George W. Bush

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US presidents: George W. Bush

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[edit] Presidential Election

  • First elected by a narrow margin in the 2000 election:
    • electoral votes: 271/538 (50.3%)
    • popular vote: 47.9% (Al Gore actually had slightly more, 48.4%)
  • Re-elected in the 2004 election
    • electoral votes: 286/538 (53.2%)
    • popular vote: 50.7% (Bush was widely quoted as seeing this narrow majority as a "popular mandate")

There are continuing and credible claims, however, that both of these elections were extensively rigged to favor Bush.

[edit] Actions

[edit] Opinions About

  • 2007-08-03 Think Tank Suggests Bush should be President For Life: reprint of "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy" by Philip Atkinson, originally published on The Family Security Foundation, Inc.'s web site and later removed
    • Argues that a ruler often has to make unpopular choices and shouldn't have to be subject to the will (or whim) of the people; completely ignores the fact that many of the "mob" who don't like Bush or his actions have made very cogent arguments for this dislike, which have generally gone unanswered anywhere (much less in this article or by Bush himself). Paints Julius Caesar's imperial takeover of Rome as a positive thing, bringing peace and prosperity to a nation formerly in turmoil. (Sure, and I bet Germany would have been peaceful under Hitler, at least in the official accounts.)
    • 2007-08-16 Group that advocated Bush become "President-for-Life" linked to Bush Administration itself: they're not even denying that Bush is anti-democracy anymore, if they ever did.
  • 2007-07-04 I Accuse You, Mr. Bush... by Keith Olbermann (Related: 2007-07-02 Libby bail-out): a good list of charges
  • 2007-03-14 The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors by Glenn Greenwald
  • 2006-10-06 Olbermann to Bush: 'A Special Comment About Lying' by Keith Olbermann (video with full transcript and reader comments)
  • 2006-10 Let’s quit while we’re behind by Christopher Buckley: 'Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research? A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.'
  • 2006-09-25
  • 2006-08-24 Vonnegut's Apocalypse: "...but it took George W. Bush to break him"
  • found 2006-06-24 The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush / The Case for Divided Government
  • 2006-06-08 Blame for Haditha Lies at Bush's Feet by Scott Ritter, AlterNet
  • found 2006-05-09 An Apology From a Bush Voter by Doug McIntyre, Host, McIntyre in the Morning, Talk Radio 790 KABC
  • 2005-11: Confessions of a Repentant Republican
  • 2005-10-22: Death Up; Taxes Down: Bush, an Assessment
  • 2005-10-21: reader comment on [1]: "I have just spent the last four years watching conservatives throw away any and every principle they have ever claimed to have in support of GW Bush. * Balanced Budgets - out the window. * Peace - out the window. * Prosperity - out of the window. * Geneva Convention - out of the window. * 6th Amendment - out the window. * Small Goverment - out the window."
  • 2005-09-03: "My wife, a dual British-Australian citizen, says that in any civilized country, the massive failure of the Bush administration would bring down the government. It is not so simple. Emperor Bush II, after all, came into office by a coup, and consolidated power 4 years later (involving election machine software as well as more traditional fraud). In the process, he betrayed (1) the Bush family (firing the remnants of his Dad's friends from Cabinet-level and the next rung down), and recall that Bush Senior fought to SAVE the wetlands around New Orleans; (2) the rump-state of the Republican party (which had been nominally run by the technocrat Goldwater, whose election failure led to the takeover by the anti-government Reagan wing, which in turn was displaced by the current anti-Science Imperial Theocrats; (3) the country (as reconfirmed by the Gulf Coast fiasco); (4) the World (unilateralism, Iraq, Bolton in UN, etc.); (5) the universe (see Anti-Science, supra)" [2]
  • 2005-09-01: "Impeach George Bush. Impeach him now." [3]
  • 2004-09-10: Why conservatives must not vote for Bush
  • 2004-02-08: You Can Make It With Plato: "Bush's difficult relationship with reality." by William Saletan
  • 2004: "We invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have. We may have ignited a war of civilizations it was in our vital interest to avoid. Never has America been more resented and reviled in an Islamic world of a billion people. As custodian of the national economy and decisive actor in the management of the Budget of the United States, George W. Bush has compiled a fiscal record of startling recklessness." — conservative pundit Pat Buchanan in Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (ISBN 0312341156)
  • 2003-04-22: Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult:
    • "I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death." – Gary Bauer, evangelical Christian
    • "A former Texas Department of Public Safety officer, a devout Roman Catholic, told this reporter that evidence to the contrary, Bush was more than happy to ignore DNA data and documented cases of prosecutorial misconduct to send innocent people to the Huntsville, Texas lethal injection chamber."
  • 2002-11-08: Bush Anything But Moronic, According to Author: "Dark Overtones in His Malapropisms" by Murray Whyte, about Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, a book by Mark Crispin Miller

[edit] Quotes About

  • "Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot." – popular bumper sticker
  • "George W. Bush is just like Forrest Gump. Except that Forrest Gump is honest and cares about other people." – sigline, author unknown
  • "You agree that this president is one of the top two or three most incompetent in history?" - Right wing financial talk show host Larry Kudlow, to a guest, on MSNBC 2006-01-17 (quoted here; unverified).

[edit] Rumors

  • Bush was talked out of bombing Al-Jazeera by Tony Blair: apparently false, unless further evidence surfaces. The White House at least seems to realize how crazy the idea would be: BBC News See also Al Jazeera bombing memo at Wikipedia and more details at the Asheville Global Report and here.

[edit] Links

[edit] Reference

[edit] non-neutral

  • Bush Scandals List: starts with a good editorialistic summary of The Bush Calamity. Bush surrounds himself with a handful of trusted advisors; whoever gets to him first carries the day because he is too lazy to change his mind and doesn't like being wrong.

[edit] Books

[edit] Tagged Links

  • 2008-07-10 /S/D/ Bush's Banned Interview: An Insight Into Insanity “The video shows Bush at the absolute peak of his arrogance -- convinced of his own rhetoric about Iraq, flooded with confidence from international subservience to American power, and high off a crushing military victory that reinforced his childish fantasies of American power and preeminence. .. The problem was, Coleman was having none of it, and what transpired was a unique insight into the warped brain of the least respected and most hated president in the history of the United States.” Classic Bushism: "My job is to do my job." Page with direct video link: 2006-11-13 BANNED Pres. Bush Interview
  • 2008-07-02 /S/D/ President Bush Boosts Pornography Industry With Economic Stimulus Plan, According to AIMRCo “An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.” Well, it was intended to be a "stimulus" package.
  • 2008-07-01 /S/D/ The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency “In a lot of ways, choosing the Bush administration's 10 greatest moments -- disastrous failures, all -- is about as pointless as picking out your 10 least favorite hemorrhoids: There are entirely too many of them, and taken together they all add up to a throbbing mass of pain. But unfortunately, history demands that we at least make the effort so that future generations will understand why we perform voodoo rituals cursing Bush's memory before we go to bed every night.”
  • 2008-06-29 /S/D/ Clinton Impeachment Manger Says, Bush Is Worse “BARR: What George W. Bush has done to the fabric of our constitutional government -- to separation of powers, to a government of limited powers, to destroy the notion that we are a nation of laws not men -- is something that is absolutely unforgivable, irresponsible, and terribly, terribly destructive of our notion of government. .. President Clinton, I certainly had my problems with him. But what he did in terms of perjury and obstruction was bad, but it was not destructive of the very systemic foundations of our country.”
  • 2008-05-23 /S/D/ Despite Bush's Vow to Veto, GI Bill Passes in a Landslide “On Thursday, May 22, three-quarters of the Senate voted to support a new GI Bill for the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Following the 256-166 victory in the House last week, the GI Bill has achieved almost unparalleled momentum. A number of Senators actually changed their NO votes to AYE, as it became clear that this vote was going to be a landslide: 75-22. .. These 75 Senators stood with Senators Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel in favor of a new bipartisan GI Bill that actually covers the cost of college. As these Senators return home to honor troops and veterans during the Memorial Day recess, they can proudly point to their vote this week as proof of their commitment to our troops. IAVA thanks each and every one of them.”
  • 2008-05-15 /S/D/ Biden calls Bush comments 'bulls**t' Speaking about George W. Bush's comments accusing Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats of wanting to appease terrorists, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden said “He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has. His intelligence community pointed that out not me. The NIE has pointed that out and what are you talking about, is he going to fire Condi Rice? Condi Rice has talked about the need to sit down. So his first two appeasers are Rice and Gates. I hope he comes home and does something.” A longer and uncensored account of Biden's comments is here. Note that most of the comments in that latter link are supportive of Bush while completely ignoring the substance of Biden's remarks.
  • 2008-03-24 /S/D/ The conservative case for Barack Obama by Andrew J. Bacevich: “Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives — and the state of the conservative movement — they could do worse.”
  • 2008-03-21 /S/D/ How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? by Andrew Sullivan: “But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent — even glib — about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom — the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.”
  • 2008-03-03 /S/D/ White House guts Intelligence Oversight Board “the White House issued a new executive order effectively gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), “created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.” Under the order, many of the IOB’s investigative powers will now be transfered to DNI Mike McConnell. “Rather than intelligence agencies reporting their activities to the board for review, they will now report them to McConnell,” the AP notes. Smintheus has more.”
  • 2008-01-17 /S/D/ Bush's Middle East Hopes “At a time when George W. Bush arouses such intense vituperation among his critics, someone who wishes him well, like myself, criticizes reluctantly. But criticize one must; to pretend all is well, or to remain loyal to the person despite his record, does no one a favor. A frank recognition of shortcomings must precede their repair.”
  • 2007-12-26 /S/D/ Bush's very good year by Larry Kudlow: “Against all odds, and despite the usual drumbeat of criticism, President Bush had a very good year. .. The troop surge in Iraq is succeeding. America remains safe from terrorist attacks. And the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.”
  • 2007-12-19 /S/D/ Bush set for another win over Dems “The Democratic-controlled House is expected to give President Bush an end-of-session victory in his yearlong battle with anti-war lawmakers over Iraq by approving $70 billion for U.S. military operations there and in Afghanistan.”
  • 2007-11-21 /S/D/ Bush 'involved' in CIA leak case “At the conference, Mr. McClellan told journalists that the two aides Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in leaking Ms Plame's identity. .. The excerpt reads: "There was one problem. It was not true. .. 'I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice-president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself.'"”
  • 2007-09-20 /S/D/ Dan Rather's Conspiracy Theory "The former anchorman alleges CBS shut him up to protect George W. Bush." by Byron York, National Review White House Correspondent
  • 2007-09-20 /S/D/ Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Persons Who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism George W. Bush extends the national emergency declared on 2001-09-23 (in response to the 2001-09-11 attacks) for another year.
  • 2007-08-01 /S/D/ Bush Keeps Israel Close, Saudi Arabia Closer "From the White House comes the news that self-styled anti-terrorism crusader George Bush wants to sell $20 billion in high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers, for the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the United States." Where are all the hardline anti-terror, "you're either with us or you're a traitor" crowd?? Why aren't they screaming about this?
  • 2007-08 /S/D/ The History Boys by David Halberstam (Halberstam was killed in a car wreck 2007-04-23, so this must have actually been written before that): “In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman - unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.”
  • 2006-11-13 /S/D/ BANNED Pres. Bush Interview “This is a video I found of an Irish TV interview with President Bush. I later found out that this interview was not shown on American television because it was banned! Why you ask, take a look and see...” Commentary: Ben Cohen
  • 2006-09-11 /S/D/ Fascists Under the Bed by Patrick J. Buchanan: “Contrary to what Bush believes, the 9/11 killers and London and Madrid bombers were not out to repeal the Bill of Rights, if any ever read it. They are out to kill us and we have to get them first. ... If Mr. Bush does not want a war of civilizations, he will drop these propaganda terms that are designed to inflame passions rather than inform the public of the nature of the war we are in.”
  • 2006-08-15 /S/D/ Is Bush an "Idiot"? “Is the President of the United States, George W. Bush, an idiot? Scarborough Country asks the forbidden question. They look at his inability to speak correctly, not at his inability to lead correctly, however. Of course the real question is, is the Republican Party full of idiots because they nominated the sucker, and continue to blindly follow his crap?” Host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, seems to be leaning towards "yes"; his two panelists debate the issue with some substance. The "con" side is basically "he's just inarticulate, not stupid"; the "pro" side raises the point: How can you tell, based on his actions? Also, is it sheer coincidence that Scarborough Country was canceled only a few months later?
  • 2005-12-07 /S/D/ Bush: 'We have to win the battle after the battle' “President Bush touted U.S. wartime successes in helping Iraq improve its economy and infrastructure Wednesday during a high-profile speech saying "we have to win the battle after the battle."”
  • 2000-04-29 /S/D/ Bush a prize cynic, fellow alumnus says “But the author of Newsweek’s acclaimed "Between the Lines" column awarded the top prize for cynicism to Texas Gov. George W. Bush, a fellow Phillips Academy alumnus, who graduated in 1964. .. Reflecting on the March presidential primary in South Carolina, Mr. Alter criticized "our own alumnus" for the way he distorted the record of then-candidate Arizona Sen. John McCain. .. "The first stop that George W. made was to appear with a crack-pot veteran who said McCain had done nothing for veterans in the Senate." Sen. McCain is considered a war hero after he spent five years as a captive during the Vietnam War. .. During the New York primary, Gov. Bush went on to accuse Sen. McCain of voting against breast cancer research. Gov. Bush eventually distanced himself from ads that stated Sen. McCain opposed putting money for breast cancer research into a military spending measure. Sen. McCain ultimately dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, but there is still some question if he will embrace Gov. Bush's campaign.”

[edit] News & Views

[edit] Texts

[edit] Groups

[edit] pro-Bush

[edit] anti-Bush

[edit] Satire

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Notes

Back when Clinton was first elected, there were all these bumper stickers saying "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush". I want to mass-produce bumper stickers saying "Ok, you can blame me this time." and paste them over all the few remaining "W '04" bumper stickers you still see around. (Note that Gore and Kerry supporters did not indulge in this kind of sore-loserhood in either of GWB's stolen elections.) --Woozle 18:42, 1 November 2006 (EST)

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