Bush - Bad for the Country

[Racoon]

I think so, but I've run out of steam for now on this topic.

Politics is exhausting, and rarely does arguing about it accomplish anything..

 

But what the hell! :hyper:

 

I think Bush is Bad for this country.

Had the Gut-Feeling ever since he ran in 2000. Yes I'm a Democrat

(a dick-'em rat :hihi: ) And I proudly voted for Gore and Kerry.

 

My problems with Bush are, among many: (and I'll look for links and stats)

 

#1 - The Budget! :eek:

Clinton left with a record surpluss. Now we have a record Deficit.

granted, Clinton was at the right place and time with NAFTA and free trade,

 

But Bush Cut taxes for the rich while going to war which always costs more than they say it will...

 

#2 - The EPA and Environment - Bushes Special Interests include easing Clean Water Standards, Drilling in ANWAR, and totally blowing off the Kyoto Treaty :(

I could say more, but right now it's making me sick...

 

#3 - The intractable war we're in??

What the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden?? I thought he is who we were after :shrug:

To name a few...

 

#4 - Took the support the world had for us after 9/11 and turned it around into more hatred! :evil: Cowboy Politics :esheriff:

 

to respond to Clays last question:

They wanted to Impeach Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky deal.

Bush lied about Iraq having WMD, The deal with the CIA agent leak, and the Karl Rove, Tom Delay fiascos...

I'll look into that some more.

I do not support Impeachment, for reasons I stated earlier.

 

Bush Bad for The USA? YES! The whole Cabinet seems totally inept (FEMA), special interest motivated, and sneaky bad!

Condolezza Rice is his only saving grace.

 

Feel free to counter, agree, or throw your 2-bits into the ring.

[Tormod]

*OOPs>>> Can a Moderator move this into Social Sciences?? my bad. Lounge for quiet contemplation. I got ahead of myself* Thanks!

 

Done.

[InfiniteNow]

A little of both. We've clearly had some issues during his presidency, and many changes culturally. However, he's not the only one responsible. Although he's got a lot of options available to him, there are others involved as well. Further, maybe in the long run it will be a good thing because people who have been dormant to the impacts of decisions around them might just wake up and start demanding changes... So,

 

A little of both.

[Boerseun]

Dumb question, I know, but I'm more in tune with African politics than American:

 

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

[TheBigDog]

Dumb question, I know, but I'm more in tune with African politics than American:

 

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

Not really. The President picks his cabinet heads and they are approved by the Senate. He can fire tham without any approval. They get as much authority in setting policy as he wishes them to have. They are essentially there to put his policies into those departments. Different Presidents give different cabinet leaders more or less rooom to set their own direction.

 

Bill

[bpjg2fat]

bah, bush.:shrug:

[Michaelangelica]

I think so, but I've run out of steam for now on this topic.

Politics is exhausting, and rarely does arguing about it accomplish anything..

 

#3 - The intractable war we're in??

What the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden?? I thought he is who we were after :cake:

Feel free to counter, agree, or throw your 2-bits into the ring.

 

I always knew Americans (USAans?) where bad at geography but really guys. . . Bin Laden is in AFGANISTAN. You know that little bit of high country just north of India. Ask the CIA where it is. During the Russian invasion they sent a bil. or two of arms there. They must know the address. eh. . . - don't bother they would have thown it away after the Russians left.

Saudi Arabia will know where it is -ask them- they have sent a bil. or two of arms and other "aid" there too

 

O yes a lot of Bin Laden's money comes from Saudi Arabia. (I know you think they are your friends; I know,. . I know,. . .)

Saudi Arabia is a little county near. . ( well its a bit hard to explain where it is -buy a globe-but they have lots of oil, lots of US$, big desalination plants,and wear frocks.

:beer:

 

the FUNNY

" I

don't really know how to begin talking about the current situation in

the United States, but I thought I'd read a few passages from senior

high school and college examination papers and essays. Various

professors of history collect these remarks and send them to the

magazine and every three or four years we publish a small anthology,

and I have saved some of the ones that please me the most. These are a

fair indication of the state of the American mind at the moment.

 

This is a history of civilisation as told in a collection of college

and high level high school students:

 

Civilisation woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. Flooding

was erotic.

 

David was a fictional character in the Bible who pleased the people

with his many erections and saved them from a tax by the Philippines.

 

Religion was polyphonic. Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.

 

The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and

Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

 

Plato invented reality. Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle.

Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.

 

Rome was founded sometime by Uncle Remus and Wolf.

 

Neoplatonists celebrated the joys of self-abuse.

 

A German soldier put Rome in a sack. During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.

 

Machiavelli who was often unemployed wrote The Prince to get a job

with Richard Nixon.

 

Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his

later personality.

 

The government of England was a limited mockery. When Queen Elizabeth

exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, Hurrah! Then her

Navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

 

When the Davey Jones index crashed in 1929, many people were left to

political incineration.

 

The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent.

 

We in all humidity are the people of current times. This concept

grinds our critical seething minds to a halt.

 

That is a fairly accurate description of the Bush Administration's

foreign policy."

 

 

 

The DEPRESSING:

"We live in a civilisation in the United States where the number of

people who believe in the literal truth in the Book of Revelation

exceeds the number of people who lived in all of mediaeval

Christendom.

 

The American War against the intellect – by which I mean the drug

trade, television, the pornographic film industry and so on – is now

worth anywhere between $500 billion and a trillion dollars a year. In

other words, it's a more expensive undertaking than our military

establishment. Our leading export at the moment is money. We borrow $4

billion a day in order to ... well, the position is, that our global

war on terror is being funded by the People's Republic of China, and

the war itself is, to my mind, a futile enterprise. It would be like

having a war on lust. It's a war against an unknown enemy and an

abstract noun.

 

 

As to the religious superstition and the numbers of people who believe

in the liberal truth of the Book of Revelation – at a press conference

briefing in Washington last March, the National Association of

Evangelicals declared its intent to lend a hand in the making of an

American politics faithful to the will and abundant wisdom of God.

 

The pastors handed around a twelve-page manifesto for a Bible-based

public policy entitled An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.

And the first few sentences of their joint statements stand as fair

indicators of the tone in which they describe the rest of the program.

As follows:

 

We engage in public life because God created our first parents in

his image and gave them dominion over the earth. We also engage in

public life because Jesus is lord over every area of life. To restrict

our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important

part of this dominion, and to functionally abandon it to the evil one.

To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the

private and domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing lordship

of Jesus.

 

 

 

And that is the kind of thinking that we have in Washington. I don't

know whether I mentioned this already but Bush is a born-again

Christian, so is Tom De Lay, the majority leader in the House of

Representatives; so is Condoleezza Rice; so are one hundred and thirty

members of the House of Representatives. And by and large they take

the point of view that we are all, or they are all, on God's side, as

is the United States of America. And the guarantee of terrible

punishment for God's enemies combined with the assurance and the

ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates

provides the plaque for the left behind series of neo-Christian

fables, thirteen volumes, sixty-two-million copies sold that have

risen in popularity over the last ten years, in concert with the

spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the resurrection of

the militant Christ.

 

The co-authors of the books, Tim La Hay, and Jerry P Jenkins, tell the

story of the rapture on that marvellous and forthcoming day when the

sage shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in

pain. Like most of the prophets who have preceded them, they express

their love of God by rejoicing in their hatred of man. Just as the Old

Testament devotes many finely wrought phrases to the extermination of

the Midionite, also to the butchering of all the people and fatted

calves in Moab, La Hay and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the

wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles. And you

read the book and these are gays, blacks, secular humanists, liberals,

New York newspaper columnists and so forth.

 

And the twelfth book in the series delights in the spectacle of divine

retribution at the battle of Armageddon and I quote: 'Their innards

and entrails gushed to the desert floor and as those around them

turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in

the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.'

 

So we have people, quite a few people, wandering around the United

States with those notions in mind and the faith-based initiative

descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of unknowing that

over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of the American

mind in the fogs of superstition. It isn't only the fundamentalist

crowd, it's also the challenges and the teaching of evolution mounted

in forty-three states, attested to by the – Bush himself is reserving

judgment as to whether evolution is a sound theory."

 

THE FULL LONG DEPRESSING ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigidea/stories/s1481032.htm

 

michael

[C1ay]

to respond to Clays last question:

They wanted to Impeach Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky deal.

Bush lied about Iraq having WMD, The deal with the CIA agent leak, and the Karl Rove, Tom Delay fiascos...

:hihi: They wanted to impeach Clinton for committing perjury in his testimony in the Paula Jones case. There are plenty of people serving 5 year sentences now for lying about their lover while under oath. Clinton should have been treated the same. Perjury is perjury, quit trying to say it isn't. Clinton lied under oath in a court of law and he was disbarred for it. He is a perjurer, no ifs, ands or buts.

 

Bush did not lie about Iraq having WMD. Bush was lied to about Iraq having WMD and passed on what he was told. For that matter, small traces of WMD have been found since we went there so we don't even know if they did or did not have any activity at this time on that subject. We may never know. The claim that he knew Iraq did not, for a fact, have WMD and told the people otherwise is an unsubstantiated, unprovable claim at this point. Feel free to prove otherwise.

 

At this point there is no proof that Valerie Plame was even undercover. It is known that she had not had any clandestine assignments for over 5 years and her friends and family knew what she did for a living. The special prosector has not been able to even prove that any such crime even occured. You should wait for more convincing proof before passing judgement on this one. Feel free to provide such proof if you have it though.

 

Tom Delay made his own bed, Bush had nothing to do with it so put the blame where the blame is due.

 

Bush is somewhat of a moron but trying to pin things on him that he is simply not guilty of does little to support your case.

[C1ay]

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

His powers are limited. Thomas Jefferson probably said it best in his letter to the Danbury Baptists when he wrote:

Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts....

The power of the Executive branch is controlled by Congress as is the power of the Judicial branch. The President has executive power but he can ultimately be trumped by the people, i.e. Congress.

[C1ay]

the 2007 EPA budget will be cut another 4%!

You don't know that. The President sends a suggested budget to Congress but Congress ultimately decides what the actual budget is. If the EPAs budget gets cut it will be Congress that did it, not the administration.

[C1ay]

The intractable war we're in??

What the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden?? I thought he is who we were after :hihi:

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Bin Laden, we are still looking for him in Afghanistan.

 

The war in Iraq was the result of Hussein's breach of the conditions required by the first Iraq war. He was a brutal, genocidal dictator that should have been removed during the first Iraq war. Now that we are there the war has continued because of an influx of terrorists that are attacking us and the Iraqi people. The new government there has asked us to stay until they can fend for themselves. is over, we are now stuck there protecting their people. To leave now would be inhumane.

[Eclogite]

Bin Laden is in AFGANISTAN. You know that little bit of high country just north of India.

It's a small point, but I think you'll find Tibet lies to the north of India.

Afghanistan lies to the north west of Pakistan.

 

There is a reason we Brits called it the North West frontier you know. Unoriginal? True, but damn convenient if you wanted to know which way to march your invading army.

[Erasmus00]

My only contribution will be that I think Bush's administration has set a bad trend in terms of dealing with science and scientists. It isn't that he doesn't listen to scientists, there is nothing new in that, but distorting and censoring EPA studies, not allowing government scientists to speak to the press without administration handlers, etc. To me, its an alarming trend.

-Will

[TheBigDog]

My only contribution will be that I think Bush's administration has set a bad trend in terms of dealing with science and scientists. It isn't that he doesn't listen to scientists, there is nothing new in that, but distorting and censoring EPA studies, not allowing government scientists to speak to the press without administration handlers, etc. To me, its an alarming trend.

-Will

I think you will find this practice is very old, only the blame seems new.

 

Bill

[Jay-qu]

I dont know ;) Im kind of ignorant when it comes to global politics.. he doesnt seem to be much of a favorite, how much longer is he in for?

[Cedars]

What we spend to fund the EPA in 1 year, we are spending in Iraq in 1 week! approximately...:eek:

Bush is bad for the environment. During his first term:

 

Federal lawsuits against corporate polluters violating regulations fell 75% (hmmm, campaign contributers?)

 

Hazardous waste clean-ups down 52%

Clean air inspections down 52%

But public beach closings UP 36%

Mercury levels up, clean water contamination up.

 

the 2007 EPA budget will be cut another 4%! :confused: (to $7.4 billion)

 

Do we want to live in a polluted country with animal and plant species disappearing? Environment is so important.

Dirty Air! Dirty Water! Extinct Animals! Carcinogenic toxins everywhere! B)

Do we want that for our children and grandchildren?

 

There were alot of changes in the EPA and associated programs before Bush Jr. was elected. Superfund monies had been depleted and many spots still needed cleaning. One idea was to focus on the sites we know of and finish the job there. Alot of waste was being produced on the bureucratic side by monitoring things that were not changing. Additionally, the discoveries being made during some of this cleanup confounded the experts. They knew x amount of chemical 1 was put here, on the ground 30-40-60 years ago and when years later, the corportate and state and federal entites had a plan, agreement and resources to clean up the area, they found much of it had dissapeared. Further studies done in some of these areas revealed microbes which had dispersed these pollutants. Now they have to study these microbes themselves before unleashing them into the environment on a whole scale effort to disperse the pollutants. You have probably read a bit on the oil munching bacterias. Its way bigger than that.

 

Another discovery made during these attempts to clean up resulted in further contaminations. This is why no one is hurrying up to clean up the river bottom along New York. Because of the condition there, the expected release into the waterway of the buried chemicals in the silt of the river will exceed the pollution standards and re-release the toxins into the environment. Its a 'better to let sleeping dogs lay' philosophy.

 

Then there are things that they cannot do anything about, such as existing ground water contaminations and topographical contaminations. There are some things we just dont know how to fix yet.

 

Now I do agree with you on a few things Bush has proposed such as relaxing emission standards for older power facilities, rather than the philosophy that was implemented during the 70s - 80s of, you want to exand you upgraded your facilities to meet existing standards.

 

Here is another issue. We have built no new refineries in 30 years or so. Now I dont know how much technology has changed in this area but I do know part of the reason for this non-construction is local resistance to such things. The NIMBY aspect of people. If newer refineries can produce fuels at a lower rate of contamination/pollutant generation, and higher production of the fuels, are we shooting ourselves in the foot by resisting the new facilities?

[Amtekoth]

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Bin Laden, we are still looking for him in Afghanistan.

 

The war in Iraq was the result of Hussein's breach of the conditions required by the first Iraq war.

 

That's NOT the case that was pushed in public at the time. Dick Cheney, in particular, linked Osama and Saddam in speeches over and over again, even when it was reported that no proof of a functional relationship existed.

 

Bush and his people took their eye off the real enemy, the extreme Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, as personified by Osama and his fellow Al-Qaida murderers, to pursue regime change in Iraq. The reasons given in public changed repeatedly as their evidence failed to pan out or were shown to be false or twisted. And these are the folks who got re-elected by calling Kerry a waffler! People in the room at the time have come forward (after they left their government jobs) to tell the story of Bush's insistence on going into Iraq, regardless of 9/11. The administration’s apologists and allies savaged these whistleblowers.

 

He was a brutal, genocidal dictator that should have been removed during the first Iraq war. Now that we are there the war has continued because of an influx of terrorists that are attacking us and the Iraqi people. The new government there has asked us to stay until they can fend for themselves. is over, we are now stuck there protecting their people. To leave now would be inhumane.

 

As has been pointed out by others, there were (and still are) other brutal dictators out there. This administration seems to be very selective about which genocides they punish and which ones they don't, IMO.

 

There are now far more foreign terrorists in Iraq than there were before the war. That's an irony that seems to elude Bush.

 

My personal opinion is that we have to deal with the mess we've been dragged into under false pretenses. Number one should be to get rid of the people responsible for the mess: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Neocons who assailed the patriotism of anyone who tried to point out that the Emperor was buck naked.

 

George Tenet resigned, so we can't fire him. But Bush did give the guy who "lied to him" the Medal of Freedom. Good job, Georgie!

 

This congress will never impeach Bush (he could kill a child, carried live on Fox News, and they wouldn't).

 

A ramped exit over the next two years is my thought.

 

Blah, gotta run (I need to take care of some chores). I'll chime in more later.