There is so much irrational Bush bashing that it is hard to address his shortcomings without coming across as another mindless anti-Bush partisan.
But jesus christ. He & Cheney ran on a platform of ‘we will keep you safe’ in 2004 when fighting against Kerry & Edwards. WTF?
Clinton was working on a deal with N. Korea and Bush dropped it in 2000, now we are in a standoff. Perhaps it wasn’t a great deal, but Bush dropped it.
Bush didn’t address terrorism until it was too late
Bush invaded Iraq, which I was in favor of on humanitarian grounds but now all we’ve done is given more motivation to terrorists.
I was watching Keith Olberman giving an op-ed piece on New Orleans and he talked about ‘where is Dick Cheney, a year ago he was doing debates saying that ‘the other guy won’t keep you safe’ and now he is nowhere to be seen’. Its such bullshit.
The head of FEMA has no experience and background and is just a crony. Funds for Levees were cut before the hurricane, FEMA didn’t know what it was doing. I’m 100% certain the admin will not take any responsibility for any of this just like with 9/11. with 9/11 only one man (I forget his name, I think the ex-head of counterterrorism) took any responsibility. This sucks.
I don’t feel safe at all with Bush. I am not an irrational Bush basher and I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt but this is too much. We fucked up as a nation and as a government.
Has it occured to you that perhaps we aren’t “mindless” and “irrational” ? With such a huge amount of evidence for his incompetence - like the things you mention in you own OP - I think it’s far more mindless and irrational at this point to support Bush.
Funny tangential question on that then - is there some requirement that a “Police Action” (aka Korea) need be referred to as a Police Action in all official stuff? Or can ‘they’, meaning government agencies, refer to it as a ‘war’?
The Korean War is pretty universally referred to that way by US governmental agencies, as are subsequent undeclared US wars, such as the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
The Vice President has been moved to an undisclosed location to maintain the continuity of government in case the President is the target of a second hurricane.
I thought Paul Krugman’s column in the NYTimes made some good points in regards to the seeming inaction of the fed. (The column currently doesn’t require an account)
Nothing new, but a rather accurate and damning summary it seems.
That’s the bottom line isn’t it? It seemed for a moment that even conservatives might be willing to admit that there was a real screwup here. But it largely turned out that the old game of “find the goofy liberals who go too far in their criticism and focus almost exclusively on them” was more important than holding their government accountable for something. For once. If folks are assigning blame to the administration a little too fast, maybe it’s because they are used to seeing that NO ONE in this administration ever seems to be to blame for anything, no matter how unbelievably screwed up an operation is, a budget gets, or how clearly incompetant someone is. If I don’t spend much time discussing Hagin and Blanco, it’s in large part because I’m 100% sure they’ll bear tons of blame anyway, and probably deservedly. Heck, more tax-payer funded federal resources are currently being poured on to ensure that than are to find out what the feds did wrong. But the Bush administration itself? As long as fellow-travelers insulate it from the fallout of its own policy choices, it will never have any reason to apologize or do a single second of soul-searching.
Brit Hume was on yesterday trying to find a local Republican that would tell him what he wanted to hear: that the locals were all at fault. He kept giving them a not-so-subtle prompting to say so, to follow the recently diseminated script, and when they said that the federal government shares plenty of the blame as well, he looked surprised and startled and then moved on to someone else, all to no avail. Luckily, the Fox “news” format allows you to switch right over into Sean Hannity to give the “news” the desired context of right-thinking opinion.
Criticism of President Bush doesn’t have to stray way over into loony wacko conspiracy territory. It frequently does, though, and such loony wackos aren’t told by their fellow travelers to fuck off and let legitimate criticism continue.
Proof of that can be seen in the Cindy Sheehan episode of late. I can see how some might be quite willing to associate themselves with her antiwar activism, but her other political views (like, for instance, her support for radical lawyer and convicted terrorist supporter Lynne Stewart) were far outside of the political mainstream, and would turn lots of people in the middle off.
George Bush has made plenty of mistakes, and about the only thing that has saved him politically at times is the incompetence of his opponents.
Yes, but luckily as that’s an ad hominem logical fallacy, most people would recognize that individual claims should be evaluated on individual merits. Right?