Why does everyone blame GWB for everything?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

The guy wasn’t a great president. But the current mantra, from everyone from late night comedians to newspaper columnists, is “It was Bush’s fault.” Obama has spent the last four years blaming GWB for everything, including his own failure to fix what he said he would when we elected him. The economy is being blamed on GWB even though there’s no rational reason to do so (his fiscal policies may have angered liberals but the current/recent economic mess had very little to do with those policies; there are/were larger forces at work).

Heck, they even blamed him for Hurricane Katrina (including criticism for not leaving emergency equipment in the city center, where it would have been destroyed). He’s blamed for global warming, global cooling, and insect plagues. He’s blamed for burned grilled cheese sandwiches and for bringing about the total collapse of human civilzation. What gives? Is he just a convenient scapegoat/punching bag since he seems disinclined to defend himself? Is he a dartboard for the Democrats because it’s convenient to blame all the country’s troubles on a Republican?

It is amusing that liberals (and foreign critics) assume that the President had absolute power from 2000-2008 but that office turned impotent in 2009. In other words, GWB, in his malevolence, reached out his all-powerful tentacles and destroyed everything within reach; Obama, on the other hand, can’t accomplish anything because a president’s power is so limited (by that annoying Constitution, as Obama himself as said).

I don’t like the man or the man’s politics, but painting him as an all-powerful mixture of Nero and Dracula just doesn’t jibe with reality IMHO. Presidents set the tone but can’t dictate how the music is played. Their power, and thus their ability to influence events, is finite and limited. Even if he had wanted to, Bush couldn’t have caused the Second Great Depression (2008-?).

#2

No; it’s just easier to do damage than it is to fix that damage. Especially when the damage weakens you. The fact that it takes longer for a doctor to fix multiple stab wounds than it does to inflict them doesn’t mean the doctor is useless or lying about how hard the job is, especially when the doctor has been stabbed too and only has one working hand.

#3

Cite?

I can’t say I recall Obama even mentioning the man since taking office.

#4

“Everyone” isn’t doing anything and certainly not blaming Bush for “everything”.

And although Der Trihs put it rather inelegantly, the fact that Obama inherited two wars (which had been financed off-budget) and a lot of tax cut legislation has some relevance to the current situation, not to mention some inept handling by the previous administration when the financial crisis began. And the fact that Republicans have openly stated that their priority is to make Obama fail even if it causes greater economic problems is particularly relevant too.

So no, it’s not all Bush’s fault personally; a lot of what happened during his tenure likely wasn’t driven by him anyway. But the wider Republican party has done an awful lot of damage and while I would hardly absolve Obama from any responsibility for things he has done, neither can the GOP wash their hands of things that they did both before and after January 2009. If you drive a bus off a cliff, you can’t hand the wheel over to someone else and then blame them when it crashes into the ground, especially if you are flinging shit at them the whole time as well.

#5

It’s amusing that you don’t understand that governing is different when your faction controls all 3 branches of government, vs. controlling only one of them.

I’m not necessarily going to blame Bush for things he actively did during office, but I do blame him for either failing to manage effectively (Katrina) or handing the reigns over to business & military interests, and showing no interest in what they actually did with that power.

So what did Bush do that was so horrible? He did nothing, he let everything fall apart while others did horrible things.

#6

Cite?

#7

Cite? Especially the “openly stated” part? Because that’s pretty heinous to be saying openly.

#8

Both “everyone” and “everything” are strong generalizations, requiring only a single counterexample to refute. Thus: I do not blame GWB for my bread being moldy this morning. Ergo, your assertion is proved incorrect.

#9

The mold looked like the baby Jesus, tho, so …

#10

Oh, I don’t know; if anyone would have the Evil Eye I’d think it would be Bush. Did anyone check to see how high the incidence of sour milk and two headed calves being born were in DC while he was there?

#11

They did not phrase it exactly so, to be fair, but rather than rehashing the full arguments, here are two existing threads on the topic:

Robert Draper: GOP decided to oppose Obama on everything on Jan 20, 2009

Is the GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?

The first thread discusses a meeting amongst key GOP figures to oppose Obama on all things; the second is about their willingness to act in ways which damage the economy in pursuit of that goal. Both threads cite Mitch McConnell’s statement “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President” and both have links to other sources with more details. You can read the fuller discussions there.

#12

This is news to you? :confused:

#13

Ok, I’ll take a shot;

*he lied his country into a foreign war, that’s still bankrupting the economy.

*he endorsed torture, built Gitmo.

*he suspended habeus corpus, his term will go down as a dark chapter in US history.

*he deregulated wall street until the world economy teetered on the brink of collapse.

*he did a lot of ‘mission accomplished’ posturing, without actually catching anybody.

By the last days of his final term, the next Republican presidential candidate didn’t want him on the campaign trail. Unheard of. (McCaine knew.)

He did a couple of smallish speaking gigs, but unlike every other modern day ex president, did not find himself being offered giant book deals and lucrative speaking engagements. (The media knew.)

Do you hear any Republican’s boasting on his service in this election cycle? Mention his name even? (They all know.)

He withdrew, and has wisely kept a pretty low profile ever since. (Because he knows too!)

When in office he was routinely, and only half jokingly referred to as a moron, etc. I very, very much doubt, history will be any kinder.

Now do you see why he’s the perfect guy to blame everything on? He’s hunkered down in Texas, no one much takes him seriously, ('cept Texan’s, of course, he’s their boy!), or seeks him out for opinions, the world views him as a joke, and most American’s are ashamed of his presidency and it’s legacies.

#14

What Elbows said. +1

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot one more small gripe about Dubya: He completely failed to heed credible information that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. His vapid expression of total cluelessness when first informed about the attacks is priceless. Well, sort of priceless, but only if you consider the subsequent 4,000+ dead US service members and 100,000 dead Iraqis and Afghans to be without value.

#15

Nonsense. His insistence on keeping the tax cuts even during prosperity, and his insistence on waging a war and adding to Medicare without paying for them caused the big deficit as we went into the recession, which reduced the opportunity for needed stimulus. Deregulation and allowing the banks to take ever greater risks for profit directly caused the great recession. I agree he had no master plan - he is too stupid - but if you don’t responsibility you shouldn’t run for president.

As others have said, cite? He is blamed for appointing someone without qualifications to run FEMA. He is blamed for being so clueless about what is going on in New Orleans that his aides had to make a DVD of the news coverage.

All powerful? He turned power over to Cheney and Rummy who had some oomph. Bush was the laziest president in years. He seemed to care a lot more about his vacations than the country. Remember he was told about the 9/11 threat, and responded by telling Rice to do something about it and went back to cutting brush. The first meeting to discuss the memo was the first week of September.

#16

He busted the budget, started a useless war, ignored natural disasters, lowered taxes for the rich and thereby ran up trillions in deficits, outed the head of the CIA’s covert anti-proliferation efforts, appointed partisan hack idiots to the USSC, and destroyed civil liberties. He alienated most of the world with his foreign policy, and failed to get Bin Ladin. Damn near destroyed the economy and then couldn’t get his own party to help out in fixing the aortic dissection to the financial system and offered his own party no leadership.

On the plus side, he did give German Chancellor Angela Merkel a nice back rub. Germans are not a touchy feely people, especially with strangers in public.

#17

For the record, this is the same fine new Doper who claimed yesterday that no felon can ever open a bank account, qualify for a credit card or even get a library card issued to them upon completion of their jail or prison sentence, so I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a cite…

#18

Bush had been in office only 8 months before 9/11. Clinton was in office for 8 YEARS without getting Bin Laden. If you people weren’t so blinded by your idiotic hatred, you would be blaming Clinton instead of Bush.

#19

How long does a country take to recover from 2 wars, deficit of over a trillion dollars, financial meltdown and recession, and the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history?

#20

I’ll start citing, as we all did in our doctoral dissertations, at the moment a requirement to do so comes into effect. (As in, dictated by the moderators of this board, not by a few random posters). I won’t even wait for everyone else to start conforming to that golden standard before I do it myself.

In the meantime, it’s a really stupid way to express your disagreement with something a person says by bleating, “Cite, cite, cite.” People assert things without cited proof all the time. That doesn’t mean such assertions are untrue–it means they didn’t want to clutter up the discussion.

(I did, in fact, amend my assertions about the difficulty of living as a convicted felon from that certain things were impossible to that they were very difficult, on the prodding of various citeaholics. I shouldn’t have done so, though, because it didn’t alter my basic point, which was that the obstacles faced by convicted felons in our society are part and parcel of their sentences, and that should be taken into account by judges and prosecutors. And no, I’m not going to “cite” that.)