If the “Bush is a detail wonk” meme wins out, it’ll also feed the “Bush is evil” meme, as people realize that the president really did deceive us about his reasons for conquering Iraq, that he really did sit on his butt for over a year doing nothing while the situation deteriorated, and he really did give his stamp of approval to the mass torture of innocents, to name but a few examples. This president is better off cultivating the idea that he’s not too smart.
So Reagan KNEW what he was doing in the whole Iran-Contra mess? Give me a break.
Whatever, guys. No minds are going to be changed here. If I knew this thread was going to wind up in GD with the usual suspects, I wouldn’t have bothered posting.
Uh-huh.
IOW, you can’t refute the facts with wishful thinking and fanciful revisionism.
Ah another Bush bashing circle jerk. Haven’t had enough of THESE yet, ehe? You guys are right…I’m sure the article cited in the OP is simply a whitewash of reality to make Bush look good. Newsweeks is a notorious Conservative/Republican publication after all…known for its non-critical reporting about things political.
Yep yep…Bush is just a stupid monkey, a hand puppet to dumb to even see the hand controlling him. IQ of a turnip and all that. And by extension American’s are stupid for for re-hiring him over the brilliant and thoughtful Kerry. I’m sure we are poised on the brink of total destruction…America will most likely completely collapse any day. I suggest you guys hold your collective breaths…
…
All venom aside and attempting to once again be calm in the face of seemingly endless Bush bashing and snide comments, I don’t see the contridiction. Bush doesn’t speak well in public. Doesn’t have anything to do with intellegence. For that matter, speaking well in public doesn’t necessarily mean anything either…except that the person can or can’t speak well in public.
He is detail oriented (according to the cite). Thats not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing…its just a different management style. I’ve known good managers and bad ones that were ‘detail oriented’…and good and bad that had a more laid back approach. He doesn’t like yes men. Again, its simply a different management style and doesn’t necessarily say anything at all about how good or bad he is at managing. He’s an engaging personality in one on one situations…we already knew that. Tells us, again, nothing really one way or the other. BTW, being detail oriented doesn’t tell us anything about his deceiving or not deceiving us about WMD Squink. He could be not detail oriented and setting a policy of deception, or detail oriented and simply wrong…or perhaps TOO focused on the details to see the bigger picture OR alternative explainations.
Personally I’ve always said that Liberals/Dems were/are (and looks to me will always be) fools to paint the man as a stupid monkey, blah blah blah, ad nausium. Seemingly intellegent people who are quite critical and thoughtful on other subjects just throw their brains away when it comes to Bush. They have constantly underestimated him…and he’s basically taken you every time. He’s laughing at you all the way to a second term.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, but I really think you folks brought this shit on yourself. That a president as weak as Bush, with all the problems of his presidency AND an unpopular war managed to get re-elected, and by a fairly comfortable margin…well, it says something. Speaking to the wall though trying to say all this here of course. So ya…just keep telling yourself that he’s just a stupid monkey meat puppet.
-XT
Sam, you are one of the usual suspects. A decision not to post in threads where the usual suspects post would require you not to post in threads in which you post. That’s a conundrum very like that faced by the barber of Seville.
Do you deny that increasing knowledge on the part of the president brings with it increasing responsibility for the consequences of his actions? For the past year we’ve been hearing a steady drumbeat saying that Bush didn’t lie to us because he really didn’t know. If you now try to claim that Bush is some kind of secret maven, you destroy your own argument.
“It’s not his ignorance that worries me, not the things he doesn’t know, but the things he knows with clear certainty that just ain’t so.”
- Mark Twain
Squink, I’ve ALWAYS put the full responsibility for his actions on the President for Iraq. The problem has been that the Left/Dems have been yammering for so long about this ‘heliedheliedhelied’ crap that it has distracted from the core issue. Hell, if I didn’t know better I’d think the Republicans have bribed the left (or encouraged them) to be such fools.
You are making the same mistake here. We don’t know if Bush lied or not. My guess is…he didn’t. He may have not listened as he should have to dissenting opinions, he may have thought the evidence was more solid than it was…but I really think that the majority consensus was that Iraq had WMD somewhere.
However…WHAT DIFFERENCED DOES IT MAKE IF HE LIED OR WAS WRONG??? Why do you suppose that if he was wrong it lets him off the hook. What has let him off the hook was the constant yammering that he lied from the left for gods sake! Its so stupidly easy to refute that plausably…and since they made it the unending background noise it drowned out anything else.
-XT
I’d hardly call a Newsweek editorial a “cite”… especially when it goes against the known behavior of the individual and his posse.
Well, it should be noted that there probably wouldn’t be as much venom hadn’t the Republicans gone on their few hundred million dollar character sniping quest.
I think we estimate him on the mark, it is Rove we underestimate :-p Every time Bush opens his mouth on his own, something mind numbingly stupid comes out. His personal history before becoming Mr. Rove’s puppet is nothing but stupidity and failure. Everything he touched turned to shit. I dunno if you’ve seen some of the film footage that exists of Bush pre-98, but… it is sobering to realize that half of this country voted him into office.
The only reason he is in office at all is probably the tax cut, supported by Kerry’s general failure to have a plan that that most of the country could understand at all. Even the people who voted for Kerry did so more out of dislike for Bush than like for Kerry.
The only underestimation was Rove and the neo-cons behind Bush. THe man himself… well, at least he has something in common with most of his supporters.
He lied?
BECAUSE THE FATE OF THE GOD DAMNED WORLD IS IN HIS HANDS.
Well, that’s part of the problem; despite his many flaws, Bush comes off as Regular American Guy, and Kerry does not. Most American voters didn’t bother to inform themselves of his actions and only listened to his God/freedom/fear message. Kerry just had negative charisma and a vague platform. He kept saying, “I have a plan,” but he never said what his plan WAS. It was infuriating, and I was a supporter.
Moreover, the Dems failed to reach out and get the message out to the voters in ordr to counter the GOP lies and disinformation. When rural voters say they voted against Kerry because he was for gay marriage and abortion, despite his stand against them, the Dem clearly screwed up in the PR.
You’re absolutely right, and I hope the the Dem leadership will learn from this debacle, but don’t forget that unless you’re a millionaire, he’s laughing at you, too.
That’s not the dumbest thing I ever heard. I’ve been to church, been to protest rallies, been to bars. So its not.
What you’re saying, then, is this: if we had kept quiet about Bush’s failings and his lack of accountability thereof, he would have been forced by our silence to talk about them? We drowned him out, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise to beseech our forgiveness? He called the Major Tedia, said “I want to give a whole bunch more press conferences!” and they said, nope, sorry, too busy with the bashing.
Or is it that you think we have exaggerated the significance? Just a little ol’ war, for Heavens sake, not something to get all upset about, a few corpses here and there, BFD? OK, so a few Iraqis are dead, some thousands, but some of them would have fallen to tragic felafel overdoses, and the rest are free to vote for whomever we like!
But not the dumbest. Nosir! Not by a long shot.
See, X, the important thing about the HELIED thing is that if he lied, he is criminally responsible for a lot of spilled blood. If that isn’t a core issue, I dunno what is.
Its the basis of the OP. Do you know what a ‘cite’ is by chance?
Against Clinton? I agree. I also see the irony of the present situation from my lofty unaligned perch. However, the venom has gone up several notches even from Clinton’s day, at least as far as THIS message board goes. But what comes around goes around, and in the unlikely even the Dems EVERY take back the whitehouse its going to be ugly.
Thanks for making my point. 
The irony here is just…well, ironic.
-XT
That’s your point? That more people voted against Bush than for Kerry? What kind of fershlugginer point is that? Would you surprised if more people voted against contracting smallpox than voted in favor of anal warts?
Huh?
I don’t suppose that at all. I’ve ALWAYS put the full responsibility for his actions on the President. However, the right/GOP has been yammering so long about this “hedidn’tknowhedidn’tknowhedidn’tknow” crap, that I’ve come to believe that the group as a whole actually buys the argument that ignorance somehow deflects responsibility. I’m happy that you’re an exception to this generalization, but that doesn’t make the generalization any less valid.
Let’s clear a few things up:
-Disliking intellectuals does not mean you dislike intellect. That phrase can easily mean you just dislike people who are all theory and no application, or people who sit in the Ivory Tower all day. You can’t paint someone with comments like that until you’ve got context and clarification.
-Reagan was talking in the context of global warming when it came to “trees pollute more than cars” in that it is very true trees produce many times the greenhouse gases of cars (98% of all greenhouse gases come from the natural wrold.)
You can obviously be one of the ones who believes that extra 2% nudge is what “ruins the world” (aka causes a marginal rise in temperature over 100 years) but that still doesn’t justify saying the comment was completely wrong.
I usually associate cites with fact, not editorialism.
YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I WAS GETTING AT…DO YOU?? :smack:
I figure you know EXACTLY what I was getting at, but I’ll play along. If the left hadn’t been yammering and screeching about the ‘fact’ that Bush lied, then they would have been free to pin the responsibility for being WRONG about Iraq squarely on him…as should have been done. However, when the central issue came down to ‘he lied’ it was stunningly easy to plausably argue that he was wrong and point to all the OTHER folks who were wrong too…such as Mr. Kerry himself. The RESPONSIBILTY was Bush’s…but IMO the left and the Dems pissed away their chance to use it against him because of their own hysteria. YMMV 'luci…thats my own assessment.
You are absolutely right…he’s laughing at me too since I voted Badnarik. I just couldn’t BELIEVE that Bush would win a second term, even though I was watching the process by which the Dems snatched defeat from the grim jaws of victory.
-XT