How bad is Bush?

Parent Cafe
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<p>As I’ve noted, I do see some deterioration in GWB’s speech patterns. He seems much less self-assured and much less adroit than he used to be. Under the circumstances, I find that very troubling, but not surprising. </p>

<p>I don’t think he has been a very good judge of people. Rove has turned out to be among the worst Presidential political directors in recent memories - I mean, come on, a post-9/11 Pres winning only 51% against John Kerry and then giving away the store in 2006? Condi “we don’t rendition” Rice? The Rumsfeld disaster? Harriet Miers - “by far the best qualified person in the United States to lead the Supreme Court”? Alberto Gonzales? </p>

<p>I wish his actions could easily be explained away by stupidity, but sadly, I doubt it. As for Clinton, his intellect didn’t stop him from killing children, and then attempting to cover it up in 1998, hence providing the basis for Democratic backing for the current Iraqi debacle. Intelligence is overrrated.</p>

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<p>For me, intelligence broadly defined and encompassing some of the characteristics I talked about, is not overrated, but is a necessary but insufficient condition to being a medium to great president. Clinton had enough to be great, but wasn’t. He was pretty good in my opinion. Nixon had enough, and could have been really good.</p>

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<p>Rove has been a fantastic political director. He’s just been a disastrous policy director.</p>

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<p>mini, could you please explain what you are referring to when you say Clinton killed children? Pretty please?</p>

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<p>Check through the archives. Basically, the Clinton Administration decided - unilaterally - to interpret United Nations sanctions against the shipment of military equipment, to include equipment to repair wastewater treatment plants (which they bombed), small electrical generation systems for hospitals, aspirins, simple antibiotics, anti-diarrheals, children’s medicines, bandaids. Iraq’s medical system, once the jewel of the Middle East, where folks from all over went for treatment, was quickly thrown into complete disarray. Between 1992 and 1998 (most before 1997), about a million people died (somewhere between 3 and 6 times the number of people killed by Idi Amin during his entire career), including half a million children. There is debate as to whether it was half a million chidlren under age 5, but no debate about the half million children. Friends of mine spent a good part of the 1990s, in direct violation of U.S. law of which I am very open and proud, raising funds to help the American Friends Service Committee repair the wastewater equipment and bring in antibiotics, but it was a drop in the bucket.</p>

<p>In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeline Albright, who at the time was Clinton"s UN Ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that"s more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?” Madeline Albright replied “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”</p>

<p>European leaders charged the U.S. with genocide claims (you can read about them by searching Google for Denis Halliday and genocide - he is now teaching at Swarthmore, I think), until the U.S. backed off, and instituted “Oil for Food”. The attempted genocide was specifically aimed at the civilian population, seemingly for two reasons: 1) Clinton hoped that as a result the military (who he would not attack) would rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein, leaving the Iraqi military intact, and now a client state of the U.S.; and 2) a reduced child population would weaken Iraq for an entire generation (as it has). </p>

<p>The genocide having failed (though virtually every Sunni and Shia Iraqi having a dead child in their extended family), Clinton changed strategy, and decided to take aim at the Iraqi military, culminating in the Christmas Bombing of 1998, and the most intensive bombing campaign conducted by the United States since Viet Nam. In doing so, he brought in George Tenet to concoct a series of lies about WMD production, stockpiles, and delivery capabilities (now, mind you, this was at a time when there were inspectors all over Iraq, all of whom universally disagreed). Clinton and Tenet sold these lies to the Democratic leadership - Carl Levin, Joe Biden, Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry, Al Gore - all of whom in February 1998 started making speeches about the impending danger of Iraq’s growing stockpiles of weapons, none of which existed, and for which there was no intelligence whatsoever anywhere in the world. I have posted their speeches repeatedly.</p>

<p>The lies having been sold to the “astute, intelligent, and experienced” Democratic leadership, this very same George Tenet was kept on by George Bush to repackage and resell the same lies and more (“it’s a slam dunk”) to a ready and willing bunch of Democrats who couldn’t repudiate them without also repudiating the pack of lies sold to them by Bill Clinton.</p>

<p>To this day, Hillary Clinton can’t repudiate her vote on Iraq based on faulty intelligence, because she knows that the faulty intelligence has footprints that lead directly back to the Clinton White House.</p>

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<p>From the insider books that are coming out about the Bush administration, Bush has the following characteristics:</p>

<p>a) He is bored with, and will not read, briefing papers.</p>

<p>b) He likes to have decisions presented to him in pre-digested form.</p>

<p>c) He “goes with his gut” and then is inclined to “stay the course” with intractable resolve and bravado.</p>

<p>With those qualities in mind, the tag team of Cheney and Rumsfeld basically steam-rolled the President, blocking dissenting views from being presented. Specifically, the two shut State out of the process.</p>

<p>A key component to the decision-making is the degree to which intelligence was taken in-house by the Vice President and Defense.</p>

<p>IMO, George W. Bush, today, is a pathetic figure. He certainly understands that his policy is an abject failure. However, he is so committed to the forces advocating that policy (Cheney, the Saudis, Israel, the hawk wing of his party, etc.) and so detached from contrary opinion (the American public, our traditional allies, etc.) that he can’t accept any way out.</p>

<p>Why he didn’t grab the life preserver his Dad threw him with the Baker-Hamilton Commission? I guess we’ll have to wait for the history books on that one. He clearly chose the American Enterprise Institute’s neo-con long-term escalation plan (aka “the Surge”).</p>

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<p>mini - thank you. very enlightening (and depressing) reading.</p>

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<p>No, it’s not. Bush is a wartime President–like it or not. Contrary to what most people think here, I do not think he is a shallow, or stupid, person. I believe he takes each and every death in Iraq to heart. I think these deaths weigh heavily upon him.</p>

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<p>Roosevelt was 63. Bush will be 61 in July.</p>

<p>Bush is a human being. I can’t believe some of the sentiments I read here. Anyone who thinks he planned for things to go badly in Iraq is a fool. War takes a toll. Personally I can’t wait for him to leave office so he doesn’t deteriorate further, and so Big Mama Hillary can save us all. LOL.</p>

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<p>hereshoping, if he “takes each and every death in Iraq to heart” and it “weighs so heavily on him” how come you never see him attending any military funerals ? Or allow photographs of flag-covered coffins? Or fund veteran hospitals?</p>

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<p>Didn’t the American Enterprise Institute (or was it the New American Century) people write a letter to Clinton in 1998 urging him to take out Saddam for much of the reasons put forth by W in 2003? I know there were people in the first Gulf War who thought his dad messed up not following Saddam into Iraq and on to Baghdad.</p>

<p>Anyway, what irks me is this war was never about wmd, it was about transforming the middle east into a democracy through regime change and that was all laid out in an article in Foreign Affairs (published by the Council on Foreign Relations) just prior to the invasion while they were going thru the motions at the UN. It was an idea cooked up by Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and some other people and sold to Cheney and Rumsfeld who convinced W of it. However, forcing democracy at gunpoint would have never flown with the UN or Congress so they needed another argument. These people went into the White House with a game plan and 9/11 speeded up the start date.</p>

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<p>i agree with zoosermom</p>

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<p>Mini blames Clinton for the death of Iraqi children that resulted from UN sanctions first imposed under Bush 1 in 1992 and continuing through the Clinton administration and the Iraq invasion under Bush 2.</p>

<p>Between the destruction of infrastructure (water treatment plants, hospitals, etc.) in Gulf War I, the UN economic sanctions, and Sadaam’s reign of terror, a very large number of Iraqi children died from poor nutrition and health care. The number is probably not the half million Mini cites, but is certainly in the hundreds of thousans over the ten year period.</p>

<p>Mini believes that Clinton committed genocide by not following the policy advocated by ex-UN relief chief Dennis Halliday, i.e. ending the economic sanctions against Sadaam’s regime. The “genocide” characterization is a bit dramatic, but the policy position advocated by Mini is certainly a legitimate point of view. Of course, the other alternative to the sanctions was an invasion of Iraq (as we have seen from Bush 2).</p>

<p>Unfortunately, Iraq under Sadaam Hussein was not a situation that lent itself to “good” or “easy” solutions. Virtually every conceivable policy had serious liabilities. The sanctions indeed took a humanitarian toll. However, the santions were also the reason that Sadaam did not have active WMD programs. He tried to keep the nuke program going after Gulf War I and simply couldn’t because of the restrictions imposed by the sanctions. The last remnants of the program were abandoned in the 1992 time frame, although he did his best to keep the team of scientists together for some indeterminant time in the future. Thus, ending the sanctions carried a cost as well. And, certainly, we’ve seen the humanitarian cost of invading Iraq as an alternative to sanctions.</p>

<p>Mini does not point out that the UN approved the “Oil for Food” program to supply humanitarian aid to Iraq in September 1991. Sadaam Hussein refused to allow the program to start until May1996. The program finally started in December 1996 with the first shipments arriving in early 1997.</p>

<p>Overall, Mini’s narrative is accurate from the perspective of the American Friends Service Committee, but one-sided.</p>

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<p>I think the response to 9/11 in Afghanistan was appropriate but what could have turned into a major success story got side tracked by Iraq. Just imagine what Afghanistan could be like today if we’d spent all the Iraq money and effort nation building in Afghanistan instead of pursuing somebody’s silly intellectual exercise in a sand pit in Iraq. Trust me, I don’t think they want to still be there. I think they actually thought the transformation would work and rather quickly at that. Probably listened too much to Chalabi.</p>

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We have a winner. Ding ding ding.</p>

<p>MM, I think you might characterize Iraq, with only mild lack of accuracy, as a Feith-based initiative.</p>

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<p>And another winner here.</p>

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<p>I know, in my heart of hearts, that GWB is among the worst Presdients ever. But I also know that a lot of that judgement is clouded by my having a different set of values than he does. So, ultimately, we will have to wait a while and let historians judge him in hindsight.</p>

<p>One problem in waiting is that so much of this Adminstration has been conducted in secret and a disproportionate amount of material has been classified, even allowing for the terrorist threat. There simply won’t be the normal amount of documentation to work with.</p>

<p>I wonder how his appearance at next year’s Republican convention will go. Will he be embraced or merely tolerated? He’ll have to address the convention. Will they feature his speech in prime-time hours?</p>

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<p>“One thing I have noticed is that Bush is successful in delivering speeches for which he is very well prepared.”</p>

<p>Please be aware, there these people called speech writers. All presidents (or at least most modern) use them. They practice the speech and television spots in the same way an actor would. </p>

<p>It’s like thinking evening news men are smart or Alex Trebeck really knows all those answers on Jeparody. They all can read prompts.</p>

<p>When they have to answer questions on the fly do you see where they struggle. GW struggles because he has to think, not a team. He has to come up with an answer, not the team. That is why there was all that talk when he had a good night that he was wired with a feed, just like a sportscaster. </p>

<p>I just think GW is living proof of the peter prinicipal.</p>

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<p>HH: Roosevelt had polio. And he had been president for a long, long time. I fail to see many parallels. </p>

<p>Bush on the other hand, rather than having a life of polio’s ravages to excuse him, has been intent on getting exercise and living a balanced life, as evidenced by this statement of monumental baby-boomer egotism. This statement was made with respect to protests about the Iraq War. Whether or not you agree with the protests, the statement itself is fairly revealing:</p>

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<p>Talk about being part of the me generation. I don’t see a lot of “taking each death to heart” in this statement. Quite the opposite.</p>

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NOTE: Zoosermon: here’s how mud-slinging starts.</p>

<p>I don’t think many people think Bush planned to have things go badly in Iraq. I think most people are concerned that Bush never took into account, either in deciding whether or not to go into Iraq or planning for the post-invasion time, that things could go very badly. I mean there’s no evidence that even contingency planning was done on this basis.</p>

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<p>Um…I said that not zoosermom. There is a poster here who repeatedly states that the “neo-cons” want the war in Iraq to go badly–or rapture-believers, end-timers, or some such pov.</p>

<p>I realize FDR had polio. I was simply trying to inject a little humanity into the thread. It seems people forget that Presidents are not Gods.</p>

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<p>He was warned. By his own Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Of course, Cheney and Rumsfeld proceded to wage a campaign to discredit Powell as being weak-kneed. Basically, they Valerie Plame’d him. Just like dissenting analysts throughout the government (CIA, State, Defense) were Valerie Plame’d.</p>

<p>Bush was so caught up in his simplistic “forces of good versus forces of evil” world view that he missed the warnings.</p>