Obama "facts" circulating via e-mail

I received the following e-mail more than once and I was hoping some of you would be interested in debating/de-bunking some of the so-called facts it contains.

Who’s the Idiot??

If George W. Bush had doubled the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in just one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had criticized a state law that he admitted he never even read, would you think that he is just an ignorant hot head?

If George W. Bush joined the country of Mexico and sued a state in the United States to force that state to continue to allow illegal immigration, would you question his patriotism and wonder who’s side he was on?

If George W. Bush had put 87,000 workers out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling on companies that have one of the best safety records of any industry because one company had an accident, would you have agreed?

If George W. Bush had used a forged document as the basis of the moratorium that would render 87,000 American workers unemployed, would you support him?

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a TelePrompTer installed  to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes? 

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If George W Bush had made a joke at the expense of the ‘Special Olympics’, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of ‘inexpensive’ and ‘incorrectly formatted’ DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches,would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent “Austrian language,” would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States, would you have said that he is clueless.

If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, egotistical jerk.

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word “advice” would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoes as proof of what a dunce he is?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite? 

If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush had created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

  So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? 

Can’t think of anything?
Don’t worry.
He’s done all this in 15 months –
so you’ll have two years and nine months
to come up with an answer.

Every statement in this email is factual and directly attributable to Barrack Hussein Obama. Every bumble is a matter of record and completely verifiable.

LET’S SEE HOW MANY OF YOU FORWARD THIS…

I know this is not the kind of reply you’re looking for, but the sneaky thing about this list is that it doesn’t contain any actual facts. It’s just a collection of questions about hypothetical and counterfactual past situations, implicating but not entailing any facts about the current president. So before you waste your breath/finger movements on any "Obama didn’t do that!"s, keep in mind that a technically correct response would be “Never said he did!”

Fantome, can you really not see how this kind of stuff is only compelling to GOP partisans? Is this actually an e-mail you’d send to someone to persuade them?

Near the end of the email it’s stated about Obama “He’s done all this in 15 months.” The people forwarding this know that every statement starting with “If George W. Bush had” is a claim that Obama did what follows.

No, I wouldn’t send it to anyone, but I would forward back intelligent responses from my fellow Dopers and I know some of the people I know that received this may be swayed by them and some of my friends that are Obama supporters would like to know the real facts.

This did not happen.

The iPod had pictures and video from the Queen’s visit to Virginia, not Obama’s speeches.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/9355453/Barack_Obamas_gift_for_the_Queen_an_iPod_your_Majesty/

The debt went from like $13 trillion to $14 trillion, hardly doubled.

So, he couldn’t just e-mail the pictures? Has to squandor tax payer money on an I-pod? To pay off Steve Jobs, that Muslim computer guy? Connect the dot, people!

First, the email was taken from The American [del]Stinker[/del] Thinker:

At first glance this looks like a collection of half truths and misleading points. I will check the one closest to me:

Big whopper here, the point remains that Arizona is trying to override the federal government on how to deal with illegals, considering that the Republicans in Arizona are planning to do (The just elected -palling with neo nazis- leader of the legislature is on record that they are planning to bring to a vote proposals like removing the 14th amendment for anyone that is born in the US from illegal parents, so much for all that said that laws like SB 1070 were not the beginning of a slippery slope) suing the state to prevent items from SB 1070 from becoming law, is the least the federal government can do to reign over states that are considering passing truly unconstitutional legislation.

This is fun, we can knock off 3 right away…

Since President George was hardly the first president to use a Teleprompter (image of President Lyndon Johnson, I think the blue thing by the camera is the teleprompter), nobody really cares about that - of course, George could make verbal gaffs with or without Teleprompter help…

Sure I’d approve, but what if he had held hands with the Saudi King instead?

According to wiki, President George W. Bush indeed had 32 Czars, and I really don’t remember much sqawking about it during his administration - this may be an old list, as wiki has Obama at 39 now.

Heck, Bush even kissed the Saudi King.

These kinds of things are only useful if you accept/reject the spin of one side as gospel. On the SDMB, this kind of thing is rejected out of hand as deceptive and dishonest. Unless it about Bush, which is, of course, quite different.

Regards,
Shodan

I thought this was Great Debates, not Do Anything To Get In A Partisan Dig.

Now that we have your obligatory kick at hypothetical liberals in, do you have anything substantive to say?

This list overall relies on insinuations, exaggerations, and distortions to make a point. The things that I think Bush is rightly criticized for are literally matters of life and death: starting an unjust war, for example. To the extent that Obama has continued some of these policies, I think he deserves criticism as well.

But shit like iPodgate degrade our politics whether they’re about a Republican or a Democrat.

If Barack Hussein Obama had invaded a country based on bad intelligence and cost 5,000 American lives in the process, would you support the war and label it part of the President’s “Freedom Agenda?”

I’d like to know what this is about. If he’s referring to the Midwest floods of 2008, those happened under Bush’s watch and only killed about a dozen people. If he’s referring to the Arkansas or Tennessee floods this year those only killed about 20 and 31 people respectively (and aren’t even really in the Midwest).
Katrina on the other hand killed close to 1,500 in the New Orleans area alone. And other than the disasters I’ve mentioned above I can’t think of any other major floods that have happened in the U.S. the past few years, and certainly not anything comparable in scope to what Katrina did.

Since we’re in Great Debates-Cite?

Exactly. What is the point of refuting loaded questions like these?

The whole thing reads like “Has Obama stopped beating his wife yet?”.

If George W. Bush had fathered two children with a black woman…?

I loved the oil moratorium. The wells were evidently not inspected. They should have stopped the well drilling until inspection was done. That does not mean they all sit. Once one is inspected and found to be safe, it could continue. That means as they are determined to be safe, one after another they go back to work.