Right. Only the majority
I don’t hate the president. I voted for him – well, ok, I voted against Gore – in 2000. I do, however, feel alternately disappointed in and betrayed by him, and I voted against him in the last election.
He just looks goofy and silly.
No president should look goofy and silly.
I think Voyager put it quite well (posting #25)
Yes, he’s the “spoiled rich kid of the neighborhood”. You know what I mean? He’s the kid that gets to play quarterback on the football team - NOT because he’s good but because his father is the mayor or the richest son of a bitch in the town. He’s the kid that gets speeding tickets “fixed” ; gets caught with drugs but doesn’t get arrested; gets a new Corvette from Daddy smashes it up within 3 days but Daddy fixes it; gets into a good college NOT because of his academic achievements but because Daddy knows the right people.
Dubya has had a very “cushy” life and had many opportunities to do something good with his life. Instead he pissed it all away which is easy to do when you know Daddy will bail you out time and time again.
Disapproval=hate?
Well I’m back. Thanks for the replies, everyone.
I can see why alot of people are in high disapproval of the Bush Administration actions as of late. But count me in the group of people that says he really did think Saddam had WMD, but unfortunately, he was mostly wrong.
Alot of people have strong personal feelings against the guy: Its like if any of you met him, you’d slap him on the face (given you wouldn’t get arrested afterwards). I don’t see how any of us can disapprove OR approve if he is “the kind of guy you’d sit down and have a beer with”. How can you even remotely derive what his personality is like? Its not like anyone can just sit down and chat with the guy, without a prepared speech or a camera sitting in his face. Every single word that Bush says can be criticized against him: he has to take special care of what he says. Because people are detail-ists, and they will find the smallest flaws of logic in his actions of speeches, and criticize it against him.
Another thought: Certainly being the president of the US is one of the hardest jobs around. I don’t think any of us can realize the full responsibilities and stress and thinking that presidents must deal with on a daily basis. Maybe Bush was stuck in a situation in our history that was going to cause this problem, no matter who was the president at the time. Who are we to say that anyone else would’ve handled the situation any better or worse than Bush?
Because most certainly, if people saw this coming, they wouldn’t have voted for Bush years ago. I think that these political-social situations are beyond our total control and total understanding.
http://www.thenation.com/covers/alfredw/
November 13, 2000. The famous cover of Bush as Alfred E. Newman. As the Nation reported then just before the election, with Bush it was not"what me worry?" but:
WORRY
Well said, Hekxx. I suspect that had 9/11 not occurred, Bush would have been a fairly popular do-nothing president regarded somewhat along the same lines as Eisenhower: a nice guy who kept things steady during his term in office.
No Republican president is ever going to be popular on this board, and no Republican president would have fared any better around here post 9/11 than Bush has. Anything they’d have done would have been criticized just as harshly, they would have been hated just as much, and the same claims of stupidity and idiotic insults about their looks would still have been posted just as much.
Contrary to what many around here like to think, Bush is not stupid. He was thrown into a situation fraught with peril from many sides and one which no other president has had to contend with. He’s done a hell of a good job in protecting this country and its citizens from further catastrophic attack. He’s fulfilled most of his other presidential duties either adequately or well (barring predictable political opposition), and he’s tried to fight the good fight in the mideast so as to make things better all around for us and Iraq and the mideast as a whole.
Unfortunately, I believe that given the practical realities of the situation (i.e., we can’t take military control of the entire region, whether for political reasons or lack of will and resouces) it just hasn’t proven to be possible. I think Bush erred following the election of 2004 and assumed that he had a mandate to do whatever he felt like–and therefore felt somewhat bulletproof–and he stubbornly refused to see the need to alter a course of action that clearly was going nowhere.
Then, to his credit, he acknowledged the “thumpin’” he took following the last election and, according to the obvious will of the country’s voters, began to alter his course of action in Iraq.
Bush is a good guy in a no-win situation. The way this country was set up by its founders ensures that no matter what this or that president does or tries to do, he’s going to be met with critcism and derision from the other side. I’m just glad it was Bush defending this country post 9/11 than the likes of Clinton (either one), Gore or Kerry…all of whom would likely have responded with a fierce determination to try to find some way to impose sanctions upon the terrorists.
That’s the thing about pubbie presidents, by and large. They do what they think is right and they do what they think needs to be done, rather than governing to win last night’s polls and/or next year’s election…which is largely what you get, IMO, with Democratic presidents/politicians.
In closing, I do believe Bush has erred in the way he has handled the war in Iraq, though I believe he felt it was the right thing to do at the time and for the reasons he has stated. I feel that in most other regards he has, as president, performed satisfactorily or well, though I wouldn’t call his presidency exemplary. He is a good man doing the best he can in a situation that no one on this board…and I mean no one…could come close to handling as well themselves.
And now, let the hue and cry commence!
You make it sound like it “just happened” to work out that way. :dubious: Most of us on the nation’s board of directors, who vote on which applicant to hire as CEO, expect a minimum standard of honesty and diligence in finding out the facts before taking serious action. Instead, we know he had previously made the decision to go to war, and was looking for rationalizations to sell it to us. That didn’t “just happen”.
By now you should realize that “Bush hatred” is not simply an inexplicable personality quirk, but a hatred of what the man has done in our name.
Oh, yeah, WMD’s, no WMD’s, so what, that’s just a nitpick? Good God Almighty, you’re serious about this.
If you take it seriously, it is. If you spend 3 months a year plus, on vacation, clearing brush, you can’t be working *that * hard.
He created the Iraq war. Anybody who wasn’t similarly deluded or deludable, which is most of us, would have handled it better.
Not if we apply ourselves to thinking about them more than you have here.
Not from this quarter. But I’ll just ask everyone to remind themselves what a monster Saddam was.
I still feel we should have departed after bagging Saddam and left the Iraqis to sort themselves out, with a stern warning to Iran, which at that time they would have heeded (q.v. Libya).
Yawn…
You can’t blame Iraq on 9/11. Iraq had jack shit to do with 9/11. Bush is not a victim of circumstances in Iraq. He chose to create the circumstances, against the advice of experts, against international law and against anything the evidence ever really suggested.
If Bush had just stuck to rooting out the real criminals in Afghanistan, maybe found Osama and crippled al Qaeda while minimizing the degree to which he antagonized the Islamic world and the international community as a whole, without shitting on the Constitution and the Geneva Convention, without lying his ass off any more than the average President, then the “War On Terror” would already have subsided to background noise, he could have focused more on bumbling with domestic issues and I would have thought he was just a poor (maybe even average) President and a bit of a dolt, who I disagreed with ideologically but didn’t despise. I didn’t hate Bush before 9/11. Up to then, I just thought of him as an empty suit bound for a forgettable single term, not significant enough to generate hatred, probably not dangerous. He managed to change my thinking considerably in the space of about a year.
Starving Artist
I realize this board is somewhat liberal but I don’t think it is always going to chastise anyone just because they are Republican.
Heck, I might not have agreed with a lot of Ronald Reagan’s politics but at least the guy was a good public speaker and handled himself well (especially with reporters).
“Dubya” is just an embarrassment.
Just out of curiosity, Sept 11, 2001 supposedly established “Dubya” as a strong leader and President. Why? What did he say that was so inspiring? What did he do?
If this is directed to me, Dio, I’m fully aware of that. However, Iraq was very much a part of the post 9/11 effort to protect the country from terrorism. I know you disagree with that assessment, but I believe it was indeed Bush’s incentive for going into Iraq, and one which I agreed with both at the time and now. Hussein had more than ample opportunity to prove he had no WMD but he chose to play cat and mouse instead. We simply couldn’t take the chance that he either had them or would develop them and they would subsequently fall into the hands of anti-US terrorists, Muslim or otherwise. (I’m not going to argue the veracity of this belief here as I’ve done so many times before.) We could have handled the war better, but we were right in toppling Hussein.
IMHO, of course. 
Please explain how this ‘group of people’ can know that the Shrub had all the highest experts in the field available to him, many of whom told him that there were no WMDs, and still insist that he was right and all the experts were wrong when time has shown they were right. He had no justification. He was told there was no justification by people in the know. Experts. And he went ahead anyway.
All that makes him is arrogant and stupid which are not qualities you want at the helm of the most powerful nation on the planet. Quit excusing him. You just don’t want to admit you screwed up in believing in him.
I said the same thing then, it was then a big mistake to remain in Iraq, the mistake was then made worse by ignoring that a good chunk of Iraqis were willing to give democracy a chance with the expectation that the US and other occupiers would right after the election then begin to make moves to leave, the result is that on top of a civil war, many also are aiming to get rid of us.
Now who’s fault is that? And why then does the right imply that the people should not demand redress for the administration’s mistakes, incompetency (or worse) and the continuing denials that there is a problem?
Then many analysts (after a year I noticed that) are finally realizing that indeed the Iraq invasion was a godsend for the radicals in Lebanon and Palestine, Bush in 2005 insisted that the democracy movements in those countries were thanks to us being in Iraq. Oops.
If he is not willing to accept that his foolish war made things worse in the ME he will then assume that the more the better, and yet we still have people cheering him on, never willing to realize they are just enablers.
I can’t think of any better metric on which to base one’s hate or love of a person than the actions he or she takes; the President has set in motion actions that have killed hundreds of thousands of people, he has eroded American civil liberties, he has destroyed our foreign image, he has been involved in a scandal or lie seemingly wherever there’s an opportunity for one, he has grandstanded on the repressive side of social issues while lives were at stake elsewhere-- there is precious little to say good about this man. I’m really dumbfounded by the people here that consider our President somehow a basically good man. For that to be the case, Bush would have to be incredibly stupid, and I don’t believe he is at all.
That is ok, because you are still wrong.
The world is full of monsters. Most more monstrous than Saddam. But they’re not sitting atop great big stores of oil.
Americans have historically not intervened to remove monsters even when they were asked to; Hungary in the 50s, Afghanistan in the 80s. America was begged to help before Russia went in but it turned a blind eye. On the other hand, America has installed monsters when the monsters were pro-American commercial interests. Take Pinochet for example.
As for being the Great White Helper, what about Uganda? South Africa? And today Darfur? I could go on and on. But too many people in your land never knew nor cared what was going on in the rest of the world all these years so you bought all the Shrub’s stories about what good he was going to do. Pitiful, really.
All this bull about Shrub being a saviour of Iraqis is hypocrisy at its most disgusting.
Except for the little fact that he altered his course in Iraq to repeat, for the third time, what hadn’t worked before, and most people don’t want an increase in troop levels in another country’s civil war.