The problem with this statement is it ascribes a very subjective slant to what on its surface appears to be a somewhat objective statement. You claim Bush’s denial of habeas to non-US citizens confined outside the borders of the United States is “sucking the life out of the Constitution” despite the fact that there is no Supreme Court authority to the contrary. In other words, you’re grafting your view of what you WANT the Constituion to mean onto the argument, and then proclaiming an analytical victory.
I don’t agree. If this discussion is to have any merit at all, surely there must be objective criteria in place – otherwise, why don’t we just move it to IMHO and be done with it?
OBJECTIVELY, neither the Constitution nor any Supreme Court decision forbids Bush’s action. OBJECTIVELY, the Supreme Court DID forbid Jackson’s acts.
So OBJECTIVELY, which acts are more fairly characterized as “sucking the life out of the Constitution?”
No…not me. I didn’t forsee the insurgency thing…and I’m willing to be that ‘quite a few people’ didn’t foresee it either. I know ‘Quite a few people’ thought it was a BAD IDEA…and they were certainly right. But predict how it would pan out before the fact? I’d need to see some mass evidence of this prescience from ‘Quite a few people’ (which I take to mean more than a handful) in order to believe that.
Same with Vietnam. I freely conceed that in 1964 there were people who thought our involvement in Vietnam was a BAD IDEA…but that there were loads of folks moping around who knew how things would turn out? Color me skeptical.
Would you like to quote me where I’m saying something in this thread to warrent this? ‘Sumatter? I’m not toeing the "I hate Bush’ party line strong enough or something? I haven’t said any good has or will come out of this war here (though I haven’t said otherwise either in this thread), and it wasn’t the point I was making…what I was saying is that we don’t know that the conflict will be A) always and forever associated with GW Bush and B) that the next administration will somehow magically fix things to ensure that happy event (i.e. that Bush will be sole owner).
Read back over what I’ve written in this thread…quote me where I’m saying the war was a good thing, or where I was defensive about my previous stance (at the beginning of the war, oh, 3 years ago say), or whatever else you THINK I said. I think you’ll find that I didn’t say what you thought I said…or that you made the whole thing up.
The whole purpose of taking people to Guantanamo Bay was to remove them from US legal restraints on the government’s power. The claim is that Guantanamo Bay isn’t US territory so US protections for the accused don’t apply. If it isn’t US territory and is on the island of Cuba it must be Cuban teritory. In that case the US is holding prisoners in a US prison on Cuban territory.
You’re too restrictive. “Plenty of People” includes his father, who didn’t remove Saddam from office at the end of Gulf War I. The official reason given was that it wasn’t part of the approved actions, but plenty of people at the time opined that it was because he didn’t want to get sucked into trying to put together and maintain a new government in such a sea of conflicting groups. I certainly thought that was his reason at the time. That didn’t take an awful lot of prescience.
I don’t have a cite, but I thought Bush Sr.'s major reason was that an attack on Baghdad would have lost the Arab contingent of the coalition.
I thought then that such an attack was a good idea, even so. Of course, I would have liked Bush Sr. to use his political capital to force thru a balanced budget and do a lot more stuff as well, and he didn’t do that either.
His father didn’t follow thru, and he should have. His son did, and shouldn’t have.
The story of American diplomacy post World War Two is a the constant fight between the school of thought that American diplomatic activity should be about strengthening the American economy and position (“realpolitik” or “Dollar Diplomacy”) and the school of thought that American diplomatic activity should be about providing a moral force for good to help uplift the world (Wilsonian idealism).
But even the former school, the much more hard-nosed, “realistic” school has recognized that the American public wants to believe that all actions taken by the United States were done out of a noble idealism. While the real motives of the government in taking any of the actions listed above might have been more about trying to establish markets or support flagging allies, they were portrayed by the government as being part of the ultimate nobility of American ideals, saving the world from Communism or Fascism or leading to Lasting Peace or what have you. All of which directly traces back to Wilson.
?
Oh, absolutely something he did wrong. I hate consumer protections. And kittens.
How many citations would you consider quite a few? Not all of them predicted every little detail. None of them seemed to predict we’d rape little girls and kill them and their family, for instance, but many people knew that we’d not be welcomed with open arms, that shitloads of people would die, and that we’d be there for a long time to come. Hell, even Reeder nailed that one. Anyway, give me the criteria and numbers that will satisfy you, and I’ll back it up.
Not that knew exactly how it would turn out, but knew that it wouldn’t turn out anywhere nearly as rosy as painted, or that knew it would be a clusterfuck.
Bush will always be the owner of this war. I can’t imagine any other president who would have engaged in a unilateral pre-emptive strike on Iraq. If a future president from either party does something in regards to Iraq that turns out to have been boneheaded, it will still be Bush’s war. I don’t care if the damned thing goes on for 100 years of civil war with millions dead, it will still be his war.
I think you are attempting to give Bush an out by playing the “We don’t know how it will turn out” card. We do know how it will turn out, ugly. We just don’t know how ugly, and it’s his (and his supporter’s) fault.
As per usual, your memory fails you – or rather, it plays partisan tricks with your own self. For the reason Bush père didn’t go into Baghdad are clearly estated in his own memoirs, “A World Transformed.” Quoted from said autobiography:
– my bolding/underlining.
1-I see nothing there about “losing the Arab coalition.”
2-What I do see is almost prophetical compared to the current situation in Iraq.
3-Would that the son had a fourth of the intelligence and savvy of the father.
So you think that the USA would be better served by stating frankly “we are intervening in situation X because it will be in our financial interest?” While being honest is commendable, I’m not sure that it would best serve the USA’s image in the world.
Sorry, my misunderstanding, I was thinking that maybe you believed that Wilson went overboard in that respect.
From what you’ve said in this thread, Wilson did some Very Bad things but also a few Good things (e.g. conducting a major conflict successfully), and he was effective in accomplishing the Good things. I could see how you can argue that he is too highly rated, but as far as being the worst president, I think it’s a stretch to rank him that low.
At least you’ve inspired me to read more about his presidency.
You’ve been asked before, but have never directly answered. Do you, in fact, think there is such a concept as the *spirit * of the law, and that it is not necessarily congruent with the *letter * of the law?
Really? Because we’ve been masquerading our intentions for the last eighty years, hiding our real financial interests behind stories of benevolence, we’re now at a point where the world assumes that whatever we do has some financial interest behind it regardless of what we say - witness the public outcry that the invasion of Iraq was just an imperialist landgrab, or hell, the much smaller but notable outcry that our invasion of Afghanistan was solely out of economic interests.
My apologies - it’s hard sometimes for me to talk about American history with someone who isn’t American, simply because I make assumptions about frames of reference that make sense when talking to someone who had a high school class in American history.
The problem is that it’s impossible to find a president who did no good things whatsoever. Even Grant and Harding had successes in foreign policy or civil rights. Arguing about “worst president ever” is entirely about whether a President’s failures outweigh their successes, and by how much. Sure, Wilson did good things. Bush 43 has done good things as well. The question is, did Wilson’s horrible things outweigh Bush’s horrible things? And given how many people in this thread are shrilly screaming or whining about “OMG Bush is teh worst EVARRRR!!!”, I thought it should be pointed out that everything people hate about Bush was done worse by Wilson.
Really, it’s a moot point in my opinion - Ulysess S. Grant outdoes them both in terms of accomplishing little good and screwing up massively. But Wilson made an easier person to compare, note for note, what people are saying about Bush.
Well, inspiring reading is always good. I can’t recommend any specific books on his presidency; most of what I know of him is based on other books dealing with the general period.
Fair enough. You got your “Arab Coalition” excuse. But I’ll make two further points once more:
1-What Arab Coalition does Jr. have now? The US is hated more worldwide than at any other time in its history – never mind the MENA region. For that matter, without forgetting Poland, you are basically on your own as even Blair has had to succumb to the inevitable and set a time-table for British troops withdrawal. And Basra remains a mess.
2-I believe the points made by his father in the the original quote I posted remain the most pertinent to this day
A-Lack of an exit strategy.
B-Getting stuck in a bloody quagmire in the midst of of an overwhelmingly anti-American population.
Pragmatic and prescient, or simply a much better informed CIC? Bit of both actually. Two qualities sorely lacking in the current Administration.
Lastly, from your first cite, I found it interesting that Time felt the need to scrap the article from their files. Must be part of that vast liberal media conspiracy that is always looking out for Shrub.
But remember it was Bush, nobody else, who put us in a situation where what you’re describing is actually a best-case scenario. As in, no better outcome can reasonably be hoped for.
Then I guess we are back to you don’t understand what I’m writing…or are making stuff up. I’m not giving Bush an out…I’m saying that we don’t know what future administrations will do. Let me give an example since its obvious you aren’t following me here (or you are fixated that I’m a closed Bush supporter or something):
Lets say that the next administration doesn’t leave Iraq but actually increases our presence there by doubling the number of troops. Lets say further say that Iraq blows up into a full scale civil war, with large militia formations in the field, with cities being directly attacked and the number of civilian Iraqi deaths going up even more than what we have now. This of course would still splash on Bush…but it would splash on the next administration even more, bringing them more fully into the ugly-ness. Its only going to go so far saying ‘Bush got us into all this’ if future administrations continue to have us in Iraq and things continue to go tits up.
At any rate, I’m done attempting to get my point through to you…you either understand it or you don’t by now. And we are straying afield of the original question anyway. I don’t think that, even if Bush is forever the sole owner of the Iraq war, it puts him in the same league as some of our past presidents for the top spot in ‘worst president ever’. YMMV, but I think history will show Bush a piker…merely in the top 10 of the ‘worst of’. I might even go so far as to put him in the top 5…but THE worst? I’m not buying that myself. YMMV.
An Iranian invasion is a best-case scenario? Or do you just mean that any scenario short of nuclear war that includes a Bush impeachment is a best-case scenario?
An Iranian invasion is best-case scenario; at least it will end with somebody in control of the country. Next-best is a raging civil war with nobody emerging a clear winner until Iraq is broken into three smaller states. As for Iraq’s freely elected nongovernment actually gaining control of the country . . . that is not a realistic possibility.
The more I think about the OP the more I begin to think I don’t really care if Bush is the worst president ever. That’s an arbitrary, historical judgement. What Woodrow Wilson, or Andrew Jackson, or US Grant, or Warren G. Harding did or didn’t do is over and done with. What George W. Bush is doing is going on right now and is affecting me, my family and many others right now. What Bush is doing is bad in my opinion, and that’s what counts.