Why do so many people hate George Bush?

Politics International Politics
1

Is it because of BUSH’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

  • He attacked and took over two countries.
  • He spent the U.S. surplus and bankrupted the Treasury.
  • He shattered the record for biggest annual deficit in history.
  • He set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.
  • He set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
  • He is the first president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
  • He is the first president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
  • In his first year in office he set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history. After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, he presided over the worst security failure in US history.
  • He set the record for most campaign fundraising trips by any president in US history.
  • In his first two years in office he allowed over 2 million Americans to lose their jobs.
  • He cut unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any other president in US history.
  • He set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.
  • He appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
  • He set the record for the fewest press conferences of any president since the advent of TV.
  • He signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any other president in US history.
  • He presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
  • He presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
  • He cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
  • He set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest against him (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind
  • He dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
  • He’s made his presidency the most secretive and unaccountable of any in US history.
  • Members of his cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history.
    (The ‘poorest’ multimillionaire, Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her).
  • He is the first president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.
  • He presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud in any market in any country in the history of the world.
  • He is the first president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation, and he did so against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
  • He has created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
  • He set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any other president in US history.
  • He is the first president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the Human Rights Commission.
  • He is the first president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the Elections Monitoring Board.
  • He removed more checks and balances, and has the least amount of congressional oversight than any presidential administration in US history.
  • He rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
  • He withdrew from the World Court of Law.
  • He refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.
  • He is the first president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors access during the 2002 US elections.
  • He is the all-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations. The biggest lifetime contributor to his campaign, who is also one of his best friends, presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEOof Enron Corporation).
  • He spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
  • He is the first president to run and hide when the US came under attack
    (and then lied, saying the enemy had the code to Air Force One)
  • He is the first US president to establish a secret shadow government.
  • He took the world’s sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
  • He is the first US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
  • He is the first US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than by their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
  • He changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
  • He set the all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling their huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
  • He has removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
  • In a little over two years he has created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided that the US has been since the civil war.
  • He entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

  • He has at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine
    (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).
  • He was AWOL from the National Guard and deserted the military during a time of war.
  • He refused to take a drug test or even answer any questions about drug use.
  • All records of his tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to his fathers library, sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
  • All records of any SEC investigations into his insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
  • All minutes of meetings of any public corporation for which he served on the board are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
  • Any records or minutes from meetings he (or his VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

PERSONAL REFERENCES:

For personal references, please speak to his dad or Uncle James Baker
(They can be reached in their offices at the Carlyle Group where they are helping to divide up the spoils of the US-Iraq war and plan for the next one.)

“(George W. Bush) is the worst president ever. He is the worst president in all of American history.”
– Helen Thomas, United Press International

2

Much as I agree with the sentiments, a few quibbles.

[quote=“European”]Is it because of BUSH’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

  • He is the first president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.

[/quote]

Yeah, but it was Timothy McVeigh! Let’s keep that in perspective. If some monster who blows up and kills 200 innocents doesn’t deserve the death penalty, no one does.

But certainly not the only president to have been a career criminal before office. Remember, JFK was a tool of the Mafia for his entire career.

Whoaaaaaa!!! This is MAJOR whopper! The Mexican War. The Philippines. WWII - Germany and Japan were military occupations of sovereign nations. Korea. Vietnam. Grenada (if that counts as a “war”, heh). Panama.

This has nothing to do with George Bush or the United States’ reputation. It is because the U.N. has instituted a rotating membership on the Human Rights Commission - and in the recent lottery, such staunch defenders of human rights as Sudan were placed on the Commission (yet another blow for the U.N.'s credibility).

See above.

He’s hardly the first and won’t be the last to do so. The U.N. has rendered itself irrevelant in the past by twiddling their thumbs and refusing to lift a finger to take care of any of the major world humanitarians disasters in the past decade: stood by and did nothing about Somalia, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia. It’s proven itself a basically useless and irrelevant organization for taking any necessary steps towards solving the world’s problems beyond hemming and hawing and passing a passel of resolutions that sound nice on paper but have no muscle to back them up whatsoever.

No nation during wartime has not violated the Geneva Convention at some point. Hundreds of nations, including your own, have regularly violated the Convention in the past and probably are doing so as we speak. Have you ever read the Geneva Convention? It’s a theoretical ivory tower document for an idealized “gentleman’s war”.

Nope, Abraham Lincoln still holds the record by a country mile. Of course, during the circumstances of Civil War, he had to do what he had to do.

I despise the man and think he’s one of the most incompetent men to ever hold office of presidency, up there with that alcoholic slob Ulysses S. Grant. But let’s be accurate and fair here. Let’s not let our propaganda get in the way of facts.

3

Thank you European; next time give some credit where it’s due and list your source. Anyway, your reasons don’t really correspond with the thoughts of the general public. We can make lists like this for any president. Trivia…yawn.

4

Fortunately, the “so many people” who “hate George Bush” are the same sort of leftie fruitbats that European so perfectly represents. They’ve successfully marginalized themselves so badly that they’re soon to have just as much power as the Nazis and Baathists.

There are also plenty of people who feel that Bush has earned their grudging respect. He has done very well considering the collapsing economy that Clinton left behind (the stock market started tanking in March 2000, long before Bush was even nominated as the Republican candidate, and ten months before he took office) and the attacks on the U.S. that happened in large part because of Clinton’s pathetic lack of leadership on the problems during the previous decade (Clinton’s bombing of a pharmaceuticals factory, to try to distract from one of his “bimbo eruptions”, certainly didn’t endear the U.S. to the Muslim world).

I could go on, but why bother. European has adequately demonstrated why he and his ilk are doomed to the ash-heap of history.

5

frankly, i hated bush during the election. he ran right and pandered to all the scariest right-wing elements of the republican party. i was pulling for gore to win and was pissed off beyond belief on election night.

that said, bush has proven to be a lot more moderate than i could have hoped for. and you know what, he’s probably going to win reelection next year. you notice that elections for the us presidency are limited to us citizens. bush is elected to represent american citizens, not foreigners who dislike american culture, values, and politics.

you guys should be worrying more about the eu constitution being hammered out and how your most powerful leaders get elected(or appointed as the case usually is). :wink:

6

I don’t think it’s fair to blame (or give credit to) a president for the general macro-economic situation. It’s simply not something over which they have much control (thankfully) beyond manipulating the level of federal spending.

Bush Jr. practices a unilateral style of foreign policy which most Americans apparently support (arguably through manipulation), but foreigners mostly lament. This is a basic problem with a political system based on the nation-state. In principle, Bush’s duty is to do what is best for the U.S.A., but thanks to that country’s economic and military power he has disproportionate influence on the world as a whole.

Many of his faults as a politician are ones which almost any successful U.S. politician could be expected to have. Financial questions, for example, or backpeddling on certain issues.

Drug use is partly a generational problem (what percentage of the U.S. population has never tried illegal drugs?) but partly a genuine scandal which the electorate knew about, and chose to overlook. Clinton (who also used cocaine, by the way, and may have even been a dealer) was in a broadly similar situation with respect to his pre-1992 extramarital affairs.

The civil rights issue is a genuine problem, and it is strange to see the U.S. depart from so many of its legal traditions (for example, by sending its own civilians to military courts). The basic problem is that there exist huge areas of life which are insufficiently policed by any effective authority–the international sphere, cyberspace, nanotech, etc.–and which the existing legal system finds difficult to deal with.

7

You must mean Roger Clinton, the half-brother of Bill. Roger was indeed a cokehead and was sent to prison in Arkansas for it. To his credit Bill refrained from pulling any strings to commute his brother’s sentence. There were tons of rumours of Bill having affairs floating around Arkansas when he was governor, long before he was a national figure - it was an open secret that everyone ignored because the feeling was that it was between he and his wife. There was never any proof that Bill was a cokehead, much less a dealer. I don’t recall his name ever being attached to any of the numerous drug scandals in Arkansas throughout his tenure as governor, and believe me, in a state as small as Arkansas, there’s no way he could have kept any cocaine abuse secret, not with his position.

8

Gosh with such a question, I was waiting for people to come forward to criticize European for advancing an agenda under the cloak of asking a question. Guess such comments are only deemed necessary when certain views (and/or questions) are raised?

freddy

9

Yep. The majority of voters also hated to see ol’smirkface elected as US. Pres.

Yikes! Flipper you’ve flipped.

What? “A lot more moderate than I could have hoped for.”

Bush & Co. have been even worse than I feared. His “compassionate conservatism” makes Attila the Hun look like Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

10

Yep. The majority of voters also hated to see ol’smirkface elected as US. Pres.[/quote]

Read the Constitution lately? You might be surprised to discover that national campaigns are run on the basis of winning electoral votes, not a majority of the popular vote.

11

I don’t know how this fits into the big picture, but W is the first president with an MBA.

I think what W will truly be remembered for by the American people is his domestic policy. What he has done so far to cater to his old buddies and what he has taken away from the average American is truly outrageous. Compassionate conservatism my ass, dude.
The sad thing is that only very few Joe Public Americans seem to realize just how bad his domestic policy is for them, not just for today, but also in the long run.

12

I’m not a fan of George Bush either … but I think the overly-idealistic and zealous Europeans who can find nothing better to do with their time than criticize the US and George Bush would do much better to exert their time and energy to reform their own less than idealistic governments. For those Americans who dislike GW and his administration … do something about it rather than sit behind the computer and bitch and moan. It is your right and duty to influence and change the government (a right which so many others in this world don’t have, and probably will never have in our lifetime). Take part in grassroots organizations, write letters to your Senators and Representatives, even send a letter to AIT. Be thankful you have the right to complain without worrying about having you and your family executed (like would have happenend if you lived in Iraq before the “Coalition of the Willing” got rid of Saddaam Hussein, or if you’re a resident of the socialist utopia of North Korea). Sheesh … :unamused: :unamused: :unamused:

13

Thank you for reminding us that we do not have death squads in the U.S.A. I was not aware of that. I should be thankful to George Bush because I have the right to complain without being executed? Setting the bar a bit low there, ain’t ya?

And Flipper, you have indeed flipped. Dubya ran as a “compassionate conservative”, “a uniter, not a divider,” - as a moderate Republican, using the same playbook as Clinton did running as a moderate Democrat. But unlike Clinton, who really did turn out to be a genuine third-way centrist, Bush II has run the most right-wing administration in our nation’s history.

And as for the economy beginning to dip in the middle of 2000 - yes, that’s true, and Bush can’t take the blame for such macroeconomic happenings. But his administration has nearly three years to turn the ship around, and the economy has only gotten worse since he’s been in office. One thing that Clinton and Congress did to restore faith in the American economy was to slash government expenditures to push through the only budget surplus since WWII. Putting a dent in the national debt did more to ensure investor confidence and stimulate the economy than the voodoo economics of tax cut after tax cut for the wealthiest 5%. Bush, on the other hand, has personally been responsible for reckless spending and sloppy government management that has put us back into rising deficits. Now managing the national deficit/debt is a macroeconomic issue that the President is personally responsible for. And while he’s using the excuse of 9/11 and the subsequent wars for his ballooning federal government bloat, his administration was pushing the national finances into borrow and spend bankruptcy well before 9/11. The hypocrisy is astounding - Republicans snigger about Democrats being tax & spend while pursuing their even more dangerous economic policy of borrow & spend.

14

Because he gave birth to George W. Bush.

15

Yep. The majority of voters also hated to see ol’smirkface elected as US. Pres.[/quote]

Read the Constitution lately? You might be surprised to discover that national campaigns are run on the basis of winning electoral votes, not a majority of the popular vote.[/quote]

Did someone dispute that?

16

And yet he kept his figure so trim! That’s bound to inspire jealousy. :laughing:

17

you see, i don’t consider a interventionist foreign policy right-wing. in fact, most of our presidents who engaged in interventionist foreign policies were democrats. republicans were more associated with isolationism.

look at what bush has done about the biggest social issues. for someone who’s so tied to the religious right, he’s positively liberal when it comes to issues like abortion and church and state issues. has he done anything at all to indicate that he’s anti-abortion? look at how the bush admin handled the affirmative action issue. they were much more moderate on it than i would have liked since i’m very anti-aa.

and linking presidents and economic cycles is rather pointless. as if having gore in the office would have avoided a global recession. i’ve love to hear your magical scenerio for how the us could have avoided recession and maintained a budget surplus if gore had been president.

don’t even bring up investor confidence unless you’re winning to listen to everything investors say(lower taxes, less regulation, more free trade pacts). seriously, wall street wants all the policies you hate and generally support pro-business, pro-tax-cut republicans. not a good idea to bring them into this. :slight_smile:

if bush is personally responsible for our federal debt, is grey davis personally responsible for the 38 billion cali debt?

and in the area of managing the macroeconomic health of the nation, the federal reserve plays a bigger part than the president. the federal reserve controls the monetary supply and has the tool of interest rates to work with. what does the president have? it all runs through congress eventually though as most of the powers to tax and spend were delegated to the legislative branch. to claim the president is personally responsible for the economy is quite an interesting interpretation of the us constitution.

18

This thing (and variants thereof) is plastered all over the Web–how could you expect European to track down the original source?
britishweekly.com/columns/add.html

19

Not necessarily liberal, but simply echoing the the sentiments of the majority of the nation - which makes him a moderate on social issues. Americans have rampaged towards increasingly liberal toleration in the area of lifestyle issues since the 1960s. The liberals have more or less been winning the fight for the past three decades in the “Cultural Warfare” (to quote Pat Buchanan) arena. It would be political suicide for any sitting president to attempt to repeal the right of abortion, as a quick glance at the polls would tell you.

Affirmative Action was a policy started by a Republican - Richard M. Nixon. No president since him has seriously attempted to disband it, not even the patron saint of modern American conservatism Ronald Reagan.

[quote]
lower taxes, less regulation, more free trade pacts seriously, wall street wants all the policies you hate and generally support pro-business, pro-tax-cut republicans. [/quote]

Why do you assume I’m necessarily against some of those things? And I’ve been reading about Bush losing support in the polls from the economic wing of his party because he’s been a poor manager of this nation’s economy. Smart businessmen pay more attention to the bottom line than to cliched ideology. Neoliberal supply-side dogmatics worship a faith that’s little better than communism dogmatics on the other side of the spectrum. Voodoo economics has never been proven to work despite being tried several times in the past two decades in America. When Reagan seriously tried to put his dogmatic ideology into practice with the 1981 tax cut, it bit him in the ass and turned out to be such a disaster that he was forced to implement the highest tax hike in history just a year later in 1982. Cutting taxes in the '80s left us with a fourfold increase in the national debt, which was only brought under control during the Clinton administration’s thriftier (converse of the “big gubmint tax & spend” rhetoric, the size of the federal government and its expenditures were actually downsized under Clinton, whereas the gubmint ballooned under every Republican administration in the past three decades. But don’t let your dogma and recieved stereotypes get in the way of the actual reality).

[quote]
if bush is personally responsible for our federal debt, is grey davis personally responsible for the 38 billion Cali debt?[/quote]

The states are in debt because the federal government is in debt. Lost federal money must be made up with an increase in state money. Lower federal taxes & expenditures for basic services that must be met = bankruptcy for the states or a massive hike in state taxes (which would be political suicide for any governor who tried it).

[quote]
and in the area of managing the macroeconomic health of the nation, the federal reserve plays a bigger part than the president. the federal reserve controls the monetary supply and has the tool of interest rates to work with. what does the president have? it all runs through congress eventually though as most of the powers to tax and spend were delegated to the legislative branch. to claim the president is personally responsible for the economy is quite an interesting interpretation of the us constitution.[/quote]

I didn’t say that he was responsible for the entire economy. I said that he was personally responsible for the national deficit and budget. The president is the first guy to call the shots when it comes to designing the federal budget. His cabinet draws up the budget and they pass the blueprint on to Congress to approve or disapprove. Congress whittles a little here and slabs on a whole lotta pork there, but that’s just fine-tuning. The president is responsible for the master plan. Anyone who’s ever had to handle a budget can tell you it’s just a matter of simple physics: spend more and take in less, whoah where did I get this massive credit card bill?! You can’t cut taxes and increase spending at the same time and expect the books to stay balanced. You either have to cut spending or increase taxes or a combination of both. This is not a difficult concept to grasp, except to supply-side dogmatics and communists, people who let ideology blind them to common sense reality.
Cutting taxes for the top 1% of income earners and throwing a $200 rebate check at the rest of the voters as a sop is a cynical nadir of the socially Darwinist wing of the Republican party, who wish to take us back to 1903 robber-baronism. The vaunted “tax cut” for the middle and working class is barely enough to pay for a family of four’s monthly food bill - it’s too little too late to stimulate the economy; it’s the American equivalent of Taiwanese vote-buying. Instead of 200NT slipped in a hongbao under the door, a couple hundred bucks ticked off of the tax form come April - bread and circuses.

20

You’re the one letting rhetoric get in the way of facts. At the end of Clinton’s second term, federal government receipts had risen to about 21 percent of the GDP, a good three percent over where they were when Clinton took office (and at near historical highs).

<a href=“http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1821&sequence=0” target=new">Table 2 at this CBO site has all the information you need to study the growth in taxes under Clinton

When Clinton took office in 1993, federal budget revenues were just 17.6% of GDP. Seven years later, they were at 20.8 percent. Clinton did, as you say, control the growth of government as federal spending dropped from 21.5% to 18.4%, but in this he had a huge assist from Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin (who strongly advised him to take that route)and Congressional Republicans who defeated his big government scheme for health care and pushed hard for a balanced budget. After the defeat of his health care plan, Clinton triangulated his way back into a moderate-conservative Democrat.

By the way, I’m not quite sure where you’re getting this massive Reagan tax hike of 1982. Care to explain? I know there was a tax hike under the guise of the 1986 tax reform, but I’m unaware of one in 1982.

The states have their own sources of revenue far beyond what the federal government gives them. California was hit harder by the recession than most states because so much of its economy was dependent on the so-called “new economy,” a sector that was devastated by the last economic downturn.

Have you ever heard of Keynesian economics? Lord Keynes, who was neither a supply-sider nor a communist, said that during economic downturns it made sense for the government to use deficit spending to help prime an economic recovery. Running deficits is not something supply-siders or Communists invented, but was the basis of liberal economic policy for most of the post-war period.

Surely the robber barons wouldn’t want to go back to the heyday of Theodore Roosevelt’s Fair Deal. The late nineteenth century was a much fairer time for them.