George W. Bush

This page is a seed article. You can help Issuepedia water it: make a request to expand a given page and/or donate to help give us more writing-hours!

Negative Points

• Anti-environment
• Conservative Christian outlook (this is being filed under negative for now, but if someone wants to defend it...)
• Lied about his intentions in invading Iraq, claiming there was strong evidence of WMDs when it seems clear that there was none
• Responded to violence (9/11) with violence (unsanctioned invasion of a non-involved country)
• Against same-sex marriage
• He is sometimes just, I'm sorry, really scary (most notably, search for "reality-based" and read the paragraph which includes it)
• Claimed, in 2000, to be "a uniter, not a divider", but in fact seems to play heavily on The Red-Blue Divide, both in his 2004 campaign and in his actions while in office
• Seems at times to be looking for any excuse to declare martial law: "The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bans the military from participating in police-type activity on U.S. soil. Bush began discussing the possibility of changing the law last month, in the aftermath of the government's sluggish response to civil unrest following Hurricane Katrina." ... "a senior editor at the conservative Cato Institute, said Bush would risk undermining "a fundamental principle of American law" by tinkering with the act, which does not hinder the military's ability to respond to a crisis." [1]

Positive Points

• Removed Saddam Hussein from power (into which he had been placed by his father's administration [2])
• Pushed ahead with reconstruction in Iraq when popular opinion was against occupation after the first few weeks. (If you want to see how pulling out of reconstruction early due to public demand has disastrous results, look at the curtailed reconstruction of Vietnam, for instance)
• Disarmed Libya of its chemical, nuclear, biological WMDs.
• Signed largest nuclear arm reduction ever with Russia.
• States his personal views and governs with his morals (A somewhat-positive flipside to the somewhat-negative Conservative Christian outlook)

Debatable Points

• Republican
• Supportive of big business (part of the Republican Party platform)
• Pushed the No Child Left Behind Act
• Pushed for family-centric reforms (e.g., reformed adoption laws, requiring adopting parents to have background checks before getting children)
• Nominated John Roberts and Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court

Opinions

• 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)" [3]
• 2005-09-01: "Impeach George Bush. Impeach him now." [4]
• 2004-09-10: Why conservatives must not vote for Bush
• 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)

Articles

• 2000-2007 US Presidential Administration

Links

• http://www.sorryeverybody.com/ : The U.S. apologizes for electing GWB
• http://www.amconmag.com/12_15_03/feature.html