I concur. I might have pissed on him if he was on fire before this, mind you, but at least now I’d feel less guilty about doing it. 
I gotta give him credit for knowing when his time in the spotlight was (finally) over, too.
Even a buffoon should be able to realize that people get killed in wars, so you need a damned good reason to start one, and you need to have a really good idea of what you’re getting into when you do.
Bush didn’t bother to learn the basics. Not to mention, it was public knowledge a month ahead of time that we had no plan for the postwar period*, which was really all that counted. (It wasn’t like there was any doubt as to which army was going to win, and which army was going to lose. What happened next was the whole ballgame.) He was not a decent human being. Fuck him with rusty farm implements.
*Our supine media has never apologized for going along for the ride either. Still pissed at them over that, and probably will ever trust them all that much.
Could not disagree more. He was a horrible man. Look at any of his speeches or press releases about the Iraq war, and you can see how carefully worded they are so that while they give anyone who isn’t a news junkie a 180-degrees-wrong impression, he can say that he technically wasn’t lying.
I remember one in particular. In 1992 or thereabouts, a representative of Saddam met with a representative of Bin Laden. It quickly became apparent that Bin Laden was of no use to Saddam, and so the meeting came to nothing. Bush reported this as follows: “We know that Saddam and Bin Laden have an association going back ten years.”
If that had been a one-off, it might be possible that a speechwriter had slipped it in. But that was the way Bush spoke almost every time. While he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, he can’t be so dumb that he didn’t know why his speeches were written that way.
And besides, we have eye-witness testimony that he told his aides to find a pretext for invading Iraq.
You know what, you’ve harshed my mellow, and now I’ve changed my mind again. I won’t piss on him if he’s on fire, and I hope he burns in hell.
Thanks for remembering this. There was a shitload of this sort of crap, and it was impossible to miss at the time if you were paying any attention at all, unless you were deliberately doing so. But I’d forgotten about this over the past decade.
Yeppers. Unless he decides to tell us, he will never know why Bush invaded Iraq, because the answer, my friend, is locked up in his head. But he was pushing for it from the get-go. I’ve sometimes wondered what excuse he would have tried if 9/11 hadn’t happened (which AFAIAC is his fault too), and whether people would have bought into it.
Yup. I think Bush went to war in Iraq because he genuinely believed that human rights and living conditions would improve for the Iraqi people, and Iraq would be a positive model for the rest of the middle east.
It didn’t work that way obviously, but I personally think that was his mentality.
He wasn’t a very good president but he wasn’t a sociopath like Trump.
The part that scares me is that in 12-16 years the GOP will pick a presidential candidate so incompetent, deranged, bigoted and criminal that we all look back and say ‘You know, Trump wasn’t that bad in retrospect’. They have no bottom.
That’s what I was thinking too. I can’t imagine how that could be possible…but then the GOP seems to be forever expanding the possibilities in that direction.
It used to be that some GOP Presidents were worse and some were better with no dramatic trend…but the last three have established a really scary trend-line.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with this, I have to say that it’s very important to see prominent conservatives speaking out against the Tea Party and it’s natural downstream event: the election of Trump.
The lack of a sane R party is what’s making the United States ungovernable at the moment. That’s becoming clearer as we realize that they’re unable to accomplish much even when they control all aspects of the federal government. If we’re to reestablish and effect two-party system where checks and balances still matter, some aspects of the R party need to begin making the effort to reclaim their party from their insurgents.
How much worse can it get? The antichrist, or something?
A lot of people were taken in by the the pro-war rhetoric.
A very large lot.
There were good folk with Soul and conscienceless asshole, idiots and geniuses alike.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that GWB could’ve been among that lot.
It’s sort of moot though.
I’d not begrudge GWB some of Tony Sinclair’s urine if GWB were on fire.
Well, Charles Manson is still alive…
Well, imagine someone with as authoritarian a mindset as Trump, but more competent at implementing his policies.
Cruz, Pence, a more electable version of Huckabee.
A neo nazi with swastika tattoos and fetal alcohol syndrome who promises to use the presidential pardon on anyone who murders a liberal in the streets and who openly talks about the need to eliminate elections since they empower leftists.
- I called it.
Rand Paul.
Quayle -> W Bush -> Palin -> Trump -> ?
The trendline is clear. The GOP are picking people more and more stupid, dishonest, authoritarian and unqualified. More and more sociopathic. I don’t think the trend will end with Trump and the party that has spent the last 30 years feeding propaganda to angry, scared white people in small towns will pick someone intelligent and qualified in the future.
Their base has gone insane, and they run the show now.
Insanity, hmmmm what a way to govern. We’re doomed!
As I’ve argued many times, I think we’re already there. The antichrist in scripture is just those who oppose Christ. And Trump’s philosophy is basically the opposite of that of Jesus and Christianity. And, as predicted, a lot of Christians supported him. (See comic.)
Now, there is the Beast who unites everyone in the world under him. And if you don’t think that was Rome, then there is someone else predicted who is worse: as evil as Trump, but actually able to trick the rest of the world.
As for Bush, yeah, he does strike me as a decent guy, and always did. I know he started wars that killed people. But I genuinely believe he did so for what he thought was a good cause. And Presidents do start wars. I don’t think that alone is enough to make him as horrible as you guys make him out to be.
Doesn’t mean he should have been president, or that he didn’t do a bad job. But I do delineate between that and actually being a bad person. It’s the distinction I made about Trump this entire time. It was why I was always quick to point out that I had never, ever treated a president as evil before now.
No, he was a shit. According to Tucker Carlson, hardly a raving liberal, Bush mocked a woman on death row pleading for clemency (over 150 people were executed in Texas while he was governor). And you should read “Shrub” by Molly Ivins to see what a shit he was in business. The reason he doesn’t have as bad a reputation as Trump for shady deals is not that he isn’t just as sleazy, but Bush is lazier than Trump, preferring to let other people make the deals and just cut him in on them.
To Bush’s credit, he never embraced Islamophobia to the extent that a lot of the rest of the party did. He was careful to declare in the early days after 9/11 that the US was not at war with Islam and al-Qaeda didn’t represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims.
Tru dat. In 2001, that was just basic decency and refusal to throw in with the worst of the demagogues and xenophobes on the right-wing fringe. But it was still a stand, so he deserves credit for this. Similarly he never demonized Latinos.
Can’t remember Shrub’s take on black people. Of course, his dad, the supposedly ‘good’ Bush, played the ‘Dems will sic all those scary black people on you’ card with the infamous Willie Horton ad and its followups, in order to get elected.
Ah, those days of innocence, when blacks were the only minority that Republicans tried to scare us white people with. :rolleyes: