We all know the George W. Bush years were hard for liberals, but EPIX takes Bush Derangement Syndrome to a whole new level with their new original series Graves.
It’s about former Republican President Richard Graves (Nick Nolte) who is pretty obviously based on the second President Bush, although his presidency is said to have been from 1993-2000 – odd that liberals airbrushed out their beloved President Bill Clinton.
There are a few parallels to President Ronald Reagan – Graves survived an assassination attempt by a sick man obsessed with Taxi Driver – but mostly his past matches up with President Bush – Graves is said to have started “two deadly wars,” one is Afghanistan but for some reason, instead of Iraq, the second war is Libya.
There’s an exchange that’s pretty clearly what liberals want to hear Bush admit. Indicating walls with the names of the soldiers lost during his presidency, Graves says, “These were just kids and I sent them to be slaughtered – just slaughtered – and I don’t even remember why.” His assistant Isaiah, who supported the war, protests, “It was genocide there.” Graves responds, “So was this.” A little extreme, no?
An article that comes up on the screen titled “Richard Graves’ Two Deadly Wars” says, “His true legacy will always be the death of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians in the two fraudulent wars he started. A Congressional panel concluded seven years ago that the evidence that led to the U.S. war in Libya was fraudulent, though Graves has repeatedly stated in interviews, 'It was the right thing to do and I would do it again.'" The parallels are obvious, but the piece specifically recalls an appearance in Michigan in 2010 when President Bush said, "Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do and the world is a better place without him," and "I'd do it again [waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] to save lives."
The main plotline of the series is revealed when Graves begins reading lefty online articles with titles like, “Graves Opens Federal Lands for Oil Drilling,” “President Graves – Harshest Border Policy in History,” “Graves Guts Cancer Research,” “President Graves Dismisses Gay Rights,” “Richard Graves: Worst President in History” and it reduces him to tears. Somehow, reading these articles causes him to, from a liberal’s point of view, see the error of his ways and abandon everything he believed in as a Republican.
(Side note: Some of the articles are dated 2015 – even in a fictional fantasy the liberal media is still blaming a Republican president for things 15 years later! And if you look closely, the fake articles are riddled with typos.)
Upset with himself, Graves smashes a model of his presidential library at his home, then goes to the actual library and smashes displays there. Then he runs off and gets high with a young waitress. (What’s with Hollywood portrayals wanting to show Dubya smoke weed? The movie Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay had him lighting up, too.) “I’ve done some really, really terrible things,” he intones to her. “Ok, so now you can go and you can do some really, really good things,” she replies. With this newfound “enlightenment,” his mission becomes to set right all the “wrong” policies he put in place as president.
Graves’s first public repudiation of his policies comes at a speech for a children’s cancer charity because, as we all know, Republicans are pro-cancer and hate children. “Let’s face it, it was me who gutted federal grants for cancer research. I did this! I don’t know how many people died because my political machine at that time just figured, hell, dying people don’t vote.” Then he goes on to spout the typical liberal trope that defense money (the ONLY federal program liberals ever want to cut) should be redirected to cancer research.
In the second episode, “You Started Everything,” former RNC Chairman Michael Steele makes a cameo to recruit President Graves’s wife Margaret (Sela Ward) to run for New Mexico Senator Tom Udall’s senate seat and help rebrand the Republican Party. They say her primary opponent is an “anti-establishment protest candidate bomb-thrower just to the right of Attila the Hun,” and “one of those ‘can’t get pregnant when raped’ guys who’s hijacked the party.” I’m sure in the future we will see her take so-called moderate positions as a candidate: pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-gun control, pro-everything the Republican Party is not.
But the major theme for this episode is immigration, although both Reagan and Bush backed amnesty. Journalist Laura Wolf reports, “ICE has issued the largest number of deportation orders it ever has at one time. Widely called D-Day for this nation’s undocumented workers, it will affect thousands. America’s arcane detention and deportation policies can be traced back to the restrictions Graves’ conservative administration put into effect 2 decades ago.” Left unexplained is how Graves’ 1990s immigration policies are to blame – surely if they were so horrendous Congress and the President could have made some changes in the decades after he left office.
Graves goes onto Wolf’s show to say his past enforcement policies are “a damn shame,” and bemoans the workers “who live in the shadows, in fear while they labor in the fields of the largest corporations…it’s a moral shit show that plays out every day.”
He recalls President George Washington’s quote, “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong,” That quote comes from a letter Washington wrote to the leader of a Dutch rebellion that was inspired by the American Revolution. The full quote continues, “…but I shall be the more particularly happy, if this Country can be, by any means, useful to the Patriots of Holland, with whose situation I am peculiarly touched, and of whose public virtue I entertain a great opinion.”
And yet, Graves says, “So I asked myself, how would Washington feel if he could see what we’ve done to his dream? He’s blow his fucking brains out.” Perhaps Washington would feel suicidal if he could see our country now, but the plight of the illegal immigrant would rank as one of his last concerns.
Graves finishes by saying, to make amends for his “past transgressions,” he invites illegal immigrants to seek refuge at his ranch. At the end of the episode, illegals descend upon the ranch, waving Mexican and other Central and South American flags and their deportation notices.
Graves is just a tired, old liberal fantasy masquerading as an edgy, new political concept. The show is ostensibly a comedy, but there was really not even an attempt at humor, unless you consider President Graves’s crotchety, foul-mouthed old man shtick funny.
Although liberals will probably love it, Graves should just be buried in the graveyard of failed Hollywood hit pieces on Bush.
