Actually, I was unfair. I think there was an automatic recount in Florida before certification in November 2000. It was the hand recount that was controversial. :smack: Oh, well, you asked why I hated him, not for historical fact.
And now back to our rant:
Oh, I forgot.* He lowered taxes during wartime.* He raised the national debt to levels far beyond even Reagan. And didn’t veto any pork, ever. He presided over an era of total shamelessness in his party.
My story is a little different from robby’s. I was brought up in the Religious Right, indoctrinated to vote Republican. I accepted the legitimacy of Bill Cinton’s impeachment. I loudly opposed same-sex marriage. I wanted Elián González to stay in the USA. I despised Bill Clinton & Janet Reno. I had issues with the party, sure. But I had issues with Democrats, too. I finally had enough of putting up with the purblind anti-environmentalists in the GOP in 2000–when they nominated W Bush, because I couldn’t take the party as a whole seriously anymore. Then I decided I was a Democrat. Which, given my family background, was hard for me. Harder for me than it should have been, but still.
Bush made me ill, but at the time, we didn’t know much about him. His whole campaign just seemed like running for Crown Prince to me, & I was horrified that the GOP, which I thought of, despite its numerous flaws, as my party, had so little taste, so little depth, so little seriousness. But I couldn’t tell you what he’d do wrong; I had no idea. I figured he probably would be pretty ordinary. All the really horrible stuff came later, & I didn’t expect it.
In point of fact, for what little I knew of the man, the flaws that stuck out at me–being a legacy candidate, being of questionable honesty & intelligence–were shared by Gore. It was Gore whom I feared would be a diplomatic disaster. Bush has proven determined to be one. (Was it only later that I learned that W had neither any international experience nor expertise of his own?) By the time of the election, I had no faith in either of them. I voted for the biggest third party candidate on the ballot, Nader (Green Party), as protest against a two-party system that gave me these two choices. And I have come to regret that so much. Who knew he would be like this?
I sympathized with the Iraq campaign. I hated Saddam & wanted him gone. I didn’t believe in letting a brutal dictator stay in the name of stability. I didn’t understand how bad destabilization would get & how fast. In my defense, I was a twenty-something with no formal education in political science. The President of the United States needs to know better.
But even I, who thought it a mistake not to continue on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War (now I understand why that was a bad idea), even I thought it was questionable & counter-intuitive timing to spend our resources to attack Saddam post-9/11, when we knew that N. Korea had more dangerous weapons, & bin Laden & Zawahiri were still at large.
This guy makes us look back at the recent presidents we’ve complained most about, & think how much better they were; or, more properly, how bad they weren’t. If he were trying to embody all the faults of LBJ, of Nixon, of Carter, & of Reagan, he’d probably embody them to a less extreme degree. And then he lowers the bar more. (That sounds so hyperbolic, I’m ashamed to type it. But look…)
LBJ lied to get us more entangled in Vietnam. Ethnic groups, entire peoples, now live in exile for the crime of fighting with us against the majority culture we lost to.
Bush has made the same mistake. How many exiles have already fled Iraq, how many more must? And how many of those whom we gave false hope have already died, & how many more will die?
Nixon was brought down by the illegal activities of his staff. He fired multiple attorneys general who tried to investigate. Meanwhile, he propped up murderers like Pinochet, & continued LBJ’s doomed war, all to maintain his “honor” in the Great Game against the USSR.
Well, OK, the first sentence hasn’t happened. But the Bush administration is full of Nixonites, who while they may have learned from Dick’s mistakes, still follow a doctrine of maximal Presidential authority. W’s 2004 campaign relied on the same false logic Nixon used in 1972: “I should be President because I already am; it’s your patriotic duty to vote for me.” :eek: Meanwhile, while at first blush he’s not continuing someone else’s war, in fact he is: his father’s. Remember that his father called on “the Shi’ites” to topple Saddam, & that Saddam is said to have attempted to assassinate his father.
Carter, on the other hand, commendably tried to base American foreign policy on principles of “human rights”, not naked self-interest. This was, of course, inconsistently applied, & generally mocked.
*But if you think that’s a poor basis for foreign policy, as many on the right still do, how about that amorphous “War on Terror,” as if Terror were a defined group you could wage literal war on? :rolleyes: *
Reagan is given way too much credit for events behind the Iron Curtain over which he had no plausible control, & way too little grief for the massive deficits his defense spending helped create. Also, his administration may have been more corrupt than Nixon’s, although Ronnie had the sense to cut loose the real screwups before they brought him down.
Bush has, amazingly, outdone Reagan’s deficits, following a period where budgets were actually balancing. Admittedly, the dotcom bubble burst, but still, the fool pushed big tax cuts in that environment, & offered no oversight on his new programs which lost huge amounts of money to, well, embezzlement, bad management, & fraud, which are the sort of errors made by a weak head of government with no real confidence in his own power. And he doesn’t even have Ronnie’s teflon ability to keep the stink off himself; he, Nixon-like, will be blamed for every mistake his men make.
He’s a schmuck. The GOP should have refused to renominate him in 2004. He should, in my opinion, been impeached in the summer of 2004, over Gitmo.
And that’s leaving aside the garden-variety stuff like seeking, in a time of budget deficits, tax cuts for the very rich; & a lack of long-term environmental planning. I learned, disgustedly, to expect Republicans to do those things. I also, however, used to expect them to know something about foreign policy, & at least to try to balance budgets through spending cuts, & to believe in things like realism, erudition, international engagement, & intellectual seriousness.
But nooo! Not this one! He thinks that talking to Iran & Syria is something they have to earn!
He’s, he’s, he’s such a buffoon. It’s trippy, like Commodus; or like the arrogance & international naiveté of Adolf Hitler, just without the rage, anti-Semitism, Lebensraum issues, or military competence. (That was an insult!)