my particular news shop is claiming. Who cares if the actual copy is not newsworthy, or perhaps even downright trivial?

That sentiment was clearly at work when the two major party candidates for U.S. Senate from Illinois engaged in a debate this week, and had to be subjected to one-time White House aide-turned-ABC reporter-type George Stephanopoulos asking both Alexi Giannoulias and Mark Kirk whether they thought Anita Hill owed an apology to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

TO THEIR CREDIT, neither man fell into the trap of trying to dignify that trivial question with a legitimate answer. Heck, I would have been prepared to write a commentary urging people to vote against someone for dignifying it with a response.

Because this was purely about the fact that ABC News trying to hype up the fact that they’re claiming to have “broken” the story that Thomas’ wife, Virginia, during the weekend called up Hill’s office (she’s a professor at Brandeis University) and left a message asking for/demanding the apology.

If Stephanopoulos had been able to get either Kirk or Giannoulias to nibble at an answer (both men essentially said that the Thomas confirmation hearings were so distant in the past they weren’t going to think about them), ABC News would then have claimed that the U.S. Senate debate held in Chicago rose to national news.

Stephanopoulos, who was one of the moderators for that particular debate, would have gained praise from his bosses for getting them an audio/video snippet that would tie directly into their alleged exclusive, which would allow them to boast about themselves.

ALL OF WHICH ignores reality, which is that most people have long-ago moved on from this issue (and the ones who still have the hang-ups, including Virginia Thomas, need to be told to get over it).

As best as I can tell, most people who watched the debate and felt the need to post their reactions while the event was taking place were little more than bewildered about why Stephanopoulos would even bring that question up.

Even by the standards of a debate moderator trying to slip in an off-beat inquiry to try to catch the candidates in a moment of honesty, this one was just strange. It may very well be the most bizarre moment I have ever heard in the roughly two-plus decades that I have covered such debates related to Illinois political candidates.

Then again, perhaps that is all too appropriate, because the Thomas confirmation hearings were so memorably bizarre in their own right. If anything, they were a sign of what our electoral politics was destined to become during the past 18 years.

SOME PEOPLE REMEMBER where they were the day John F. Kennedy was shot, while others felt something emotional and unforgettable about where they were when they learned the World Trade Center collapsed nine years-and-one month ago.

I remember the exact moment when I heard the line about pubic hairs and Coca-Cola cans that Hill testified under oath came from Thomas’ mouth when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – I was sitting at a desk in the pressroom of what is now called the Thompson Center state government building.

It was early afternoon in Chicago and a radio was tuned to a station that was broadcasting the hearings live. Which means I got to hear the completely out-of-the-ordinary line at the moment she uttered it

It also means that I later heard live Thomas’ testimony on his own behalf, including the line about this being a “high-tech lynching.”

WHEN LOOKED AT from the perspective of today, where Republican partisans impeached one president of the Democratic persuasion and are insistent that the current chief executive is somehow “un-American” (while also trying to downplay the disaster that was the presidency of the GOPer who held the office in between the two), all of this is too predictable.

But back in the political days of “B.C.” (Before Clinton, who will be campaigning in Chicago next week on behalf of local Democratic Party candidates), this kind of reaction would have been the stuff of our worst nightmares. Surely we as civilized people knew better than to behave in such a manner?

Republican partisans are willing to look the other way at the personal peccadilloes of their people, so long as they spout the right ideological talk. When they are attacked, they go all-out to try to destroy their critics. And they are capable of holding a grudge.

The one thing I have to admire about this whole situation is Hill’s reaction to getting that call on her office voice-mail. She contacted campus police, who in turn notified the FBI. She’s not dignifying it with a pompous response.

NOW I’M NOT delusional enough to think that the “G-men” are about to haul Virginia Thomas off to jail while they build a criminal case of harassment against her. She did use a telephone, which could bring the whole concept of ‘wire fraud” into the mix. In the hands of an overly-anal prosecutor, this whole thing could become the crime of the century.

There’s just a part of me that would like to believe that Virginia now regrets making that phone call, in large part because the audio is now public – as though Hill is the one who has let this political wound fester for the past two decades.

I’d like to think she’s somewhat embarrassed by the ABC reports (which are getting picked up in way too many places).

If she’s not embarrassed, then she should be, more so than anybody else – except for George Stephanopoulos, who managed to taint the League of Women Voters’ debate between Kirk and Giannoulias with his ridiculous inquiry.

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