Let’s not ignore the president’s “Partnership for Prosperity” program.
It sounds as if Bush is really turning that economy around.
Not that I’m in favor of huge government programs, but if he had to proprose something like that, why not propose doing something about social security or medicare or something like that.
So instead he proposes Free Internet access? WTF?
I may not be adding much to Sam Stone’s posts but I’d like to include my two cents here. I remember quite well the mindset of the country, especially the leftists, immediately after 9/11. On the afternoon of 9/11 one of my friends told me she would be scared to get on an airplane again if we retaliated. Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan there was a lot of hand wringing and fear about taking on Afghanistan, the unbeatable. How many times did you hear during that month that they had whupped the British, whupped the Soviets, whupped anyone that even thought of entering the country without a visa?
So, if you put the above together with the Clinton-Gore refusal to respond to the 1993 WTC attack, it’s entirely possible that President Gore would have handled this as a police action - a strategy which BTW has worked wonders for Spain. We’d still be negotiating with Mullah Omar over whether or not we had given him enough evidence to go after UBL yet. And the Jihadists would have doubled in strength after their victory.
As for what GWB personally has done, in addition to making the right decisions about Afghanistan locking up the Al Qaeda suspects in the US, I’d say he’s shown amazing leadership skills at a time when they were critical. Two images stand out. On 9/14 when he visited the ground zero site and ad libbed to the crowd, and on opening night of the World Series. His courage under pressure was remarkable.
Finally, the “reviled” Giuliani was elected and re-elected in a ciy which is predominantly minority and Democratic prior to 9/11. And somehow I seem to remember that LBJ and Nixon both managed to look bad in times of war.
I don’t have the energy or time to respond to all the other points.
Yes, but I am not talking about 1994 or 1998. I am talking about 2001. Perhaps “reviled” was too strong a word but here is one description that I found:
And here is what happened post-9/11:
Let’s not forget just about amazingly quickly the U.S. acted against Afghanistan. The WTC attack happened on Sept. 11, and the first bombs began dropping on Afghanistan on Oct. 7.
On that same day, ten to twelve thousand protestors marched in New York City in opposition to the war. There were also protests in Europe, in Pakistan, and in several countries in the Middle East.
The notion that this rapid, forceful response was obvious and that any other President would have done the same is revisionism. I can easily imagine Al Gore calling for a bipartisan commission to evaluate options, to report back in three months. Maybe he would have attacked the Taliban anyway, but within three weeks? That kind of decisive leadership is pretty rare.
And it’s also a myth that the world was all united singing Kumbayah after Sept. 11. The universal sympathy for the U.S. lasted exactly three weeks, until the U.S. started fighting back. Then we had stories like this:
Or, for example: War on Afghanistan Polarizes Italy
Even in Britain, the protests were huge:
And of course, on the Straight Dope Board, many of the people who now claim that the war in Afghanistan was an obvious, easy call were far from sure about it then. I remember the debates well. Unfortunately, that time period is now lost to the great board crash.
Oh yeah, and in regards to Nixon and Johnson: What we are talking about in regards to 9/11 is not just “times of war” but after America has been attacked. (Sending troops to some far-off land for obscure reasons is not the same thing.)
But the question is not whether the war would have happened or not if some of us on the SDMB had been President but whether it would have happened under another President who might actually have been elected, such as Al Gore. As you may have noticed, some of us here on the SDMB are to the left of Al Gore. (I consider myself quite a bit left of Al Gore and I was pretty ambivalent about the Afghanistan war.)
Well, I interpreted it as something like the rural electrification plans from decades past, or the rural, er, telephonification plans that we all pay for on our phone bills - some kind of incentive/mandate for the broadband companies to extend their service to customers who would otherwise be too unprofitable to care about.
And you feel quite comfortable saying that you’re sure that Al Gore would have launched an invasion of a sovereign nation within 3 weeks after being attacked? Because I’m sure not. I think it took big brass cajones for that administration to kick ass the way it did, and I’m not sure a president Gore could have done the same thing.
Bush also took the right tone, when he came out and said we’ll dig you out from whatever rock you’re under. Remember how much heat he took for that back then? Remember all the mocking he took on this forum for saying things like, “Wanted - Dead or Alive”? Too much of a cowboy, not sensitive enough to the feelings of the world, yada yada.
You can criticise Bush for plenty of other things, but when the chips were down that administration stood up and did the job splendidly. All of them.
Bush fans are liable to see him as a great President in time of war. But non-fans such as myself also see him as partly responsible for 9/11, so it is difficult to feel too positive about his military performance after that date. Needless to say, Iraq has been a big error overall.
(I would also say that Roosevelt was partly responsible for Pearl Harbor. Not so much because he should have seen it coming, although that factors in as well. But more because of the generally inept diplomacy with Japan that preceded it.)
Of course, his political enemies are going to try to spin every little thing he does the wrong way. But Bush has been incompetent in his rhetoric and diplomacy right from the get-go. The fact that he probably handled this series of wars better than Gore had done is small comfort when one looks at the big picture: highly competent fighting, aggressive incompetence elsewhere.
No way. Iraq has been a mess; now we’ll have to babysit the region for decades.
I’m not talking about Iraq. I’m talking about the way they handled the immediate aftermath, taking down the Taliban, setting up Guantanamo, going after al-Qaida in the mountains, etc.
There were a lot of things that Bush did right even before 9/11. For instance, speeding up development of the armed Predator. And Afghanistan could have been dealt with in many ways - trade embargos, trying to get the Northern Alliance to try and overthrow the Taliban without direct U.S. military aid (i.e. CIA advisors and funding as was done with the Mujahadeen), or a large scale invasion that would take months to prepare. The Bush administration’s plan was the perfect blend of all elements - air power, coupled with special forces on the ground working with the Northern Alliance. It worked beautifully.
Bush also took the right tone on the world stage - everything from his speech at the WTC, and subsequent speeches to the American people, the U.N., his State of the Union that year, etc. He was hitting them out of the park.
His performance after that period certainly depends on your view on the Iraq war, but before that period, you’d have a hard time convincing anyone that the Bush Administration wasn’t up to the job, and the polls showed it. Bush’s approval ratings were in the 90’s. Now I know you’re going to say that any president would have had those numbers, but I think the points above indicate that the Bush administration really deserves credit for a lot that went right after 9/11.
You keep saying that, but the reality is that some areas of science gets more funding, and some get less. As a research astrophysicist, my opinion is that Bush’s proposed NASA budget is strongly driven by publicity and will have a negative effect on the less visible areas of science. Whether the overall net effect is positive or negative will depend on whom you ask. To call it the “best thing to happen to the cause of space since Apollo” is quite a stretch.
So, you think it would have been smarter to re-certify the shuttle? The cost would have been very high, and the Columbia investigation board’s recommendation is that the Shuttle not fly past 2010 unless it is recertified.
So if it’s recertified, and tens of billions are spent on that task, how long would the Shuttle have to fly? BEcause there’s no way you could spend that kind of money just to scrap it in five years. The Shuttle would have wound up flying until 2020 or 2025 or something. Flights would have gotten increasingly expensive, and eaten up more of the budget. I fail to see how that helps science in the long run.
Instead, that money is being directed at a new type of modern vehicle - one which can be used for a station lifeboat, and has a modular design that lets it be configured for orbital, trans-lunar, or interplanetary flight. Now we’ve got a vehicle that can get us out to the Lagrange points and back - something that might be very necessary once we try to fly large telescope arrays and such.
The new direction is not just good for science, it’s healthy for NASA. Because the way things are going, the workforce there is getting older, there is a scarcity of quality engineers who want to work there, the Shuttle is aging, and NASA was going to get its budget cut by three billion dollars a year by 2006. Now NASA gets an increase every year. And it has a vision to work towards. And well get to explore some new frontiers instead of flying a truck into orbit once in a while.
When did I ever imply that I want the Shuttle saved? What I object to is the reduced funding for Beyond Einestein and Sun-Earth Connections objectives and the long-term development work towards reusable launch systems. Instead the money from the Shuttle is diverted into a Soyuz-style spacecraft. Yes, the other scientific objectives did get more funding, so I won’t (and didn’t) say the overall effect is negative. But the issue is not as clear-cut as you make it sound.
Absolute mularky. What exactly took cajones about invading Afghanistan? Certainly there was little potential domestic risk. Internationally, even the uber-fem wimpy freedom hating French contributed significantly to the operation. Where was the risk that required such cajones? I’ll tell you where the cajones didn’t come through - our actions were too heavily dominated by air strikes; we failed to capture bin Laden because we were too afraid to put our people in harm’s way. And you realize that your slip is showing when you describe it as the liberation of Afghanistan, right? Who gave a shit about Afghans freedoms? We attacked because they harbored the mfer and wouldn’t hand him over. We were supported by our NATO allies for this reason.
This retrospective glorification of Bush’s actions is just so much tripe - non-sensical and brainless gushing.
For f… sake, where do you cut-and-paste this rubbish from?
It takes an earthquake of the magnitude of 9/11 to shift the tectonic plates of international politics Desmo. Predator couldn’t shoot down North Korean ICBM’s.
Guantanamo is a continuing war crime. If the US was a country ruled by laws, not men, Bush and all his suborndinate war criminals involved in that ongoing criminality would be imprisoned or worse by now.
Demostylus: Reports I’ve read indicated that there were development delays in the armed Predator program which prevented it from going into use before 9/11. In fact, I seem to remember news reports after the start of the Afghan war about the armed Predator not being available immediately because it still had teething problems.
Sheesh, the greatest thing President Bush has done is institute the ‘no-call list’. I’d re-elect him just for that.