I had a thread like this that was active from July 2004 to April 2005. I think it’s time to start another.
As I said in the OP there:
I think that’s still the case. There’s a place for something in between starting a thread over the latest Administration insanity, and letting it go unremarked. This is that place.
I’ll lead off with my next post here.
From the Iraq, Better or Worse GD thread, which I didn’t want to hijack:
The Bush Administration in a nutshell. Started off not knowing shit, didn’t do their homework, went ahead and did what they wanted to do anyway, screwed things up, tried to fix things on the fly and put a good face on it, and ultimately didn’t work out particularly well.
The point isn’t just ‘Bush=Bad’; by now, that’s an elementary identity. The point is that there are particular recurring patterns to a lot of the badness that we should be wise to by now. This is one of the most frequent ones.
I know that you miss reeder, but is it really necessary for you to take up the slack so ably? You need to widen your interests, man. It’s getting warm out now, they say tennis is good exercise. Walking is a good stress reliever as well.
If Bush would just get an ear tuck, I wouldn’t have to look at all those exaggerated Dumbo political cartoon caricatures.
He could justify it as lowering his mile times (there has to be a certain amount of wind resistance there).
You’re right - we libruls should shut up about Bush already. It’s all been said. It’s not like he actually makes a difference or anything, he’s only the President of the United States.
I’ll make a deal: if he stops doing anything new and outrageous, I won’t post about him doing so. How’s that sound?
Dammit, Arty,quit dragging AD, USAF into these threads! There the poor lad is, frolicking and larking about, and you have to haul him into a Bush bashing thread! The poor dear!
Back to matter at hand. Current fave rave? Standing firm against human-animal hybridization research. Now there’s an issue with legs! Two, four, six maybe more!
(Did somebody leave a copy of The X-Men lying around the Oval Orifice?)
It’s not a question of “it’s all been said”. The man regularly does things and says things that are worthy of scorn, and as such should be called on it. But this thread… dude, it speaks of an obsession with the man.
What do you do when you get up in the morning? Do you say to yourself “Hmmm… I wonder what stupid thing Bush did today that I can call him out on”, and then when you don’t find something you start this?
You’re cracking up, man. Yesterday it was the name thing, which while it was a legitimate beef it spilled over into another thread because you just had to try to get the last word in after the original thread was closed. People have been banned for that. Now you’re obsessing over Bush. People have been banned for that, too.
Get a grip. Is a lame-duck President with no clout or credibility worth getting worked up about? Are we going to document every time he sneezes without covering his mouth as further evidence that he’s evil? Get a grip, man.
I’ve said my peace. I just don’t want to see you self-destruct like so many others have over the same nonsense.
Another recurring theme is “We Didn’t Know…!!”
[ul]
[li] “We didn’t know anyone would fly planes into the towers!”[/li][li]** “We didn’t know Saddam didn’t have WMD’s!”**[/li][li] “We didn’t know the Now Orleans levees could overflow!”[/li][/ul]
It is getting tiresome to hear this excuse again and again, yet they seem to like it so well, I expect we haven’t heard the last of it. Any bets on what they don’t know next?
I just enjoy torturing him. 
The weird thing is, I thought I was doing him a favor. I find it to be pretty easy to ignore one thread once it’s been around awhile, and that’s the idea. There won’t be a new thread title on the Pit’s front page for each new subject that appears in this thread, so there won’t be anything visible for any of our more conservative posters to get riled up about, unless they check in here periodically.
Which they’re welcome to do, of course, but the point is that if they don’t want to see it, they’ll know which thread not to open.
So you can point to the Bush administration official who signed off on this concept, right? Otherwise it could very well be the engineers of the company which did the planning and contracting who’re responsible. There might be no one in the Bush administration who knew how the engineers were planning on fueling the power plants.
C’mon RT. You aren’t really that stupid and that reflexively partisan, are you? This would be like blaming Bush and his cronies for flaws in the database schema used by the census bureau. You guys got Bush watchdogs sitting over your DBA’s approving architecture?
If the US gov’t paid to build/upgrade the plants (with my taxes), then the US gov’t is responsible for them being built with the wrong technology. Or do we just write huge checks to companies and say “knock yourselves out”?
These would be the engineers of the companies for which the Administration or its agents chose to bypass the normal bidding process for awarding contracts, right?
Ah, the buck stops somewhere else argument. Don’t you see within your own apologism the ironic defense of “maybe nobody in the Bush administration knew how they were planning on fueling the power plants?” Your argument is essentially ‘Maybe they were too incompetent/uninformed/disconnected to catch the problem, but we can’t know for sure who made the decision?’ Sheesh. If there is always a nasty smell around one particular co-worker, eventually you have to stop shrugging your shoulders and wondering who farted.
This reminds me a little bit about David Brooks on NPR this afternoon. He wants to blame Rumsfeld for the failure of the War in Iraq for his failure to recognize that we weren’t fighting against the Republican Guard but against insurgents. He gives Bush a pass for not firing him because “he was probably in the room” at the time the decisions were made, and he is a loyal guy. Brooks goes on to suggest that things are turning the corner in Iraq. In summary, he laments the lack of accountability in Washington.
After formulating an almost patented apology for Bush, he wonders where the accountability is.
Actually, what I most angry at Bush for is worth its own thread, but I have neither time nor energy for it.
It’s Bush and science–the political appointments and the rejection of any scientist (so it seems) that does not agree with his “culture of life”. This is scarey–science cannot be treated as an avenue for religious zealotry or political grandstanding.
I am not saying that scientists cannot have politcal views, but as scientists, they are to support quantifiable and reproducable data.
It’s the bad science that Bush supports and touts that scares me most.
See the article on this in the recent New Yorker. It is downright scary.
Uncle Beer, the article I linked to in the other thread says that we spent a third of a billion buck on generators that are useless there. So, who got fired? Which contractor paid the price for screwing up?
Even David Brooks now admits Rummy screwed the pooch in planning the invasion, and in not changing direction when it was clear that we didn’t have enough troops. He’s still doing a heck of a job, right?
Personal responsibility works for everyone but his buddies.
just how many fucking corners does that place have?
I’ll give you the “no credibility” part.
But “no clout”? Are you smoking crack? This guy’s administration still calls the shots with regard to US foreign policy, and has a pretty tame, Republican-dominated Congress signing off on just about every act of domestic tyranny as well.
And, despite your use of the term “lame duck,” his adinistration will continue to be in charge of these things for the better part of the next three years. If anything, the fact that he can’t be re-elected makes him even more troublesome, because he doesn’t have to think about the electoral consequences of his actions.
We Didn’t Know the Sunnis and Shiites would start killing each other while the Kurds declared their independence! Who could possibly have predicted that?!?!
-Joe
We are, of course, on about our fourth trip around the perimeter.