diamond
ONE love, blood, life
no.
i knew exactly what i was typing.
posers.
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i knew exactly what i was typing.
posers.
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On "Fox News Sunday," former President George H. W. Bush defended his son's record. "His mother and father" are "very proud of him," Bush said. Host Chris Wallace pointed out that the former president had acknowledged some failures in his son's two terms and asked him to elaborate. "No! You can go back to your, what do you call it, your Google, and you figure out all that," Bush responded.
no.
i knew exactly what i was typing.
posers.
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If Bush is considered the most unpopular US President in recent history, how did he get elected in 2000 (in the first place) and then re-elected in 2004?
Um, maybe they just forgot to take that out of the covenant...
The Raw Story | In racially exclusive neighborhood, residents worried Bush will make it a 'target'
"But the exclusive Dallas community the Bush family will soon join has a troubled history of its own.
Until 2000, the neighborhood association's covenant said only white people were allowed to live there, though an exception was made for servants.
Enacted in 1956, part of the original document reads: "Said property shall be used and occupied by white persons except those shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of different race or nationality in the employ of a tenant."
There would probably actually be enough for a 20 page thread
Given the planets ever dwindling fish stocks, and the environmental impact of energy production, this is a noble goal.“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act
By Joe Klein
"This is not the America I know," President George W. Bush said after the first, horrifying pictures of U.S. troops torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in April 2004. The President was not telling the truth. "This" was the America he had authorized on Feb. 7, 2002, when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention — the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime — did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.
The details of the torture that Bush authorized have been dribbling out over the years in books like Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side. But the most definitive official account was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee just before Christmas. Much of the committee's report remains secret, but a 19-page executive summary was published, and it is infuriating. The story begins with an obscure military training program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they're taken prisoner. Incredibly, the Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainers instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners.
It should be noted that there was, and is, no evidence that these techniques actually work. Experienced military and FBI interrogators believe that torture leads, more often than not, to fabricated confessions. Patient, persistent questioning using subtle psychological carrots and sticks is the surest way to get actionable information. But prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured — first at Guantánamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee report details the techniques used on one prisoner: "Military working dogs had been used against [Mohammed al-] Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks."
Since we live in an advanced Western civilization, there needs to be legal justification when we torture people, and the Bush Administration proudly produced it. Memos authorizing the use of "enhanced" techniques were written in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council. Vice President Dick Cheney and his nefarious aide, David Addington, had a hand in the process. The memos were approved by Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales. A memo listing specific interrogation techniques that could be used to torture prisoners like Mohammed al-Khatani was passed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He signed it on Dec. 2, 2002, although he seemed a bit disappointed by the lack of rigor when it came to stress positions: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," he noted. "Why is standing limited to four hours?"
It would be interesting, just for the fun and justice of it, to subject Rumsfeld to four hours in a stress position — standing stock still with his arms extended, naked, in a cold room after maybe two hours' sleep. But that's not going to happen. Indeed, it seems probable that nothing much is going to happen to the Bush Administration officials who perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes. "I would say that there's some theoretical exposure here" to a war-crimes indictment in U.S. federal court, says Gene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "But I don't think there's much public appetite for that sort of action." There is, I'm told, absolutely no interest on the part of the incoming Obama Administration to pursue indictments against its predecessors. "We're focused on the future," said one of the President-elect's legal advisers. Fidell and others say it is possible, though highly unlikely, that Bush et al. could be arrested overseas — one imagines the Vice President pinched midstream on a fly-fishing trip to Norway — just as Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indicted in Spain and arrested in London for his crimes.
If Barack Obama really wanted to be cagey, he could pardon Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for the possible commission of war crimes. Then they'd have to live with official acknowledgment of their ignominy in perpetuity. More likely, Obama will simply make sure — through his excellent team of legal appointees — that no such behavior happens again. Still, there should be some official acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the Bush Administration's policies were reprehensible, and quite possibly illegal, and that the U.S. is no longer in the torture business. If Obama doesn't want to make that statement, perhaps we could do it in the form of a Bush Memorial in Washington: a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position — the real Bush legacy.
his approval rating hasn't been above 50% since the 2004 election, and it hasn't been above 40% since Hurrican Katrina, and he's remain consistently lower than any other president in history. he's never rebounded in his second term, not even once. and the amount of Americans who say they "strongly disapprove" of the job he is doing is by far the highest in history.
Sorry. I was referring to the time before Bush's major decline in popularity. I mean- What compelled people to vote for Bush in 2000 and 2004?
his approval rating hasn't been above 50% since the 2004 election
and it hasn't been above 40% since Hurrican Katrina
and he's remain consistently lower than any other president in history.
Thats incorrect, its been above 50% multiple times since the 2004 election including on the days February 4-6, 2005 when it was 57%.
Wrong again. It was 44% September 15-17, 2006 over a year after Hurrican Katrina.
Wow. 6 whole days.
I can list all the others if you like.
Not to mention that you can't take a statement about ratings being "consistently lower," and refute them by showing average ratings over time. Apples and oranges.
and he's remain consistently lower than any other president in history.
the big difference between the two approval ratings was term one, was sept 11th and people were all revengeful and it clouded their judgement on things like the war in iraq and afghanistan. Term two people went 'ooops shit, we've elected a dickhead again' and realised Bush and the whole adminstration is pretty much a liability.
Irvine said the following:
What evidence do you have that Bush's approval ratings have been consistently lower than ANY OTHER PRESIDENT IN HISTORY?
I'd say the above statistics easily refutes the statement that Bush's approval rating has been been consistently lower than any other president in history.
It's very basic math. The word "consistently" implies ratings over time. By averaging things together, you're not only including his low trends, but his high ones also, and we all know that a few very high trends, as he had in the days post-9/11, can skew the overall numbers so that averages don't reflect the lows so much, and they turn out not looking as bad as they really are.
Irvine didn't prove it with his statement, but you didn't disprove it, either.
Well, the averages above come from "ratings over time". Both high, low, and mid-range numbers impact "ratings over time". If Bush had been consistently lower than ANY other President in history, it would show up in the averages. Bush's lowest approval rating ever was 25%, not as low as Nixons at 24% or Trumans at 22%.
The links to the gallup website have all of Bush's approval numbers for the entire 8 year period. Gallup put the averages together to show that when looking at ratings over time, Bush was not at the bottom but in the middle when compared to other Presidents.
The Enigma in Chief
We still don't know how or why Bush made the key decisions of his administration.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Saturday, Jan. 10, 2009, at 7:08 AM ET
As George W. Bush once noted, "You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone." What I think he was trying to say is that, over time, historians may evolve toward a more positive view of his presidency than the one held by most of his contemporaries.
At the moment, this seems a vain hope. Bush's three most obvious legacies are his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terror after Sept. 11, and the massive financial crisis. Each of these constitutes a separate epic in presidential misjudgment and mismanagement. It remains a brainteaser to come up with ways, however minor, in which Bush changed government, politics, or the world for the better. Among presidential historians, it is hardly an eccentric view that 43 ranks as America's worst president ever. On the other hand, he has nowhere to go but up.
In a different sense, however, Bush's comment has some validity to it. We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush's contemporaries, don't yet understand it ourselves. The Bush administration has had startling success in one area—namely keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press, and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job at keeping their doings hidden for eight years.
Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq. When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein? What were his real reasons? What roles did various figures around him—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice—play in the actual decision? Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception or of self-deception on their part?
Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and I recently debated in Slate the issue of how much we really know about Bush's biggest decision. Woodward, the author of four inside accounts of the Bush administration, believes that we do know the most important facts. He argues that Bush decided to invade Iraq in January 2003, that the reason was 9/11, and that Bush himself was the real decision-maker. Suskind and I argued that we don't know really how, when, or why the decision was made—though we suspect it was much earlier. By the summer of 2002, administration officials and foreign diplomats were hearing that Bush's course was already set.
The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years. Did Bush's own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps? Or was it the people around him, most importantly his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices? On so many issues—the framing of the war on terrorism, the use of torture, the expansion of executive power—it was Cheney's views that prevailed. Yet at some point, perhaps around the 2006 election, Bush seems to have lost confidence in his vice president and stopped taking his advice.
To reckon with the Bush years, we need to understand what went on between these two men behind closed doors. Yet despite some superb spadework by journalist Barton Gellman and others, we know very little about Cheney's true role. We have seen few of the pertinent documents and heard little relevant testimony. Congressional investigations and litigation have shed only the faintest light on Cheney's role in Bush's biggest blunders.
The same is generally true of Bush's most important political relationship, with Karl Rove, and his most important personal one, with his father. Only with greater insight into these connections are we likely to be able to answer some of the other pressing historical questions. To what extent was Bush himself really the driver of his central decisions? How engaged or disengaged was he? Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?
It seems unlikely that the memoirs in the works from Rove and Rumsfeld will challenge Bush's repeated assertions that he was not only in charge but in control. As for the president himself, we're unlikely to get much: Bush has a poor memory and is too unreflective to have kept the kind of diary that would elucidate matters. In time, however, other accounts are sure to emerge. Congressional investigations will shed new light. Declassified documents and e-mails may paint a clearer picture.
Once the country is rid of Bush, perhaps we can start developing a more nuanced understanding of how his presidency went astray. His was no ordinary failure, and he leaves not just an unholy mess but also some genuine mysteries.