And what makes you think that they do not deserve criticism also? However, AFAIK most of the information allowed to be seen by congress by the White House was tainted before hand by the efforts of Cheney & company.
Depends on how the Republicans are doing on other other issues.
-And it would have been a total disaster had Bush decided to withdraw from Iraq.
The Great Society did not work out as planned either-is that a disaster?
And are the Democrats (who opposed it) any better?
It will prevent the murder of fetuses-but if we get too into this it’ll end up being an abortion debate.
There are no Iranian troops stationed in Iraq nor can Iran gain too much influence as long as the US keeps a watchful eye.
Complete crisis of confidence-neo-isolationism may become dominant in foreign policy.
Sure, their sin was to attempt to engage in bipartisanship with a liar.
They gave Bush the benefit of the doubt, and he came up nine yards two feet and 11 inches short.
Those democrats should have shown better judgement, but they’re not the one’s who put Americans in harm’s way for bullshit. Bush did that. With 4376 Americans dead as a direct result of his folly, it’s hardly to Bush’s credit that he implemented some policy within that same folly that wasn’t an utter disaster.
To be a decent president, he’d have had to keep the nation’s collective dick out of the sausage grinder in the first place, not just teflon coat the tines.
As Spain and other nations demonstrated, Iraq was not supposed to be the target, Afghanistan was. Once again, it is really silly to congratulate the re-builder of a home (Half finished) if he was also the one that bombed that home under false pretenses.
I really doubt that. Women ARE half the population, you know.
Iraq IS a total disaster, and was doomed from the start. The moment we attacked, disaster was the only possibility.
No, because it left society far better off than before.
They have plenty of influence, and don’t need to have troops there.
Which would be better than the self immolating, mass murdering disaster of Iraq.
Aha, so now that is clear that you are referring to the democrats opposing those efforts, then one can say that you are really an ignorant, that was not the main reason for the collapse.
:dubious:
SO FUCKING WHAT?!!
He launched the surge? The generals told Rummy before the invasion that they needed more troops to be effective, and Rummy told them no. And Bush did? Diddly. Iraq was a disaster for 4 years, with even Republican columnists saying Rummy should be fired. And Bush did? Nothing. He only finally fired Rummy after the Dems took over Congress. Bush could have and should have done the surge years earlier, but he was captive to the Cheney/Rummy cabal. So, wrongo.
He was on the right side here, for sure. But he couldn’t even get enough of his own party to support him to get this true, even with Democratic support. Just shows he was incompetent.
Strengthened? Not clear yet. DHS is a gigantic bureaucracy - its long term effectiveness is far from clear.
Ha, ha, ha. Well, I suppose you haven’t had econ yet. The best I could say about him is that he shut up and let the people who knew what they were talking about handle things. Leadership? No way - remember how hard it was for the bailout to get through. Input? Nope. He did make one or two uninspiring speeches. Hell, the picture of Washington in the cabinet room probably had as much input as he did.
The Republicans had a majority. The Dems opposition was weak at best. No threats of filibusters or anything else. Bush used no political muscle to get this through. In any case, he could have leaned on Greenspan to regulate mortgages, which is the responsibility of the Fed. He didn’t. He was also for more home ownership, just like the Dems, which is not a sin.
So you agree he was a piece of scum. good.
-
The Surge Strategy, while a success in itself, would not have been necessary had the Iraq invasion been done properly - or better yet, not at all. If somebody runs you over, you don’t thank them for hitting your legs instead of vital organs.
-
Nobody gets credit for trying to do things, and the failed Bush immigration reforms were based on prior reforms enacted by Democrats anyway.
-
The Department of Homeland Security is simply a rebranding of existing bureaus within other departments. The DHS’ one “accomplishment” is the terrorism threat level system, which is about as meaningful in the grand scheme of government action as House Resolutions honoring deceased football players.
-
He took one action to minimize the recession: he bailed out the banks. I will give him all credit for this, since it was a necessary move to avoid complete financial meltdown. He took many that caused the recession, such as failing to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagal. The post-Enron reforms which helped minimize the fallout of the latest recession (Sarbanes-Oxley, for example) also had little or nothing to do with him.
-
See above.
-
Neither of Bush’s justices appear likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. John Roberts, for example, has indicated that he believes Roe is settled law.
W also passed a small stimulus. It was the early tax rebate thing, the one that was so small and insignificant that it’s easy to forget. And the provisions of Glass-Steagall that prohibited a bank holding company from owning different sorts of financial entities was repealed in 1999, under President Clinton. It passed the Senate 90-8.
I said this before in the thread, but it’s worth repeating: W is not directly responsible for the financial meltdown. He is only responsible to the extent that he did not call for stronger regulation of the shadow banking system, and this particular piece of blame can be apportioned to many, many other people, including the US Congress and, most notably, Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve. W’s responsibility is not the meltdown itself, but the deficits he built up that have hindered our ability to respond as actively to the meltdown as we should have. And frankly, that is more than enough blame. He was, quite possibly, the most fiscally irresponsible president of all time.
This was a recurring pattern for him. Though he possibly did not have any perfect 10 fuck-ups, he more consistently pegged 7s or 8s than anybody else, year after miserable year, thus putting him well in the running for the worst we’ve ever had.
You’re quite right. I was mistaken on the timeline on Glass-Steagal.
The original Bush stimulus doesn’t really count as anything, in my book. It was a thinly-disguised tax break for the top 90% of earners, which was fine with me, since I needed 300 bucks at the time, but seemed like a pointless gesture.
In any case, if I recall correctly it was just an advancement on the following year’s tax refund, so all it really did was cost the Treasury a lot of interest.
The last thing conservatives want is to have Roe v Wade overturned. Right now they’re in the perfect position - they can promise anything they want about abortions because they know their promises are meaningless. So they can tell the pro-life people what they want to hear without risking being held to it. Roe v Wade protects them from having to actually do anything.
But what if Roe v Wade were overturned and it was genuinely possible to prohibit abortions? The pro-life people would no longer settle for talk - they’d want results.
And what would happen if the conservatives tried to give them results? Here’s a hint - Nancy Reagan has said she’s pro-choice. So if the conservatives try to actually ban abortions they’ll lose every female voter to the left of Nancy Reagan. One election later and the Democrats hold a 300 seat majority in Congress.
If you don’t mind murderers and liars, then no, I suppose he wasn’t “that bad.” If, on the other hand, you do…
This may put things in perspective.
Ah, I phrase it quite tightly so that only those who were currently okay with repaying their mortgages were affected; if you were in arrears anyway, it wouldn’t have helped.
On what do you base that? What if we’d pulled out almost immediately? And would the disintegration of Iraq have been a bad thing? The north would have split off into an independent Kurdistan, for instance. Read up on your history of Iraq, and compare it with Yugoslavia.
Wait, what? Why would people who didn’t need help paying their mortgages need help paying their mortgages?
The point would be to help people who couldn’t pay their mortgages to avoid a rush of foreclosures and the resulting glut of homes - which depressed prices, forcing people to stay in homes they didn’t want and sharply cutting into local tax revenues.
How would an organization with perhaps 200 surviving members dominate half a country? They’re not the Illuminati.
Actually . . . Well . . . Erm . . . No. They’re not the Illuminati. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the Illuminati. That is all. You will now emerge from trance state.
Where was I? The Illuminati are the 200± wealthiest assholes on earth. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Apparently in Curtisland, Iraq is a rousing success. We put up concrete barriers ghettoizing Baghdad. The area is split up with no one knowing what kinds of ugly will follow. The sad fact is ,is that Iraq was no threat to the US. We attacked a country that did not attack us. That was a principle we always bragged about. Now Busk/Cheney come up with pre-emptive war. How much farther from longterm American values can you get? We spent incredible amounts of money destroying an acient and beautiful country that was not our enemy. We killed lots of Iraqi men women and children and thousands of Americans. We spent over a trillion dollars, none of it paid for. It is a big part of our deficit. Yet you find it a rousing success and a moral victory. Such a young kid to be so full of fear and hate.
Well Turkey, at least, would hate the idea of an independent Kurdistan.