Originally Posted by Imperator

BINGO, give that lady a cigar.

Originally Posted by goober

In a thread where Clinton is mentioned you want to give a lady a cigar?

This is getting good..........

Originally Posted by goober

In a thread where Clinton is mentioned you want to give a lady a cigar?

This is getting good..........

Originally Posted by chassisman

Single agenda OP...bush, bush, bush...blah, blah, blah, boo hoo hoo.

Originally Posted by Si modo

I disagree, probably because I look at it a bit differently. No man or woman is above the law because of their position - no one - and that is a founding principle I hold sacred.

The office is representative of the people. They elected the person holding it. I respect the people; I respect the office.

Originally Posted by Imperator

Folks who READ, may have run across books and opinions that for instance paint Hoover in a much different light, and though he is forever scarred with the depression I think we both know it’s not that simple. More blame if we assign any, should be on Coolidge’s shoulders actually.

Originally Posted by Scribbler1

I'm rather surprised his audience wasn't more carefully screened, more than anything else. Other than that, I don't put much stock in a speech from a politician.

And I do realize the OP was just a reason to take a few shots at Bush. But, speaking as a former supporter and "old-school" conservative, there ARE an awful lot of legitimate shots there to take.

Originally Posted by Scribbler1

It seems to me this has started to veer off from the OP into the office of the presidency itself.
And I personally find that a little more interesting.

Originally Posted by ViolaLee

....
There will always be those lazy posters who just want to get in their personal attacks whenever I post something.

Originally Posted by Si modo

It looks like the part about the direction the thread has gone being more intersting than your topic went over your head.

Originally Posted by ViolaLee

If they screen his audience carefully these days, he'll be talking to a mostly empty room!

The OP was just about something that interests me. I'm all for protesting a horrible government. It's pretty much all "we the people" can do. We have been given the right to do so by our constitution. Bush even said it in the speech while he was being heckled. We have free speech in America, he said.

It's not about taking shots. It's about sharing the news that interests me and makes me proud of my country. My fellow Americans are making it known that we don't agree with our president. We can hardly wait till he's gone from office.



There will always be those lazy posters who just want to get in their personal attacks whenever I post something.

Originally Posted by Si modo

It looks like the part about the direction the thread has gone being more intersting than your topic went over your head.

Originally Posted by Rakkasan

when you go into holier than thou mode i must ask these questions samantha

when people heckled clinton was it ok?

when the heckle obama will you be understanding? or will you go into sam mode and not let the gander do as the goose does?

Originally Posted by Jason Marcel

To be fair to poor old Bush, his approval rating of 23% is from only one poll. If you average things out he's at a solid 28%.

What I don't get about him and his team is that they seem to make precisely the wrong decision concerning practically every decision. When it was bad in Iraq they were like, "Stay the Course", and now that things are about as good as they'll get while America is there, he remains "Stay the Course". It's like tax cuts with this guy; there's never a bad time to have one. A terrorist attack on US soil? Tax cut time. A downturn in the economy? Tax cuts. An upswing in the economy? Tax cuts again. Two simultaneous wars that can't be paid for? You got it........tax cuts once more.

In one fell swoop, if Bush decided to deliver an exit strategy from Iraq and start pulling troops out and reconfiguring things in Afghanistan, he would simultaneously: 1) take the thunder from Obama, 2) deliver the thunder to McCain, and 3) his dismal popularity would at least get somewhere back up to 40% or so by the time he leaves.

Why doesn't he do it? Because he's cynical. And because like the rest of us, he has absolutely no idea what might happen. If chaos ensues, he'd be blamed for it, so he's going to pass it on to the Democrats and let partisan people spin it like the Dems lost the whole war. Mark my words. It's so predictable.

And the really funny thing is that the Bush team has made so many bad predictions on Iraq, that they can't even see that things would probably stay exactly the way they are now since the White House began appropriating money to go to nearly 100,000 former insurgents for their new security details.

If you look at his presidency from a level gaze and tally up the achievements and the failures, it's hard to come up with many achievements. He's about to leave office having overseen an economy that had gained 23 million new jobs in the previous 8 years with an economy now that has created very few or no jobs in this 8 year cycle.

I remember when he got into office and I was actually okay with it. I wanted Gore to win, but Bush kept projecting a sense of old-time conservatism like his dad where he wouldn't rock the boat on social issues, and he would keep the gov't lean and the budgets balanced. He kept talking about a "humble foreign policy" and "no nation building".

Indeed, in his first 8 months of office, he passed his tax cuts and then pretty much vacationed the rest of the time. America was really respected around the world, even if a few people thought that American foreign policy had a way of meddling in others affairs sometimes.

After 9/11, I didn't support the idea of taking the military to Afghanistan. I supported a policy where special-ops or "black-ops" would get into the region along with the support of allied muslim nations. I thought the best way at the time was to get people on board who were muslims that wanted to get this guy and to get those people on our side. We weren't fighting another army, which the US army is built to do, but fighting people who look like the rest of the citizens in that country who do bad shit, and then retire with the wife and kids at night in the cave. Bill Clinton couldn't get the co-operation needed from Pakistan along with the Republican controlled congress after the USS Cole bombing (Clinton and his people wanted to go after Bin Laden immediately along with help from Pakistan, but the new Pakistani President Musharraf, who had just been anointed leader with the west's help, thought it would destabilize the region, and the Republicans at the time were sick and tired of Clinton's adventures in Somalia and Kosovo and in the Oval Office with Monica). All Clinton had for a couple of years there was his "black-ops" people after the embassy bombing in Africa, and they got as close as anyone to Bin Laden ever since.

Nearly 7 years later, I've been proven right about Afghanistan.

Who knew that Bush was going to react this way after 9/11? It seemed like the appropriate thing to do at the time was to start an initiative right away to ask for Americans to make a sacrifice. Annul the tax cuts until after Bin Laden is captured, and begin an immediate plan to conserve energy, and invest in renewable energy sources like wind and solar that could get up and running within just a few months or so. Instead, he asked nothing of the people and cut taxes further.

In his first year in office he tore up the ABM treaty with Russia, and completely disregarded the work-in-progress that had been achieved with North Korea while pulling out the UN inspectors so that America would be left in the dark to wonder if North Korea was up to anything. They had shut down more than half of their nuclear reactors up to that point, but to the Bush team, they were simply evil. Case closed.

Who knew that the moderate leader in Iran, who was more favorable to the west than any previously elected Iranian leader, would be swiftly defeated by Ahmathingamabob, who was elected precisely because the Iranian people got really scared by Bush's tough "Axis-of-Evil" talk?

Who could have predicted that Bush, who had capured half a million votes less than Gore, would rule like a supreme leader or dictator and swing hard to the right with plans to privatize social security, pass an amendment to the Constitution to ban gay marriage, and give even more federal handouts to faith-based initiatives? And who could have predicted that Bush was going to oversee the largest expansion of the federal gov't in decades with the failed No Child Left Behind, the increased subsidies for wealthy corporations and retro-active tax cuts, the increase in foreign aid to Middle East countries like Pakistan, and the completely irrelevant new addition to the bureaucracy in Washington, the Homeland Security Dep't? With all that expansion, along with two simultaneous wars (when's the last time America had that?), the debt went from nearly $9 trillion under Clinton down to $5; but then will clock in at an even $10 trillion over the coming months.

The odd thing is that I haven't even started complaining about Bush. I was just recapping!

On one hand it's been tremendously exciting to say we've lived through possibly the worst presidency in the history of the United States, and on the other hand, it's dreadful since the next generation or two will look back at us and wonder how it was that we were so stupid on so many levels.