The news is reporting that someone wants to thank Bush because he ‘stuck to his guns’. I think they’re referring the military at the inauguration tonight, and Bush not being there to hear this “compliment”.
Sticking to your guns, IMHO, is bad policy. The statement to me means you’re doing something not for any peticular reason, but just to do it because you want to follow through.
Sometimes I get that. Like exercising, stick to your guns and finish the race no matter what.
But in regards to the last 8 years, It’s like me putting 5 lug nuts back on a wheel, stripping the first one, the second, the third and so on, but at least I stuck to my guns! Yeah, I fucked up the job, but at least I stuck to my guns! Praise me for sticking to my guns!
Maybe the person liked Bush’s policies and admires Bush for not changing them no matter how much it hurt all the people who didn’t like the policies. About a quarter of the population still loves Bush, and they love everything he did and the way he did it. No compromising like Reagan did, Bush was a pure conservative from start to end with no wavering.
That’s the meaning I take out of it. And I didn’t like Bush’s presidency. And I love referring to Bush’s reign of error in the past tense.
He may have stuck to his guns, but he hardly held his aim.
In 2000 he was criticising Gore for the Democratic policy of nation-building. In 2003, he was nation-building. In 2004 he was going to appoint SCOTUS Justices who’d overturn Roe v. Wade. In 2006, he appointed moderates.
I saw that on Fox. Megyn Kelly was at some military ball (I think it was called the Commander In Chief’s Ball or something), and she said some mouthbreather had come up to her and said he wished Bush was there so he could “thank him for sticking to his guns.” It was nobody of any account. Just some unnamed moron in a uniform.
Saying as a compliment merely that someone has stuck to their guns is in my experience what people say when they can’t (or can’t openly) say they like what someone was doing, but are searching for something (anything) positive that they can say.
If Alito and Roberts are moderates, then who are the conservatives? I remember that back when Bush was running in 2000 one of the issues raised was how he would appoint extremely conservative justices to the bench if he won and Samuel Alito was one of the two examples mentioned by name (the other was Michael Luttig). Roberts could have conceivably been mentioned with those two if anyone had been thinking of him in 2000. But at the time he was a lawyer in private practice with no judicial experience. He was first appointed as a judge in 2003; two years later, Bush named him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Moderates might not be wholly accurate, but both essentially indicated that they believed Roe was good law during their confirmation hearings and both indicated that they would not overturn it.
Remember how much was made of Kerry’s flip-flopping during the 2004 campaign. Once a decision is made, it must (must, must, must) be adhered to.
I heard a quote attributed to Lincoln, but I can’t find a cite to back it up. Someone asked him if changing his mind on policies and decisions would be a problem, and he said something to the effect of “I hope I’ll be smarter tomorrow than I am today.” I like that.
There’s also “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let’s see, who else in history has stuck to their guns? Truman. Churchill. Teddy Roosevelt. I could go on. I don’t understand why there’s so much aversion to the phrase.
Sticking to one’s guns under intense pressure is an admirable quality, if one is correct. One might wish to point out that Emerson criticized foolish consistency, not any consistency. Emerson was consistent on many principles throughout his life, and I daresay he was not calling himself a “little mind.”
But as far as Bush sticking to his guns, I fully concur that they were aimed in the wrong direction.
For the reason that has been explained ad nauseum in this thread. You are right that there is nothing wrong with it and it can be a virtue. It’s just that it is so often used as a euphemism for stubborn and wrong headed. Phrases can get a negative connotation as a consequence of such things.
While I don’t believe that sticking to one’s guns is necessarily a good thing, let’s be reasonable; who, on discovering that he had made a major error that cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives, would own up to it? Probably not me, and probably not most of you.