Who deserves/deserved more hatred: Bush or Obama?

[Smapti]

@Der_Trihs

In other words, you’d turn Anne Frank in to the Nazis to be exterminated, as long as they did the paperwork to make their genocide legal.

If it were me? Yes, I would, because I’d rather be alive and have that on my conscience than die in a prison camp myself for harboring enemies of the state. Having the moral high ground is small consolation to the dead.

A totally morally bankrupt position. And you’ve just justified vigilantism, assassination and terrorism/guerrilla war. If there is no real law but power, if the only rule is “we can get away with it” then it’s unrealistic to expect your victims to just sit there and take it; nor can you realistically claim that people have any moral obligation to obey the law.

I don’t believe in objective right or wrong, so statements like “morally bankrupt” mean nothing to me. And yes, you can justify vigilantism, assassination, and terrorism/guerilla war. You can justify anything, because there’s no such thing as objective right or wrong. All the people who commit those acts have surely found a way to justify them to themselves. That doesn’t mean I’m obligated to accept their justification.

Do I have a moral obligation to obey the law? No. Is it in my best interest to do so? Yes. That’s what it comes down to - self-interest. It is in my self-interest that people who want to kill Americans are prohibited from succeeding, because I’m an American and I don’t wish to be killed. The fact that an IM conversation I had in 2003 might be archived in some government database somewhere is an acceptable price to help prevent the irrevocable and permanent cessation of my existence.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Clothahump

But all I can say is that the numbers don’t lie, and since Obama took office, our debt has increased astronomically and we went bankrupt for all practical purposes in 2012, when the debt exceeded the GDP.

The numbers don’t lie, but people do. In 2012 US net public debt was 72.5% of GDP. I’m going to assume that you aren’t lying. Maybe you’re bad at mathematics, or maybe you believe everything Rush Limbaugh tells you. You may also be confused by the gross debt figures, which include intragovernmental holdings even though they are offset by exactly the same amount by other funds.

I assume you were either not alive nor old enough to complain in 1945, when the same thing happened, or in any of the four succeeding years. I also assume you simply don’t know what the word bankrupt means (hint: it has nothing to do with your liabilities exceeding your assets; if you own a home and have ever been upside down on your mortgage, you would almost certainly have been bankrupt under the definition you appear to be using). Either way, I await your apology.

[GargoyleWB]

@Evil_Captor

As a progressive it’s a tough call. I feel betrayed by Obama, I never felt betrayed by Bush, I knew he was a stupid bastard full of hateful ideology the day he walked into office. …

I’m dissatisfied with Obama’s presidency, but I don’t feel any sense of betrayal. The Bush/Obama differences are, to me, the two extremes that can be attained with a blindly complicit congress vs a blindly intransigent congress. In Bush’s case you get extreme dysfunction caused by the removal of any check and balance on the executive branch. In Obama’s case you get dysfunction caused by a legislative branch whose mandate is to roadblock without accountability.

[RickJay]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Th(hint: it has nothing to do with your liabilities exceeding your assets; if you own a home and have ever been upside down on your mortgage, you would almost certainly have been bankrupt under the definition you appear to be using).

It has nothing to do with being upside down on your mortgage. Virtually everyone who has EVER bought a home that wasn’t towed into place on wheels instantly has debt in excess of their personal “GDP.” If I make $100,000 a year and buy a $300,000 home that is hardly extravagant, but my debt’s three times by “GDP,” even if my home’s worth is theoretically appreciating.

I’ve never heard anyone use “Bankrupt” to mean “debt exceeeding income.” That is a stupid definition; it makes no sense at all.

[Blaster_Master]

Personally, I’m not a fan of either man as president, I think both are mediocre at best. If I had to pick one who is more deserved more antipathy, I’d pick Bush, but really only by an accident of history.

Looking back at Bush’s presidency, it was overwhelmed by 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under his administration he started a bunch of policies that I think have harmed us in the name of fighting terrorism. If Obama had reversed a decent number of these policies, it would be a huge point in his favor in my mind, but many of them have been continued or, in some cases, expanded. In my mind, that’s mostly a wash, starting them is worse than continuing them, but expanding wipes out whatever small difference is there.

Despite all of this, I don’t view either man as evil, and thus not worth of hatred. Bush is naive and has a too-simplistic view of the world. I absolutely believe he honestly thought he was doing the right thing and, to a debatable extent, was manipulated by some of the people around him. His greatest flaw was that his naivete led to him delegating to people who were ultimately very effective, but with ulterior motives.

Obama, on the other hand, seems a little too detached, almost having the polar opposite problems as Bush, he’s over-intellectualized in some ways where Bush over-relied on his intuition. And, also interestingly, he seems to have done a poor job of delegating, but at least they don’t seem to have ulterior motives.

So I’m left being interested in how each would have performed given the other’s circumstances. If Obama had been president when Bush was, I don’t know that his response to 9/11 would have been quite as effective in the short term, and I think he still would have authorized the war in Afghanistan. I don’t think he’d have gotten involved in Iraq, which was easily the single biggest blunder of Bush’s presidency. I imagine the war would have gone better, without our attention divided, but I don’t see him preventing the crash in 2008. So, over all, I think he’d have done a little better, but only because of that one decision.

If Bush were in Obama’s position, it’s a lot more difficult to say. Obama entered office with a ton of political capital and spent a whole lot of it on the ACA, even with a favorable congress. Now, it’s extremely unlikely that Bush would have pursued that specifically, but for all his faults, he did manage to get things done, even if they were not what we should do, so I imagine he would have been able to do a bit more with his political capital in furthering the causes he favored. But assuming he then ended up with a hostile congress, he’d probably have been about as effective as he was in his last two years, which seems to me to be only a hair moreso than Obama is now with one. So, whether or not he would have been better would have depended entirely on whether or not you agree with his politics or Obama’s more, but without judging all of that, it seems mostly a wash between the two of them to me.

So, really, that’s why I’d say Bush deserves it more, because regardless of who was president when, the only really big difference is Bush invaded Iraq, and it’s unlikely Obama would have. In fact, that’s probably one of the major reasons Obama was elected rather than a more mainstream candidate like Hillary or McCain. Still, even if that decision was disastrous, I don’t think he was evil for making it.

[The_Second_Stone]

Obama hasn’t started anything stupid and ruinous, but merely continued those policies. (Unless you count Obamacare as worse than Iraq, the tax cuts and the depression combined.) Bush wins in a walkaway.