Well, I guess we’ll never know one way or the other, since nobody fucking tried to do anything. Seriously, do you think that there was nothing anybody could do but sit on their goddamn hands?
And it’s his fault that the response was fucking abysmal. The buck stops at the President’s desk, and he didn’t do what needed to be done before, during, or after Katrina.
Ah yes, when in doubt, blame Clinton. :rolleyes:
It’s all Bill’s fault. After all, he was in the White House for the last 8 years, and in charge of Congress. And the Supreme Court. And the weather.
Didn’t you get the memo? This was discussed extensively during the Republican National Convention this summer - the one where they talked about throwing out the liberal bums running Washington.
What else could it be? :rolleyes:
How is it that Bill Clinton was so powerful when he was President that he was still running things years after leaving office and George Bush was so weak when he was President that he couldn’t stop Clinton?
Personally, I do not hold Bush responsible for the WTC/Pentagon attacks. They might have occurred regardless who was preesident. On the other hand, the necessary information to potentially stop them, (the outline of the plan discovered on a terrorist’s laptop, the collection of foreign nationals taking flight training–some of them not even asking for instructions on landing–and other bits of data were all in the hands of (separate) intelligence or police organizations and the Bush administration not only failed to collate the data, they dismissed the threat as unreasonable.
Stopping the hurricane and possibly the levee failures was outside Bush’s ability to prevent. OTOH, had he nominated an actual expert in disaster preparation (as Clinton did), then the (gutted under Bush) FEMA would have had more resources available to respond after the storm and it is even possible that the city of New Orleans would have had an actual disaster plan in place since Witt (under Clinton) had begun working with a number of cities to do just that.
The initial impetus to loans to the poor began even prior to Clinton’s adminstration. The financial disaster occurred because banks and other mortgage lenders began twisting the rules to encourage speculators (not the poor) to engage in risky behavior that was then supported by even riskier behavior by higher financial institutions that were outside regulatory control at a time when Bush continued to push an anti-regulation agenda. Bush did not create the problem, but he did nothing to stop it, (self-serving White House declarations notwithstanding).
Under Bill Clinton’s term, we saw the Northridge Earthquake (1994), the Great Flood of 1993, 300,000 acres of wildfires in Florida, the Great Blizzard of 1993, and Hurricane Andrew.
Now it’s true that G.W. Bush had more category 5 hurricanes to deal with in 2005 than Clinton had in all eight years — and it’s true that Wikipedia lists more acres of wildfire burned on G.W.'s watch than on Clinton’s, but that’s probably because Wikipedia wasn’t around for Clinton’s presidency (and more recent records on Wiki tend to be more complete).
Unlucky? I think that’s just an excuse. Every President has to deal with some kind of major crisis.
See? Even God hates the bastard.
There is speculation that the increasing amount of hurricanes and wildfires are due to environmental changes like global warming. Given Bush’s record on environmental regulation, he’s arguably responsible not only for the poor response to these natural disasters, but also the disasters themselves.
I’m very much support the findings that man is affecting the climate adversely but at most you can say Bush lost us 8 years of addressing the issue. This has been a slow (on the human scale/rapid on the geological scale) change and if the hurricanes and wildfire problems of the last 8 years are tied to the damage we have collectively done, Bush’s additional damage would not really be seen this quickly.
I say this as some one that has made it clear that I strongly disapprove of Bush, hate Cheney and as an active member of an environmental group and supporter of many others.
False conclusions like yours only leave holes for naysayers to attack the problem that overwhelmingly appears to be true and very dangerous.
Great leaders lead. Its easy to lead a nation through good times. We save our highest admiration for leaders who were effective during bad times. People don’t think about Lincoln and say “gosh darn it, bad luck.” Or FDR.
In many ways, the leader who led during these times had the opportunity to be one of the Great American Presidents - if they want to make history - they are - in a way - lucky to have bad things happen when they are at the helm.
I think we will look at GWB a little like we look at Carter - ineffectual at managing what was thrown at him - a guy who, if he’d been faced with an easy term, would have probably been fine. Neither Carter nor GWB had it easy - neither was up to the tasks they had to face. One of the questions for a post-Presidential GWB is whether he will choose to reclaim his legacy as Carter has. Carter will always have been a less than stellar president, but he has proven himself to be a pretty darn decent human being.
(I like Carter, but he had the WORST economic advisors and the “bad luck” of Iran blowing up - which then he couldn’t manage to solve with diplomacy.)
Bush became president with a high performing,low debt economy. Being a believer in the repub principals ,he totally fucked up the economy and national debt. That was not bad luck. That was bad principals,poor ethics and shitty regulation concepts.
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&complete_911_timeline_key_events=complete_911_timeline_key_warnings
This is from the 911 timeline. It simply is a compilation of news stories about incidents leading up to the towers. It is not online sites or political blogs. As it turnd out ,we were well informed before it happened.
I agree on the hurricanes bit — as part of the weather system, they tend to be cyclical (ha ha). There are up years and down years. As bad as any one person could be about the environment, it’s unlikely that somebody would immediately see an increase in hurricanes.
Wildfires, on the other hand, are harder to gauge. If there aren’t enough early responders, wildfires might burn out of control; if the forests aren’t managed properly, again, there may be excess fuel. Fires can be exacerbated by drought conditions, and they may be caused by someone tossing a cigarette out the car window. It’s hard to do more than to guess that, in the abstract, an alert and attentive president with good underlings who quickly deploy a good firefighting network might have fewer troubles, maybe.
To be fair, the wildfires here in California have exposed massive problems on the city, county and state levels. The fire chief here resigned in frustration after the 2003 wildfires, and after last year’s wildfires there was a sentiment among those in public service during both events that not much had changed. It cuts deep: everything from littering laws to the end of California’s prisoner brush-clearing program in the 80s has some effect on the whole thing.
How was I being ridiculously simplistic, exactly? Don’t quip; answer the question.
I did say it was Bush’s responsibility for causing natural disasters was an arguable point. But I don’t absolve him on the basis that he was only in office for eight years. If that were a defense then no politician would be responsible for problems like the environment or the financial crisis - these problems don’t suddenly appear and then become national emergencies within the space of a few years. They take decades to grow to the size where they’re a crisis.
But if you’re part of the problem, you deserve part of the blame. Bush may not have initiated all of the policy decisions that led to global warming or the Wall Street collapse, but he supported and advanced those policies right up to the point where things fell apart. If Bush had bad luck, it was that he happened to be the conservative in charge when the deregulation chickens came home to roost.
Well I can support this 100%. I agree, the policies that led to the fiscal crisis were not corrected by 6 years of Bush and loyal Republican Houses rule. The problems were a combination of deregulation that started under Reagan* and Clinton[sup]2[/sup]. As to the environment, we will be paying for his 8 years of wanton disregard and years of denial for decades and probably in many extra tens of billions of dollars.
[sup]2[/sup] Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac with the undersecured loans was started before Bush but it seemed to be the Bush admin that was really cheerleading the everyone buy a home and ignoring the worst abuses that really got going after Clinton.
And it will take a long time to redo the environmental and economic regulations he undid during his time in office, too.
Wow. Still waiting for something from you besides adolescent snark. Starting to think you’ve got nothing.
Obama seems to have planned for that.
Of course, the ship of state is a pretty big barge to try and turn around on a dime, but it looks like we might have to wait all that long for things to begin to [del]change[/del]shift.
In a horrible sort of way, bad events = good luck for a leader who deals with them in a statesmanlike manner and thereby gains admiration and credibility. Take Rudy Giuliani - I thought the man was a toad, until I saw how magnificently he dealt with 9/11. (I think he’s resumed toad-status since then, but my point remains.)
Bush, on the other hand, simply proved what a nitwit he is.