It seems its really easy to hate the guy nowadays. Now, I’m not really big into politics, but like, didn’t we elect him twice? How popular was he when he won against Kerry?
And this whole Iraq thing: Again, i dont follow politics or world news much, but wasn’t he trying to protect us from future terrorism?
Clue me in.
No can do. If you don’t hate Bush on your own, unaided, there’s nothing we can do for you.
He lost the first election, but the supreme court chose to install him into the office anyway. The second election was one of the closest in history.
You’re kidding, right?
This will end up in the pit.
Read a newspaper. Browse the threads in GD and/or the Pit. Educate yourself about world events.
And he may not have won that one either, if you believe those who question what
happened in Ohio.
I probably hate Ralph Nader more than Bush-if it weren’t for Ralph, Dubya would be
a political has-been right now. I still don’t see the point of Nader’s run.
Heh, this is like that episode of Scrubs last night where J.D. is reading “Iraq For Dummies” (not that I’m calling the OP a dummy). “I don’t understand, I just got to the part where Bush made his speech in front of a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner and there’s still like 400 pages to go…”
I don’t buy the argument that Nader cost Gore the election. Gore didn’t even win his home state. If he had, he would have won the election.
Any number of factors beyond Florida-related issues cost Gore the election. Should he have embraced the Clinton legacy more? Leiberman provided zero bonus to the ticket.
Nader’s success could be viewed in terms of Gore’s failure to energize his base, which is a fundamental rule for anyone running for president.
Mainly, I disagree with his politics and the behavior of this administration.
On a gut level, though, I hate his monkey face - that stupid smirk just infuriates me to no end. To me, it says “Well, I may be half-retarded, but here I am, President of the United States! Take that!”
Joe
Me, I hate the Nader voters, those who can’t stand Bush, those that would have voted for Gore had Nader not been a dick and ran. People smart enough to vote for Nader 
had to be smart enough to know that he had no chance to win, and his votes would only take away from their second choice, yet they did it anyway. Why? So the Green Party would continue to receive funding? Or just to excercise their rightas as a 'Merican?
Well one reason of why Americans disapprove of Bush has to do with subtle interpretations in the Constitution. For instance, Amendment VI states:
Clearly Bush is upholding the precise letter of the highest law in the land here.
And of Bush’s powers? Look no further than Article 2, Section II:
But let’s get off the war for a second and go to our very first amendment and see what Bush is doing there:
Again, people are grasping at straws trying to attack the President on this issue. The ACLU should be ashamed of itself.
You guys can look the rest of the Constitution up yourselves. I don’t have time to do everyone’s homework here.
To answer your question, Heckxx, the reason so many Americans hate Bush and his policies and his politics is because they’re crazy and irrational.
Also, this board has a definite leftward slant, at least from the American point of view, and a fair assortment of loud hard-left posters. The board is not representative of America as a whole.
Wow! So he may still be eligible for two more terms?! And all this time, I thought he was only eligible for one more.
I guess he is not as disliked as some would have us think.
To answer the OP, in a nutshell, many people see the war in Iraq as a waste of money and resources. Also that it is not our concern what happens in other countries and that it’s none of our business to interfere.
No – the Supreme Court has ruled on the issue of whether he won the 2000 election – res iudicata, and all that stuff – so regardless of what lesser mortals might believe ought to be the law, he did in fact win that election. And if somebody tried to bring a suit about the 2004 election in Ohio, I suspect the court might rule that the suit was brought far too late. So he’s eligible for no more terms, in real life.
There is no way the clusterfuck that is Iraq can be adequately explained in a message board post. I recommend the books by Thomas Ricks (Fiasco), George Packer (The Assassin’s Gate), or Peter Galbraith(The End of Iraq). Suffice it to say that the level of incompetence and cluelessness is without parallel. The war has cost us billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Iraqi lives, has actually increased the threat of terrorism, has made Iraq actually a worse place to live than it was under Saddam, and has left us with no way to leave without abandoning the Iraqis to utter chaos.
Add to that the mismanagement of Katrina, the tax breaks for the very wealthy, the cozying up to religious fanatics, the refusal to acknowledge global warming, and you have quite possibly the worst Presidnet of the last hundred years. (Maybe Buchanan was worse than Bush, I don’t know enough to say.)
On a personal level he just strikes me as an arrogant abrasive jerk. He doesn’t seem to realize he’s the president of a democracy. I’ve often heard it said that he’s the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with. I think he’d be horrible to have a beer with. He just seems like the guy you walk away from in a bar. I’d much rather have a drink with that pompous windbag John Kerry than GW.
About the Nader issue: It’s what lawyers call a “but for” argument. But for the votes Nader received in Florida Gore would be President. Yes he ran a dreadful campaign, Yes there were things he could have done that would have rendered Nader irrelevant, but even given that he would be President if not for those Florida Nader votes.
In general, he seems to have only a superficial understanding of what he’s doing, and into the void rush determined men with long-simmering agendas that know how to work him.
So we’re dealing less with a strong President riding herd on his staff and more with a weak leader in the thrall of stronger men grabbing all the power they possibly can, and exercising it very poorly.
I’m canadian, but I’ll chime in anyway.
I strongly dislike him because it seems like he hasn’t done a single thing that I can get on board with. Stephen Harper wasn’t my first choice for prime minister of Canada, and I don’t agree with him on a number of issues, but I can easily concede that he’s doing at least an okay job as PM. I imagine that most people feel this way about most presidents or prime ministers. Dubya, on the other hand, just keeps doing one infuriating thing after another. Whether it’s something as routine as tax policy or something as important as whether or not to go to war, he consistently does the opposite of what I wish the president would do. I really wish he’d do just one thing that I agree with.
We just got there sooner than the rest of the country.
Wiki on popularity of Iraq war.
It would seem to me that Bush was simply acting in accordance with public opinion. Draw your own conclusions about the current teeth-gnashing and the implied intelligence level of the American electorate.
I don’t think Americans realized how incompetently the invasion would be handled.
Also, Bush sold the country a bill of goods on WMD, using information he either knew or should have known was dubious at best.
Bush was very much responsible for molding public opinion to support the war. He and others in his administration repeatedly implied a connection between Saddam and Bin Laden, cooked the intelligence data to imply Saddam was building WMDs, and kept repeating that Saddam was an imminent threat. The entire war was a well packaged ad campaign, filled with buzzwords that mislead everyone. And, of course, once we won a quick “victory,” the public loved it.
Much of the information refuting the claims was not available to the general public until long after the invasion was over.