One thing this board teaches me is that there are people who will vote for and continue to support a leader no matter how poorly he leads nor how questionable his behavior is, and apparently no rationalization that they will not swallow. I wonder if there is anything they would not support from their chosen person.
Of course, since this is my country as well, I hope we never have to find out.
Plainly there won’t be much groundbreaking thought in a thread titled “Why does everyone hate Bush?” Without reading the whole thing, I’ll assume the major reasons have been listed already: Bush’s many horrible crimes and major instances of corruption; his brutal war, started under false premises, that has killed 655,000 people and counting; his decision to increase spending and cut taxes recklessly at a time when the country was already heading towards a huge budget crisis; his assaults on the Constitution and basic civil liberites; his bid to expand federal power and reduce individual freedom in all areas of life; his non-stop hatemongering; his sleazy campaign tactics; and his belief that the government answers to no one while everyone answers to the government.
Nevertheless, everything on that list has been done by a previous president without engendering the savage hatred that Bush has engendered. Why does (almost) everyone hate Bush with a fury so intense it would frighten a supernova? His attitude. Only Bush would increase spending by several trillion dollars and then claim that he had cut spending. Only Bush would say “We do not torture” on the same week he sent a bill to the Senate guaranteeing and expanding his ability to torture.
Imagine that Truman, on Augest 7, 1945, had said, “We do not drop bombs.” Imagine that Lincoln, at the Gettysburg Address, had said, “We never shoot anybody.” That’s what Bush would have done.
Then I say, why not remove voting-democracy and just leave the experts to run this country by themselves? If the public people cannot be trusted with their own beliefs, then why have a voting system?
The way I see it, if there are people “brainwashed” into supporting Bush on little rationale, there are also people “brainwashed” into not supporting Bush on little rationale.
Who decides who these experts are?
Logically so. But one cannot dismiss either side for the idiocy of a few.
Sounds like a fine plan to me. I’m all for a philosopher-king and council.
International panel of noted luminaries (Nobel winners, etc) choose the candidates for each nation after they’ve received full psychological screening.
I once started a joking thread on what it would take for some people to say Bush had gone too far. One of the possible situations was Bush was caught performing cannibalism. One person said they would withhold judgement on that until they heard Bush’s side of the story.
And people wonder why they get called kool-aid drinkers.
Well, what if he was caught performing cannibalism, but only according to the National Enquirer?
And on the other side, what if he was caught performing cannibalism on national TV?
Depending on how you hear the story, i think it is completely reasonable to hold judgment (when first hearing about the story).
…Even with “good” sources like NBC/CNN type television, mistakes have been made before on the reporting information. If something as drastic as that were to be discovered, the news would instantly jump on it. That also means they could’ve overlooked a detail which explains the situation better than “he’s a cannibal”.
Thanks. 
Gosh, after continuing to read this thread, I can’t imagine why I said I find most Bush-bashing childish at best. :rolleyes:
Amazingly easy to confirm one’s own preconceptions, isn’t it?
I think elucidator’s dick has a real shot in '08… picked a running mate yet?
Nah…no balls!
I keed, I keed…you know that, luci.
The Candidate is intimately aware of the dangers of inflation, as well as the strategic importance of a timely withdrawal after the mission is complete.
I believe the candidate’s age may raise questions of erectabilility.
The candidate is also deeply understanding of the crisis of long-term unemployment.
No offense to your candidate, but the VP position being worth a “pitcher of warm spit,” I’d say you could probably just pick any old asshole and it’d be a perfect fit.
I think this candidate is more likely to pick some liberal pussy.
Well, consider this datapoint.
I’m a registered Republican, and I’m originally from Texas. I voted Republican in every presidential election from 1988 to 2000. In the 2000 election, I was a McCain supporter who was disappointed when Bush secured the nomination. I held my nose when I voted for Bush in the general election, because I didn’t think he was particularly bright and I thought he pushed his religion too much. On the other hand, he was Republican and anti-gun control (which was my key issue back then), and he seemed to have a pretty competent team assembled.
Boy, did I screw up as a voter. :smack:
By 2004, I was convinced that he had done such a terrible job as President that I voted for Kerry. The whole WMD issue in Iraq demonstrated pretty convincingly to me that Bush was either a liar or incompetent. This administration’s infringement on civil liberties is even worse; it far exceeds anything supposedly dreamed up by Janet Reno in the Clinton administration.
By 2006, I was so disillusioned with Bush and the Republicans in Congress that I voted Democrat almost across the board. The Republican party seems to me to have run off the rails to the right. They have abandoned moderates like me to focus on hard religious right issues such as the Terry Schiavo case, anti-gay marriage, and flag burning. They have abandoned their traditional small government plank for earmarks like “bridges to nowhere” in Alaska. And finally, they failed in their constitutional duty to serve as a check and balance on the executive branch.
So, I’m certainly not a “hardcore lefty”, but I do think that Bush is the worst president we have had in my lifetime, and I’m not particularly enamored with him at this point.
I wonder if robby’s complaints are “childish at best?”
Siam Sam, care to give any examples of what complaints you find “childish at best?” I’m willing to wager that to do so, you’re going to have to leave a lot of examples out.
Am I the only person who wonders if Starving Artist will ever one day wake up and ask himself, “Hey, maybe it’s not everyone else who’s delusional, but me…?”
I hated W Bush getting the nomination in 2000, as there was no good reason to choose him. (John McCain & Liddy Dole each made more sense, but the party decided that having lots of money meant you had to be the nom. I don’t understand that way of thinking.) I called him “George Bush’s idiot son.”
I disagreed with his father on some things, but respected that he had foreign policy chops. The son had none. What possible qualifications did he have? His daddy was president? Oh, he was governor! Well, it turned out that he was governor only because of his daddy’s connections, & was widely considered to be a vapid political dabbler. American politics is far too dynastic. Nepotism is not better than meritocracy when choosing someone with the power of life & death over you. Really, it was the GOP that earned my contempt more than W himself. (I am now a Democrat by default; any party that considered being the son of the last person to win the office for them sufficient qualification to get the nod is not a major national party, but a minor party with no depth or credibility. I am stunned that so many people voted for him anyway.)
Then W won only because Florida insisted on a winner-take-all electoral decision in a case that was practically a statistical tie. No recount, no division of the votes, just call it “decided” based on the first sloppy count & go on. Maybe this had nothing to do with W’s brother being governor of Florida, maybe it had nothing to do with the GOP controlling the legislature & the Secretary of State being GOP; but in the appearance of conflict of interest, instead of bending over backwards to appear fair, they said, “Oh, we had it on first count! Neener!” (Actually, neither W nor Al Gore came out looking good in that episode.)
Then he got into office, & I didn’t hate him so much for a while.
But that lack of foreign policy chops meant that he had no deeper judgement skills to challenge the cockamamie ideas that his cabinet came up with. So he made mistakes:
Guantanamo Bay: Holding suspects incommunicado, first saying that they would be tried in what we used to call Red China style, without seeing the evidence against them; then saying they simply would not be tried. Wrong on so many levels, & a diplomatic disaster. Impeachment-worthy.
Rendition: Sending people seized by American power to be tortured by “third parties” which were contracted by the Americans to do this. Simple flouting of the law. Impeachment-worthy.
The insistence that those being held, without trial, were “the worst of the worst.” A lack of oversight & proper training for the military personnel running his constitutionally problematic prisons. Eventually it came out that two prisoners who were seized in Afghanistan on a false lead died in custody; more or less unintentionally tortured to death by guards who didn’t know what they were doing.
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/9590
That’s two too many.
Picking a fight with a contained secular despot when we had serious problems with an in-the-wind religious fanatic.
Invading Iraq on the premise that all those Iraqis showing documentation that the WMD’s had been destroyed were lying, & all the UN inspectors had been fooled.
Saying he was waging a “War on Terror,” then bombing Baghdad, destroying its infrastructure, & plunging it into, well, what is now a reign of terror.
And even when he was in so far over his head he couldn’t see the surface, insisting on his sole & Caesar-like authority, his infallibility, his bloody constitutional right to do as he pleased without interference from Congress, & on running again to do a job he was piss-poor at.
His Justice Dept. insisting over & against the plain meaning of the Constitution that he didn’t have to ask permission for anything from Congress or the courts, whether over wiretapping, or military tribunals until the Supreme Court reprimanded him specifically a the given issue, then trying to use the same argument as far as he could on other issues.
I do, however, tend to agree with him on Mexican immigration, at least more than I agree with the rabble-rousers that have made so much noise in both “major” parties. Even a stopped clock, I guess.