Who has been worst - Bush or Obama?

[jayjay]

Ugh. Ross Douche-hat.

[EndlessEntropy]

@Onomatopoeia

I agree with all of this. I think Obama will go down in history with a grade of ‘fair’. He wasn’t near the top, nor the bottom. However, I must say that any comparison between Obama and Bush is ridiculous. Obama was stymied at almost every turn, but you can, I suppose, blame him for being ineffective and inexplicably naive, especially as relates to Republicans. Seemingly everyone in the world except Obama knew the Republicans would never work with him. I believe he would have been more successful with his agenda had he realized this from the beginning and not wasted so much time trying to appease a group that had it out for him since day one.

Bush, on the other hand, (and let’s be honest here, handled by Cheney and his cadre of neocons) can be argued to have committed war crimes, as well as allowing financial machinations, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, that precipitated the financial crisis.

did obama actually believe he could work with the republicans though? did he ever say that early on?

[EndlessEntropy]

Sorry, I cant edt the post anymore but i forgot this

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102502408.html “elections have consequences” “i won”

[jayjay]

Glasse-Steagal was repealed on Clinton’s watch, I believe. Triangulation, and all that. And one of the major reasons that lefty-liberals tend to distrust Hillary’s commitment to the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.

[Evil_Captor]

@EndlessEntropy

Sorry, I cant edt the post anymore but i forgot this

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102502408.html “elections have consequences” “i won”

What a stupid opinion piece. At its base is the assumption that Republicans were/are willing to compromise with Obama, if only he weren’t such a hardass. That was never the case. But you keep on drinking that koolaid if it makes you feel better.

[buddy431]

I don’t blame Bush for the economic meltdown, and I don’t particularly credit Obama for the recovery. Economic busts and recoveries happen, and while this one was worse than many, it did not profoundly alter our society.

Where Bush loses big time is the foreign policy department.

[Onomatopoeia]

@EndlessEntropy

did obama actually believe he could work with the republicans though? did he ever say that early on?

That is an unequivocal yes. He said many times that he was willing to work with Republicans, he just never had the opportunity. And no, working with the Republicans is not a euphemism for give them everything they want and get nothing in return, although that was pretty much Obama in a nutshell during his first term.

[S_for_Savvy]

Considering that we have had presidents who perpetuate the same oligarchy for decades now, this question begs- when will we get a president outside the current monarchy? Obama may have a different name, but his puppet masters remain the same. The last president to attempt to make any real difference was Kennedy and even he had many flaws.

The Bush dynasty and the Clintons and many others are all in bed together and again, answer the same masters. It won’t change. The system is so rigged beyond comprehension now that I am not even sure that we could elect a president with conviction like a Kennedy again if we tried.

I look at Bush Jr. and I look at Obama and see almost the same person on a different day, doing a mix of similarly horrendous things to our human rights, let alone American rights and most certainly our sovereign rights. Soon some trumped up crisis will enslave us to yet another tap dancing idiot doing the bidding of NWO politics at large. shrugs

[adaher]

I don’t really get the Kennedy worship. I get the part about him being a very good President, he was in many ways, but I don’t really see that he tried to bring change or anything. He was far more pro-business than FDR and wasn’t really interested in reforming anything so much as continuing the progress made by FDR. He saw the Eisenhower years as years of “doing nothing”, which was pretty immature of him actually, because FDR had done so much that the government needed time to consolidate and Ike did that very well. You just can’t keep piling on new responsibilities on the government before the old ones are assimilated.

[Imasquare]

@F.U.Shakespeare

One of my pet peeves is how fluid the definition of “conservative” is, in tandem with the certainty that some people declare things to be “tru(ly) conservative”. Some of this is to be expected, since the definition can mean different, conflicting things when applied to economic, social and foreign affairs issues. But that can’t explain all of the ambiguity.

For some, the word “conservative” seems to just mean, “what I believe is right”. E.g., when Bush ran for president, he opposed steel tariffs. In 2002, he placed a tariff on imported steel. He lifted the tariff around two years later. This wasn’t just a flip-flop, it was a flip-flop-flip. But I had conservative friends who never criticized any of these positions, always finding some definition of conservatism that the new position agreed with. (E.g., opposing tariffs = free trade = conservative; supporting tariffs = helping the domestic steel industry = “America First!” = conservative). And this was always followed by the seeming axiom that whatever Bush had done, it was more conservative than what any Democratic president would have done.

In your post above astorian, it sounds like you’re advancing a new definition: “conservative” is the opposite of “Bush PAL”.

I submit that the opposite (sort of) used to be the convention: for a good part of the the Bush administration, if you criticized President Bush, you weren’t a conservative.. This changed when his popularity plummeted. At that point, the meme gained traction that Bush had done poorly, but that was because he hadn’t really governed as a conservative.

And I repeat, I think it is revealing that in this thread, people who describe themselves as conservative seem to be more willing to admit to Bush’s failings. It may mean that the events are far enough in the past to be discussed rationally.

Are there any real conservatives left amongst the Republicans? From my perspective they all seem to be radical authoritarians.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@adaher

I don’t really get the Kennedy worship.

He died, thus allowing LBJ to get the CRA and VRA passed. On that basis alone, he was a great president. I don’t think much of what he accomplished when he was alive, though.