PARADE magazine ran a story on this a few weeks ago.
Please explain how GWB “cheated his way into office”. He duly went through the legal channels. Gore won his case in the Florida Supreme Court, Bush won his case in the U.S. Supreme Court. You may not have liked the decision, but that’s sour grapes.
Sure. Not an amazing story, but true nonetheless. It was about 10 or 12 years ago, when she was under house arrest. My friend was travelling around Burma, and was staying in Rangoon. He found out where she lived, and so he went to her house and stood outside, together with a couple of other tourists. The next thing he knew, she came into the garden and started pruning roses. She saw them standing there, and came over to where they were, and said hello. She remonstrated with them, telling them they shouldn’t be travelling around Burma contributing money and legitimacy to the SLORC. Then she smiled and asked if there was anything they’d like to know. My friend said he felt like a complete chump, because here was this woman he admired to an enormous degree, and he felt very guilty about being there, and was completely tongue-tied. So he asked her the first thing that came into his head: “What should we call this country?” She replied “Please call my country by its proper name: Burma.” Then she said goodbye and went back into the house.
Not at all. I had no quarrel with Reagan and Thatcher’s landslide majorities. They appealed to something in voters and won fair and square. My sour grapes has nothing whatsoever to do with the voting process at the last election; it was worthy of one of those Third World countries where they have to send in monitors to see that it’s done properly:
First there was the hanging chads that should never have happened. Can’t the ‘world’s greatest democracy’ even ensure that everyone’s vote counts in the first place? Pathetic.
Then there was the refusal of a recount, despite there being doubts that all votes had been counted and the spectacle of some rich boys running in in their suits and ties and ‘demonstrating’ against the possibility. Let’s have democracy but let’s have it on our terms?
The Republican candidate’s brother, Jeb, governor of the state where all the controversy occurred, disenfranchised a number of voters on the basis that they ***had the same name as convicted felons * ** (yes, this may have lost them some Republican votes as well but it’s still as anti-democratic as hell), further muddying the waters.
Here in Australia you cannot even man an electoral booth if you are actively involved in politics yet in the US the head of the electoral commission who had a deciding hand in Bush’s inauguration was a member of the Republican Party. We call this a conflict of interest. (and we have similar terminology for the awarding of contracts to a company that the Vice President was CEO of)
Perhaps I’ve got some of the details wrong here; in which case I’ll only be too happy for someone to provide a link to a site that better explains the circumstances I’ve just detailed. My beef isn’t with a party of one stripe or another being in power but with someone who is subverting the democratic process holding such a position.
Good list, iamme99 Of course I don’t suggest that a leader of a Western power can compete with some of these stinkers for worst leader. They don’t have the unfettered ability to terrorise, starve or dispossess their own people. But GWB has the potential to do a lot of damage just from the position he holds. At least if he was voted in in the next election it would have more legitimacy than his current term. Then I would only be left wondering at voters susceptibility to endless war talk at the expense of more meaningful statesmanship. But that is different from worrying how the so-called leader of the Free World gained office.
How about Ayatollah Khameini and the Iranian Supreme Judicial Council? Iran is one country where the populace needs and wants change. Yet these idiots, citing religious authority, hold the country down while playing the nuclear game. Iran should be one of the more influential countries in the world but it has had its legs cut off by Khameini et al.
If you happen to know – why does the ruling SLORC junta prefer the name “Myanmar” to “Burma”? Is “Myanmar” a word that means something inspiring or politically symbolic in the Burmese language?
Link.
Quantaty wise I would say N.Korea Kim… starvation has killed so many North Koreans its a disaster. Mugabe though deserves a tie in first place…
Korea’s model is wrong and the economy crashed. Its a case of bad ideas with excessive ideology. Once the starvation “arrived” there wasn’t much to be done. For better or worse Kim has been playing the US around quite well.
Mugabe on the contrary is leading his nation into disaster in a relatively short period and for very stupid reasons. His country will be half its population soon due to starvation and emigration… poverty due to pure stupidity.
All of the ballots in Florida were counted twice. Each time, Bush had several hundred more votes than Gore. Gore wanted the votes in four select counties recounted using a different standard. The Florida Supreme Court said yes; the U.S. Supreme Court said no, that was depriving the voters in the rest of the state of equal process. The ironic thing is that a detailed study of the votes conducted after the election by a media consortium found that had the recount in those four counties proceeded, Bush still would have won.
Correction: Florida’s Office of Executive Clemency provided a list of convicted felons to county election supervisors, as Florida state law, as in many other states, does not allow convicted felons to vote unless they have appealed and received clemency. However — how that law was enforced was left to the sixty-seven individual county election supervisors, not to the state. The Florida governor does not appoint county election supervisors; they are local offices. More here.
There are several threads where the 2000 election shenanigans have been gone over in extreme detail, for hundreds of posts. Suffice it to say that people who believe strongly in either position are not likely to be swayed by anything contained in any of them. But feel free to give them a read, there have been some really excellent and eloquent posts on the topic.
This wouldn’t be the place to revive that argument, much as I enjoy retellings of the Republican perfidy of 2000. And even if the Repubs do have a bare tiny scant cover for their misdeeds, it won’t keep strongmen the world over from justifying their own misdeeds by saying, “The Republicans in America do it, too!”
So it is, as the cows say, a moo-t point.
The consensus of less than 10 persons? :rolleyes:
Another vote for Kim Jong Il
I realise that this may come as a shock, but to a large proportion of the world’s population, George Bush wins this contest by a mile. Akrako and Bakunin have indicated some reasons why, but they are being polite in the presence of friends.
None of the other contestants have damaged so many people’s lives in so little time, and for such tawdry commercial reasons. I do not comment further - either you are aware of the world outside America, and you know what I mean, or you are not aware. If you are not aware, you can only be puzzled by the anger being shown, and the Madrid explosions must be a real shocker to you.
My country is a good friend of the USA, and we like Americans. Many of them are our own kin. However, when Bush comes here in June, a large percentage of our population will parade to protest against him. Do not misunderstand - they will not be attacking America, but only the man Bush, and the harm he has caused for the sake of his business supporters.
While North Korea starves em’ CUBA imprisons them. We can thank that low-life, Carter hand shakin’, revolutionary, FIDEL CASTRO. He holds the highest percentage of a countries’ population imprisoned on the planet.
[as reported by PJ O’Rourke in Eat The Rich]
But is liberating 2 countries, and getting Libya to renounce all that bad? I think if you want to look at “damaged lives” you ought to weigh them against people who now have better lives. Plenty of evil men out there and not giving fair weight to one high profile case doesn’t seem fair.
I imagine you would say that Bush is worse than Mugabe, too, since what do you expect from a bunch of African savages?
The White Man’s Burden is so heavy at times…
Then a large proportion of the world’s population doesn’t have the moral sense of a poundcake.
Aware? Does the phrase “letting your people starve in large numbers while you develop nukes for blackmail purposes” strike a chime?
I realize it is a fun little parlor game to throw brickbats at Bush, but to say that you consider him worse than Kim or Mugabe or a dozen other Third World despots goes beyond amusement into lunacy. Either you don’t mean it, in which case it is stupid in a particularly inflammatory way, or you do, in which case your moral standards are both impossible of discussion and beneath contempt.
The approval of people who say that Bush is worse than Kim is something I hope the US not only does not seek, but even actively avoids. I don’t want my country to be popular with those who think like that - it creeps me out.
Protest if you like, but if you are protesting based on a moral system like that, don’t expect me to give a tin shit about your opinion.
Regards,
Shodan
**Vezer ** - Which two countries have been liberated?
From my experience of Afghanistan, it seems clear that it has reverted to a decentralised, impoverished land of peasants, many of whom are starving. Those who are not starving live in fear of local warlords and bandits. The US-backed “government” does not even rule Kabul, let alone the country, and the lives of ordinary people are as bad as they always were, probably worse. They were certainly no worse off in the time of the Taliban, and many say they were better. What joy to be liberated in such a fashion.
Oddly, the people of Iraq don’t feel liberated either. Sure, you can always find an English-speaking person to say nice things for US TV, and a few kids will wave American flags if you give them a dollar to share. The real people on the ground fear America, and many hate it. They blame America for their plight. They are not stupid, you know - they know what is being done by Bush’s business supporters, the Halliburtons of this world. What a joy to be liberated so they can help the US economy.
**Shodan ** - I am describing reaity. In some ideal world everyone will give praise to America and happily send resources to feed USA obesity while their children starve and die of curable diseases.
Kim is not the only leader with deaths on his hands. Look closely at Mr. Bush, ands ask how many people are now dead with the sole purpose of winning him the next election.
In the real world, Bush has destroyed whatever trust Clinton built up (which was not much, to be honest). The world sees his government as on corrupted by bribes from big business.
Do you really not see the rot at the core of your government? Why do you think the oil companies ploughed so much money into George Bush, their former employee? Why are there so many oil executives around Bush? (Why did the like of Enron also back his campaign?) Looking from outside, the situation is absurdly obvious.
Check out Cecils numbers = Does the US have the highest Prison Population
Cuba doesn’t even show up strangely.
Not really. What you are doing is casting around unsupported accusations, and pretending that these outweigh the documented facts of the horrors of Mugabe, Kim, and others.
Zero.
Again, this is idiotic. To compare the invasion of Iraq with the famines, slaughter, and general assholery of Kim is to abandon any pretence to moral objectivity. It is rather like saying Churchill was worse than Hitler because Churchill drank and Hitler was a teetotaler and a vegetarian.
If your definition of “looking from outside” means “from under the safety of a tin-foil hat”, perhaps.
Seriously, if the world’s opinion is based on nothing more than bullshit accusations and suspicion, the world’s opinion is not worth pursuing.
I would like to be popular as much as the next guy, but if the price of popularity is to agree that the earth is flat and that society is run by giant insect invaders from the planet Zark, then you can keep your Miss Congeniality trophy. The idea that Bush and Kim are even remotely comparable is like that. There is no reasonable moral standard by which you can judge the two and come up with the conclusion that Bush is worse.
I realize it is often done, but that is because it is safe to condemn Bush. He is a civilized man, and leads a civilized country. Kim is neither. Therefore, the down side of saying that Bush is the worst in the world is much less than actually admitting that there could be worse things in the world. Much safer to pretend. Stupid and morally cowardly, of course, but safer.
Regards,
Shodan
**Shodan - **
You have strong beliefs, and there is nothing to be gained by further discussion of them. We live in different worlds, you and I, each of us learning very different things from what we see.
“Sound-proof glass surrounds Americans, so they can’t hear us, and see only our shouting faces. The shouting frightens them and they will not open the door to talk to us.”