The Bushes are American royalty. How else could you explain a father and son being elected president? Not to mention two sons being elected governor of two of the biggest states in America. Just weird. I wonder if he regrets any of the major decisions he made.
Nope. Still one of the worst presidencies in modern history. Really in the history of our country in general, it’s still a pretty low point. However .... GWB the man I can separate from GWB the presidency and have a differing opinion on. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the influence of big oil in his presidency casts a huge stain on what could have been a pretty decent presidency. Many of the big problems tie back to that single issue. Invading Iraq being the biggest one of all. It’s there on video being televised the whole time during the invasion when the first place they went was to secure the oil fields. Hence securing the bank account of the country and locking us into a war we could never truly win without twenty trillion in debt, thousands of dead, and the degrading of respect globally of our country. There is also still the Great Recession but honestly ... I’m being objective here....recessions can be non partisan. It’s possible that this recession happens on Gore or Kerry’s watch. That being said there is certainly alot of blame here and really cautious tales of massive deregulation (housing bubble) and tax cuts (leading to fed issues) where Republican Presidents like Reagan, Bush, and now Trump really play with fire in order to juice up the economy instead of incremental growth of investing in the middle class and infrastructure growth. So yeah a lot of damage was done during the Bush years and we are really still recovering in some ways. We also see that the GOP never learns its lesson and just doubles down time after time with allowing the fossil fuel companies to control too many national interests... including our military. We also learn that they are actually the most fiscally irresponsible group at the end of the day. Twenty trillion in debt following the Bush years... yeah. But George W Bush the person, the leader, the president ... I would take him every day of the week over the traitor in chief we have in office now. At least I knew Bush did love this country and I do believe he cared about Americans. A very basic necessity of being president that now seems to be optional in a president. Now, the American people that follow Trump act as their own special interest group... willing to sell out in order to get something they personally think benefits them. The fact that we are even having this conversation about GWB is because of this. Even Trump fans know (but will never admit) that Trump is lacking the very basics that even the worst president of our lifetimes had... a basic love of our country and believed in Democracy instead of Trumpocracy. We all know they don’t feel great about it, but they think they are getting something out of it. When they start getting nostalgic for GWB’s leadership, I think that tells you all you need to know.
Good guy, but terrible Decider. Spent a shitload and tried to wreck government agencies when his handlers placed cronies and yes men to head agencies they were lobbying against (sound familiar?). Oh yeah, the amnesia part where he started a few wars (longest in American history) that hasn't ended yet, triggered massive deficit spending and waves of deregulation (Enron wut?) that lead to the financial collapse of 08. He's pretty much a tortured dichotomy of the worst of the two competing political ideologies. Dems hated him for his controlling party's policies and "ramming them down their throats". Gave a top heavy tax cut right after the first budget surplus in decades (later made permanent), then gave a poorly received stimulus after when an unexpected recession arrived. Under Greenspan, they (and most of the orthodoxy) truly believed the economy could be controlled and downturn in cycles contained. Connies hated him for his government expansions...created yet another departmental wing (Homeland Security), the SOX headache after Enron/Arthur Anderson bust, increased entitlement monster with Medicare D, federalized (in the Cons eyes) education with NCLB rather than voucherizing everything, and led Social Security/Immigration reform that his own party rebelled against. Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, that shifty pollster guy I can't remember the name of... Then you have Roberts and Alito and their decisions, namely Citizens United. Dubya is a historical president as much as Obama is because we're in the middle of another industrial revolution that is testing the fabrics of society, commerce, military and scientific research. Yes that means Trump will make history regardless of what he does. The voters who wanted to stick America's head in the sand will only end up pounding it. The bomb is much easier and available to make than it was 20 years ago, the same bomb that cast a pall over the world from Truman to Reagan. Asymetric warfare from non-state actors have been far more destabilizing than Viet Cong fighters living in the jungle. Laws are interpreted and reacted to far quicker than the means and reasons it took to write them in the first place. Rights, liberties and norms are much more scrutinized ever than before, except now people know about them instantly. A random person with a phone camera can have the same impact as a Woodward or Bernstein. Or as we learned, that random person can also be an automated farm of disinformation seeders propped up by another state actor. Wealth inequality is skewed towards digital robber barons and the hucksters who broke the financial system that led to Glass Steagall. For the former, they aspire to superficial libertarian principles until they grow fat, large and sometimes monopolistic. For the latter, greed has always been good, by the grace of God, for the people and by the people...because thanks to the Bush court, corporations are people too...but even better! Just like 2 legs being better than 4. People are more aware of crises. If sunlight is the best of disinfectants, then the cynical approach has been to blind the viewer. That we nominated someone like Bush (after re-electing him) and worse than him in character and inexperience, pretty much means Democrats have no grasp on politics and that Trump or Pence has a very good shot in 2020 barring another Great Depression.
His biggest mistake was the Iraq war which was unnecessary. He did a great job uniting the country after 9/11 and invading Afghanistan was the correct response to 9/11. He was very unfortunate that the sub-prime mortgage fiasco happened but that fiasco started before he was in office. He was just the unfortunate recipient of the fallout when the bubble burst. He was a mediocre President but far better than his successor.
To be fair he did lack a vision for the country which is why he made such poor choices. So he gets blamed for that. He came in with an arrogant and cavalier attitude. Had he listened to Clinton, he may have not stopped 9/11 but he could have caught Bin Laden who Clinton flagged as the biggest threat to the US in his debriefing to Bush. But I think Bush learned to be a much better president. The housing market was a time bomb - but it was one he left ticking for 7 years. It's incredulous that anyone would try to pin the blame of something that happens 7 years later on the prior president. Bush did a fantastic job of transition to Obama though and Bush made a lot of strong decisions his last year of his presidency. It's too bad he didn't run the country like that for 8 years. It's also too bad that people need to complain about Obama because they are partisans (see above). But we all can agree on this - any president in history of this country is better than the current president.
“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. Well, **** on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. **** them.” Hunter S. Thompson
I think your analysis is pretty good. He actually surrounded himself, for the most part, with long-time government people. (Hell, I found Congressman Rumsfeld's voice in the archives giving the Apollo program crap and trying to short their funding, LOL.) But they were just pretty far to the right especially in terms of energy policy and foreign policy, to the point that Cheney happily saw them intertwined with a great opportunity at hand. Cheney, to me, is the biggest single mistake. What if Bush had flown with a Bob Dole-ish (even McCain-ish) republican wingman? The huge difference to me now is not just the moral aspect, (and 45 is indeed a bad person, period): it's that 45 literally is surrounding himself with a mix of incompetence, galling inexperience, and disdain for precedent and/or governance. The only hint of that for me w' Bush was in some of his more minor appointments (like his stem cell committee, egads) and in Ashcroft, who would still be a titan of intellect in the current cabinet, I guess. There was once a little BBC sitcom about a guy trying to destroy his own company and making the worst possible decisions week to week. I forget the name. But if you want to destroy a working government, to me, that's what 45 is doing. So I don't miss Shrub at all. But I didn't fear for the body of our nation like I do now. Finally, and I may take heat for this, but all the hyperbolic "worst ever" type chants -- the demonization of each rival president -- leaves our discourse very little room when we really get a five-sigma event like 45. I remember my lefty friends and I going on about Romney's dog carrier on the car. I mean, really? Hopefully 45, if we come out the other side with a decent country of some kind, will recalibrate a lot of us. Definitely recalibrating me.
He wasn't the best President but as a man i have great respect for him unlike this current clown that's in office.
Bush Jr did things he thought would help the country, even the war on Iraq, he thought it will help the oil supply for the US is my guess. The current president does everything that helps him and his family first with no thought to the country or an after thought only.
The war in Iraq was clearly a mistake (even most hardcore Bush supporters will admit it now). I was one of the holdouts on realizing it. It was a terrible, terrible, costly mistake with lasting repercussions that are still costing lives today. That's a big stain on his presidential legacy obviously. As a person I think he is tremendous. I think he is a testament to good character. His handling of his post-presidency is extremely admirable. A good "character" success story as he didn't start off his adulthood as a good man but came to be one. I think his presidency is a tale of a good man who wants to make the world a better place that was surrounded by people (Of his own choosing) who found it easy to manipulate his belief that he could make the world better. That said, Bush signed TARP and saved the global economy. He deserves some credit for that. His treatment of the Obamas is all class. I wish his presidential legacy was better because if he had the good presidency to go along with the good character and class stuff he'd be a president for the ages. Oh well.
IIRC, GWB also appointed Alberto Gonzalez for AG, and nominated his own personal lawyer, Harriet Meyers, for Supreme Court justice both were unqualified
Did anybody else watch the Frontline documentary last night about Iran and Saudi Arabia? I ask because one of its segments was about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was strongly opposed by the Saudis and seized upon by Iran. I don't think we'll ever fully know President Bush's true motivations for invading Iraq. We know that WMD was at worst a lie and, at best, horrible intelligence. We know that the Bush Administration had no plan for post-Saddam Iraq and that many of its moves there - de-Ba'athification of the government, dissolving of the entire Iraqi military, allowing the Shia government to turn Saddam into a Sunni martyr, et. al - destabilized the entire region. Perhaps much of that was the influence of neocons like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. But, Bush was "the decider" and ultimately decided to enter into an unnecessary war that cost thousands of American, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, lives. Much like LBJ's legacy is weighed down by Vietnam, Bush deserves to have the anvil of Iraq hanging off of his. I will say that President Bush's humanitarian work combatting AIDS in Africa is amazing. The man has a genuine heart for that issue and the people who suffer because of the pandemic. He also summed up President Trump's inauguration as well as any of us could: "That was some weird ****."
don't get the two mixed up LBJ inherited the VN mess from his predecessors, from Ike to JFK, and escalated the war efforts there W concocted a lie in order to invade Iraq
Don't get distracted: they're two presidents whose legacies will forever be weighed down by wars they pursued. This thread is not about comparing the two of them, I simply used LBJ as an example of a president with a legacy tarnished by war. It's an inescapable fact for both of them.
what part of this ur unable to distinguish LBJ inherited the VN mess from his predecessors, W concocted a lie in order to invade Iraq ?
