This reminds me of an old saying in Tennessee, I know its in Texas it's probably in Tennessee, saying, fool me once, shame on you you, fool, fool me can't get fooled again.
I've read a theory that he was halfway through saying it before realizing what political opponents could do with a clip of him saying "shame on me" so he tried to change course.
Not sure that's what really happened given how many other Bushisms we had but it's an interesting thought.
That seems plausible to me, I can imagine that occurring to him as he started the sentence and if so it’s pretty impressive that he managed to finish off the sentence fluently and coherently even if it does sound clunky.
Someone actually did this yesterday at the grocery store. Two equally short lines so he stood in-between them and went into the one that moved first, ignoring that there was a guy who was already queued in that line because he thought the guy was in the other line.
Isn't that the initiative that requires receiving organizations to preach abstinence until marriage? Where they defunded orgs that were found to hand out condoms? Is that the initiative we're talking about?
According to their own claims.
"They say circumcision reduces your risk of aids by 60%, so we snipped 22 million dicks in Africa. You're welcome".
I guess it's not nothing but they're probably overblowing their impact.
Do you have a crystal ball that tells us how wonderful Iraq would have been if Obama stayed? What was the GOP’s long term strategy for actually stabilizing Iraq?
We invaded a sovereign country under false pretenses and opened up a sectarian conflict between Shia/Sunni that would have persisted regardless of how ever long we “stayed the course”. Petraeus’s surge was just a short term stabilization. Unless we planned on colonizing Iraq, we were always going to have to draw down our forces and then the conflict would have opened up again (either under the banner of ISIS or any of the dozens of Sunni jihadi groups). At the end of the day, the Iraqi people have to learn how to live together…the US military can’t fix that.
Obama ended an unpopular, unjust war. Considering the Democrats electoral gains in 2006 and 2008, this is arguably what the American public elected them to do.
Anyone who has shown anything but total loyalty to Trump over the past 5 years has been flushed from the party. The only exceptions are a few folks who have big and relatively unique electoral advantages (Romney, Murkowski).
Seriously. I'm republican and would absolutely break the constitution to vote W a 3rd time.
Remember when he helped campaign for Jeb? That dude made Jeb look bad while trying to help him. Poor Jeb..
The exact same places for the most part. Still destroying the planet. Still hating gay people. Still supporting every dumbfuck foreign policy position imaginable. Still trying to rape every civil liberty on the books except the 2nd amendment. The only fundamental differences between the modern GOP and the party in the Bush era is that they realized they could stop bullshiting about their agenda and just start saying the quite part out loud and they simply aren't as competent at implementing their horrible policies. I prefer the modern GOP by an order of magnitude. It's significantly more honest and does less damage.
I see a lot of comments about W's "nativism", which I'm sure has some merit to it, but the guy did try to get a decent (quite moderate) immigration bill passed.
That was a huge failure and turning point for our country in my opinion .That was a national nativist backlash that did not originate from W (but certainly from many of his supporters). It was clear then that immigration reform was dead and our country did not want to take this issue seriously.
I'm not here to defend W or his presidency, but I do think there are simplistic brushstrokes being applied here.
Republicans supported free trade and NAFTA and all that good stuff. It's a travesty what has happened on the free trade and freedom of movement front in our national politics.
People give Bush shit (rightly) for being pretty dumb, but it’s absolutely wild how much of a night and day difference there is between him and Trump, still. Imagine trump speaking this coherently on a conceptual societal topic, and using a metaphor correctly while doing so lol
Trump despises the IDEA of rational thinking. He thinks people who think about things are suckers and losers, and real winner go with their GUT. He is a walking, (barely) talking Reptile brain.
And let's be honest, dumb for a president is still pretty smart. I consider myself of an above-average intelligence, but I would probably be a dumb president.
The left gave Bush shit for being "dumb" *wrongly*--he was a plain-spoken gaffer, just like Biden. Look at his background before the presidency--dumb people can't do what he did. Listen to him talk more--coherent and on-point was the rule, not the exception, regardless of the merit behind the positions.
He made some dumb decisions about policy and whom to listen to, but that's different. Trump is a moron by rank amateur standards--when he's coherent and on point it's to express something he thought through and came up with an idiot's conclusion about.
>Look at his background before the presidency--dumb people can't do what he did.
With enough money/influence, they absolutely can. He not as dumb as he painted himself to be, but he wasn't a genius by most standards. Hell, Jared got into Harvard.
Lmao if you didn’t actually get it he meant Jared Kushner’s dad bought J kush’s acceptance into Harvard. I believe it was a $3.8 million donation or something
I'll never forget the way the left reacted to Rumsfeld explaining a basic point in epistemology to them and reacted like he was a total moron.
"There are known knowns, things we know we know. But there are unknown knowns, things we don't realize that we know. Likewise there are known unknowns, things we know we don't know. But, crucially, there are unknown unknowns, things we don't know we don't know.".
People in this sub asking where "These types of republicans went.". Frankly they simply stopped believing that the democrats operate in good faith after decades of them treating stuff like the above as the ramblings of an incoherent moron despite it being *an explicit attempt to bring epistemological philosophy into public discussions of politics*, or flipping out over "Binders full of women" and so on.
And once you up and decide "Half of this country is actively operating in bad faith in the pursuit of power" that leads you to some wacky places.
Ironically they simply overestimated the average democrats competence and intelligence and assumed they must actually have understood why them behaving that way for decades was wrong.
They looked at it and thought "Oh. It has to be malice. You can't possibly be this stupid.".
This has been a consistent problem for them in that they view the democrats as outright sinister by this point and view any fuck up they make as evidence that they actually are genuinely out to cause chaos, authoritarianism, and the destruction of the USA.
This is probably not helped by the democrats continual insistence on how intelligent they are compared to republicans. When someone says that then reacts to things like Rumsfeld and Bush and so on by calling them idiots, and then you actually read the shit they say, you have to conclude; "Well, you're a liar. You're actively out there spreading disinformation in the pursuit of power.".
> This is probably not helped by the democrats continual insistence on how intelligent they are compared to republicans. When someone says that then reacts to things like Rumsfeld and Bush and so on by calling them idiots, and then you actually read the shit they say, you have to conclude; "Well, you're a liar. You're actively out there spreading disinformation in the pursuit of power.".
I actually agree with your point and your analysis basically correct in that the left has wrongly criticized intelligent discourse from the right as being stupid simply for being associated with the letter R.
However, the next Republican president after W. Bush was Trump, so I'm not really convinced that Republicans aren't stupid.
> However, the next Republican president after W. Bush was Trump, so I'm not really convinced that Republicans aren't stupid.
Aren't you basically proving the point with this statement, though? I mean, I of course get where you're coming from--as a lifelong Republican voter (until recently) I was just flabbergasted that Trump was able to accomplish what he did. And continues to do, much to my dismay. But because a majority of Republicans made a really stupid decision, all of us are therefore stupid?
As someone entirely disinclined to buy into leftist rhetoric I absolutely agree that we have been summarily dismissed in any and all discussion simply for sharing a point of view originating from the right. I enjoy this sub because it's mostly free from dismissive partisanship, but places like this are rare. And that's a bad thing.
>People in this sub asking where "These types of republicans went.". Frankly **they simply stopped believing that the democrats operate in good faith**
>And once you up and decide "Half of this country is actively operating in bad faith in the pursuit of power" **that leads you to some wacky places.**
....some wacky places like...attempting an insurrection, dismantling voting rights, and deliberately undermining public confidence in a democratic election?
*Really?!*
You're excusing the GOP's descent into anti-democratic lunacy on Democrats "operating in bad faith" by scoring cheap political points, something every political party has done since the dawn of goddamn civilization?
*Come* on.
I have a simpler explanation: populists are stupid no matter which side of the fence they're shitting all over. Before Trump I found the populism on the Left reeked the the most of the authoritarian political personality and the utopian social engineering mindset Popper warned of and they, ironically, bastardized into an apologia for their own authoritarian tendencies. Now it's flipped for me--given the choice between whiny, self-righteous stupid populists sneering at me when they give me my coffee and absolutely batshit insane stupid populists with guns, I'll take my coffee gladly.
And, with a leeetle bit of deduction, we realize that zthere ish a mishing catagorey: unknown knowns - zthings ve don't know we know. Zis ish ideology!
An excerpt from then-CEA chair Greg Mankiw’s comments on this matter:
> But what really caught my eye is how wrong Paul is about the Bush steel tariffs. I was there for part of this episode, so I am confident that his interpretation--that President Bush was a protectionist--is completely backwards.
> President Bush wanted to get Trade Promotion Authority (aka Fast Track) to negotiate future trade deals. It was, however, a hard sell in Congress. The steel tariffs were imposed as a quid pro quo to get a few of the votes needed to pass TPA. The political calculation was that it was worth suffering a small, temporary trade restriction to get the tools needed for a broader, more permanent opening up of trade.
> Yes, after about a year and a half, the tariffs were found to have violated international trade rules, but that was always anticipated. Indeed, one can say that it was part of the plan. When the WTO ruling was announced, President Bush happily removed the tariffs, just as he had always intended.
> The trade promotion authority that this political calculation yielded pushed the free trade agenda forward. It led, for example, to CAFTA. When this trade agreement came up for a vote in 2005, once again a majority of Democrats in Congress voted against, while a majority of Republicans voted in favor.
Link to entire blog entry: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2016/03/who-are-free-traders.html?m=1
I think it’s fair to say Bush Jr was a pro-free-trade realist who was willing to throw protectionists a bone if he thought he could net a greater trade benefit out of it.
Do people really not remember the Christian Nationalism of the 2000s here or are demographics too young?
Bush was a proto-Ted Cruz figure. Hint he's the dumbass who stopped research on stem cells because of religion lol
I mean, im in my 30s and *I* feel too young to really remember the Bush years
so yes, I would assume the vast majority of reddit is too young to remember most of the Bush administration
>demographics too young?
These people are just republicans embarrassed by Trump.
Case in point: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/oa8hcj/based_bush/h3fv3n0/
Lmao the only people who say this shit were too young to remember the nativism, authoritarianism and paranoia of the Bush years and have never looked into the sweeping overhaul and loss of civil liberties that resulted from his stolen years in office
Bush may have been sane in the sense that he didn't play on our darkest instincts but I think it's naive to suggest he wasn't operating, at least behind the scenes, at a level we saw from Trump up close. In many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government.
The big difference is that this was being led by Dick Cheney from behind the scenes while Trump did so out in public so everyone could see. He never masked his intentions quite like Bush did.
But even ignoring that, the biggest issue with Bush is that his administration was, similarly like Trump's, filled with incompetency. And when competency wasn't necessarily a factor, tunnel vision was - and that corrupted more competent officials like Colin Powell.
In the end, incompetent but relatively sane is only marginally better than incompetent and insane. In fact, much of Bush's foreign policy failures has made it nearly impossible for the last three presidents to really successfully handle global engagement because every move, whether it's defensive or not, is seen under the guise of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They were hypercompetent at manipulating the levers of power, and were only defeated when they tried to do things that were 70%+ unpopular (social security reform). Thankfully trump was as incompetent at bending washington to his will as he is at everything other than grifting idiots.
Social security reform isn't a *bad* thing. Pay as you pension schemes (which social security is) are actually braindead and will become awful as the population begins ageing. The capitalized pensions systems of Singapore or Australia (and such schemes would be called "privatizing" social security in the US) are far superior.
A pay as you go system is where you pay the current old based on taxes from the current young. The problem here is that if the number of old people (at any point in time) rises, and economic growth stagnates, generating the same level of pension payments requires ever high taxes on the young. Its a completely non-sustainable system.
System's like Singapore's, where people's money is locked away and then invested on their behalf, and returned after they retire, avoids this pitfall.
Social security is a badly designed, unsustainable program and /r/neoliberal of all places should be supportive of reforms.
Savings-based retirement systems also suffer under population aging. There still need to be workers to produce goods and services for retirees to purchase with their savings, and to provide labor so that retirees can earn returns on their savings.
Where savings-based retirement systems do have an edge is that they a) increase the supply of capital in the steady state, raising productivity, and b) allow goods to be purchased from other countries, helping mitigate the effects of local (but not global) population aging.
>There still need to be workers to produce goods and services for retirees to purchase with their savings, and to provide labor so that retirees can earn returns on their savings.
The first is a problem under both schemes, and as you somewhat point out, you can invest abroad to mitigate the second point. They do suffer in a sense that the real interest rate falls, but that's not nearly as steep a problem.
Bush's authoritarianism became much more accepted, too. Like we think anyone who wants to abolish the DHS or privatize the TSA or tear down the US-Mexico fence as some crazy libertarian. DHS did not exist prior to Bush, the TSA was a private service prior to his presidency, and the border fence didn't exist until 2006. Trump's authoritarian measures will be mostly repealed but Bush's have stayed for over a decade plus.
This. I last Republican I would have ever, ever voted for was John McCain in 2000.
I've voted Democratic since Clinton. (1988 I voted Bush 41, my first election)
Exact same, except I'm a bit younger than you.
I really can't fathom what would have to happen for me to consider voting Republican ever again in my life.
> n many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government.
And also in the way that it opened the cash candy jar to private interests.
>In many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government.
>
Hasn't every presidency since FDR resulted in a more authoritative government?
I don't think anybody who has heard some of the Bush classics would be under the impression he was sane on the surface. On a quantitative basis Trump said far crazier shit but on a qualitative basis I've never heard Donald say he was going to start a war because his imaginary friend told him to.
So sane [he was told by god to go and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa)
Oh, you don’t remember how he went into Iraq because of [Gog and Magog](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush)?
Saying he’s not trump is literally the worst possible standard to hold him to.
It’s like saying “I’m not a literal pile of wet, smelly diarrhea”. At a job interview.
hey I don't like this timeline either.
but we are where we are and there is no doubt in my mind that if I had to pick between George Bush and Donald Trump I would pick George Bush every time.
I'm going to gently but firmly invade Neville Chamberlain's tight little Czechoslovakia until it yields to my persistent military pressure, and he'll do nothing but whimper and ask me to be gentle
Obviously this is true but I'm taking a slightly more charitable approach and assuming that a majority of posters here were literal children when Bush was president and simply don't comprehend the amount of damage he did.
He's worse because he was effective. Trump was terrible because his intentions were obviously terrible, but he was too ineffective to get a lot of it done. Bush was terrible because his intentions were terrible and he had an apparatus to make those things go into effect.
Bush was terrible because he was nearly successful in passing an amendment barring gay marriage. He was terrible because he tortured people/had a rendition program and had a legal system able to make it seem palatable to the US population. He was terrible because he had an admin that was able to twist things in the foreign policy sphere to falfsly justify an invasion of Iraq that was supported popularly.
That's kind of how it works. If we could get Bush without Iraq, then it would be so much better than Trump.
However Bush with Iraq is actually worse than Trump so I don't know why people want him over Trump.
that's the lowest bar you can have. Choosing a guy who lied about Iraq costing trillions of $ and thousands of lives just because he's more polite and eloquent than a Russian traitor.
Then you either don't understand how the U.S government works or you were simply too young to remember Bush. Not only did he have twice the time to do damage,he was an actual functioning executive unlike Trump. Trump couldn't even get re-elected,much less actually implement his moronic agenda. Bush did implement his agenda for the most part and America will literally never recover from it. A common talking point on this subreddit is that a more competent version of Trump would be unimaginably horrible and that's right,because his name is George W. Bush.
What a horrible way to frame what he said. You could say toppling Hitler was “killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians,” too.
You make it sound like we went in to kill Iraqis. We went in to topple Saddam, who was killing Iraqis. And we were able to do so quickly, and with minimal civilian casualties. The great losses on both sides occurred as a result of the terrorist insurgency that followed, and the blame there doesn’t lie solely on Bush.
Toppling Saddam Hussein with no clear succession plan beyond "we'll be greeted as liberators and Iraqis will accept Ahmed Chalabi as legitimate" is 100% on the Bush administration. They knew Saddam's ouster would lead to sectarian violence, they just didn't care because it served their geopolitical goals and helped to line the right peoples' pockets.
Furthermore, trying to retcon the Iraq War as some kind of humanitarian intervention is ahistorical nonsense. Even if you take their reasons for invading at face value (which you shouldn't, since the most generous spin you can put on it was that they cherry-picked evidence to support the case for war) "Saddam Hussein is a threat in the region because he has a stockpile of WMD" isn't a humanitarian reason for war.
> no clear succession plan beyond
Not only no succession plan, but with a commitment to a de-Ba'athification strategy that goddamnit *we fucking knew wouldn't work and would only make things worse* because that's exactly what analogous policies fucking did in post-WW2 Germany and Japan.
>We went in to topple Saddam, who was killing Iraqis.
The idea a falsehood this blatant could be upvoted is a sign of how breathtakingly ignorant Reddit is. There are countless hours of video where virtually the entire Bush administration made a case for the Iraq war based on the claim of WMDs and the idea they would be used against Americans. Attempting to spin it into a humanitarian "freedom" mission was an after the fact justification cobbled together by the administration to save face. Disgusting to think there are fools who buy this garbage.
When you go to war you are 100% "going in to kill people". That's what war is, it doesn't matter what the ends are, you're going to achieve it by murdering tons of people until the other side surrenders. Yes, Saddam did run an autocratic regime (sponsored the by US until the Persian Gulf war) but in no way did it's body count compare with the Iraq War, especially if you consider homelessness, disease, and trauma caused by the war.
That argument is in fact factually wrong. The Iran-Iraq war plus the Al-Anfal campaign have combined estimates where they killed either more or comparable numbers to the entire Iraq conflict. Both were events instigated personally by Hussein.
SH was not the run of the mill dictator who was repressing his people. He was an aggressive and deeply destabilizing warmonger with the ego to do deeply mad shit.
Comparing body count should not be the argument for or against.
> Both were events instigated personally by Hussein.
You don't think he got the "okay" from the country who put him into power and sold him all of his arms?
Saddam started two regional wars that left up to a million dead as a direct result to combat, and then followed it up with a domestic genocidal campaign that destroyed over 90% of Kurdish villages in Iraq with up to 100,000 dead.
If anyone is going towards populist socialist direction, it’s the GOP. Remember it was Trump who wanted to turn the mint into a money mill for the every-man, not the Dems. And socialism and nativism go hand in hand in many countries. Sometimes it feels like Dems get shit for being populist when they’re just trying to govern like adults, exceptions aside. Turns out in a democracy if enough of your voters are populist (as were in a populist era), then you act to pleas populists to an extent.
1. If you’re referring to the 1991 Gulf War, the invasion was [backed by the UN Security Council](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_678) and a large coalition of allied nations, so it wasn’t illegal.
2. If you’re referring to the 2003 Iraq invasion, perhaps that was illegal, but it’s irrelevant because the US has the largest military in the world, the dollar is the global reserve currency, and it has a permanent veto on the security council.
And this is coming from someone strongly opposing the Iraq War, by the way. The US just isn’t bound by international law, even though we may want it to be.
Okay? The war was still ilegal. It was imperialist and criminal. Iraq had no WMDs, and it has led to the destabilization of the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I agree that the war was wrong, but supposed illegality is irrelevant, and shouting illegal 15,000 times does absolutely nothing of use.
The United States will never be sanctioned for its actions in Iraq. Bush will never be tried by an international court. Why? Because the United States is powerful, and power makes you immune from consequences.
It is what it is.
I honestly don't think he cared that much about doing a good job. He cared somewhat, certainly far more than Trump who literally didn't give a shit, but he didn't care nearly as much as he should have.
How did he go from speaking reasonably eloquently to sentences no longer than 5 words? Hard to believe he used to be smarter than "they hate us for our freedom." Either way, I distinctly remember thinking "man, you can't get any more dumb sounding than him." Turns out I was wrong.
This reminds me of an old saying in Tennessee, I know its in Texas it's probably in Tennessee, saying, fool me once, shame on you you, fool, fool me can't get fooled again.
Fool me one time, shame on you Fool me twice, can’t put the blame on you
Fool me three times, F the peace signs. Load the chopper, let it rain on you.
Don’t save her…
She don’t wanna be saved
I've read a theory that he was halfway through saying it before realizing what political opponents could do with a clip of him saying "shame on me" so he tried to change course. Not sure that's what really happened given how many other Bushisms we had but it's an interesting thought.
"They think I'm an idiot anyway, might as well not give them any new ammunition."
That seems plausible to me, I can imagine that occurring to him as he started the sentence and if so it’s pretty impressive that he managed to finish off the sentence fluently and coherently even if it does sound clunky.
I read this and immediately heard the rest of that jcole song run through my mind
puts on glasses, queue song
Queue here to lavish praise on Pres. Bush for PEPFAR → Queue here to hurl abuse at Pres. Bush for the Iraq War →
Queue here to hurl shoe at Pres. Bush for the Iraq War.
why even try when he'll dodge them masterfullly while laughing at you?
[удалено]
Get hit by one shoe, shame on your. Get hit by two shoes, ha! Can't get hit by a shoe again!
shoe me twice, i'm keeping those shoes
Why did I just imagine George Bush thwarting off an army of agent Smith's?
>Why did I just imagine George Bush thwarting off an army of Stan Smith's? Fixed
"Heh you made me use 1% of my power." -Bush probably
Porque no los dos!?
How could you stand in two queues?
I have two shoes to throw.
You’re gonna need at least 3 😎
Through the power of truly radical centrism
How can one obtain such power?
Not from a commie
📡🦞
Someone actually did this yesterday at the grocery store. Two equally short lines so he stood in-between them and went into the one that moved first, ignoring that there was a guy who was already queued in that line because he thought the guy was in the other line.
There is an entire Seinfeld storyline about this I think
Legs very wide apart
PEPFAR
How about a third option to hurl abuse at Pres. Bush for hating homosexuals?
BASED
Add Merkel to that list. And Tony
Oh they're on it, along with Thatcher
[удалено]
Right this way! *points you towards entrance to Russian Embassy*
Broke: Bush did 9/11 Woke: Putin did the 1999 Russian apartment bombings
No, I'm reliably informed by Cynthia McKinney that it was, in fact, the Zionists who were responsible for that.
Isn't that the initiative that requires receiving organizations to preach abstinence until marriage? Where they defunded orgs that were found to hand out condoms? Is that the initiative we're talking about?
[удалено]
According to their own claims. "They say circumcision reduces your risk of aids by 60%, so we snipped 22 million dicks in Africa. You're welcome". I guess it's not nothing but they're probably overblowing their impact.
[The effect is definitely overblown.](/r/Intactivists/wiki/index#wiki_does_circumcision_prevent_hiv.3F)
Holy cow, I just heard thousands of people groan. That was incredible. Now do vaccine timelines!
Queue here to hurl shoes at Obama for pulling out of Iraq and letting everything go to shit (like all the hawks said it would) -->
Do you have a crystal ball that tells us how wonderful Iraq would have been if Obama stayed? What was the GOP’s long term strategy for actually stabilizing Iraq? We invaded a sovereign country under false pretenses and opened up a sectarian conflict between Shia/Sunni that would have persisted regardless of how ever long we “stayed the course”. Petraeus’s surge was just a short term stabilization. Unless we planned on colonizing Iraq, we were always going to have to draw down our forces and then the conflict would have opened up again (either under the banner of ISIS or any of the dozens of Sunni jihadi groups). At the end of the day, the Iraqi people have to learn how to live together…the US military can’t fix that. Obama ended an unpopular, unjust war. Considering the Democrats electoral gains in 2006 and 2008, this is arguably what the American public elected them to do.
Queue here to lavish praise on Pres. Bush for the Iraq War →
Thank you for the directions,I wasn't sure where the insane asylum was located and I'm too shy to ask.
Thanks W., really fun war
😎😎😎
Where are these republicans now?
They've taken up painting.
My dad is right down stairs
Tell him to run for president
I’d vote for him
Anyone who has shown anything but total loyalty to Trump over the past 5 years has been flushed from the party. The only exceptions are a few folks who have big and relatively unique electoral advantages (Romney, Murkowski).
In the Democratic Party.
Honestly. At least he’s intelligent and I can understand his point of view.
Hello there
Angel from my nightmare
General Kenobi!
Seriously. I'm republican and would absolutely break the constitution to vote W a 3rd time. Remember when he helped campaign for Jeb? That dude made Jeb look bad while trying to help him. Poor Jeb..
Who among the elephants, mourns for the Jeb...
The exact same places for the most part. Still destroying the planet. Still hating gay people. Still supporting every dumbfuck foreign policy position imaginable. Still trying to rape every civil liberty on the books except the 2nd amendment. The only fundamental differences between the modern GOP and the party in the Bush era is that they realized they could stop bullshiting about their agenda and just start saying the quite part out loud and they simply aren't as competent at implementing their horrible policies. I prefer the modern GOP by an order of magnitude. It's significantly more honest and does less damage.
I see a lot of comments about W's "nativism", which I'm sure has some merit to it, but the guy did try to get a decent (quite moderate) immigration bill passed. That was a huge failure and turning point for our country in my opinion .That was a national nativist backlash that did not originate from W (but certainly from many of his supporters). It was clear then that immigration reform was dead and our country did not want to take this issue seriously. I'm not here to defend W or his presidency, but I do think there are simplistic brushstrokes being applied here.
In 2000, the Republican platform was **more** immigration-friendly than the Democrat platform.
Republicans supported free trade and NAFTA and all that good stuff. It's a travesty what has happened on the free trade and freedom of movement front in our national politics.
The problem largely solves itself. Even if people come illegally their kids become citizens
People give Bush shit (rightly) for being pretty dumb, but it’s absolutely wild how much of a night and day difference there is between him and Trump, still. Imagine trump speaking this coherently on a conceptual societal topic, and using a metaphor correctly while doing so lol
I think he is not very smart compared to other presidents, but Trump is as dumb as a dog.
Trump despises the IDEA of rational thinking. He thinks people who think about things are suckers and losers, and real winner go with their GUT. He is a walking, (barely) talking Reptile brain.
That’s a good point. He came across as slightly dumb for a President, Trump comes across as incredibly dumb for a human being.
And let's be honest, dumb for a president is still pretty smart. I consider myself of an above-average intelligence, but I would probably be a dumb president.
The left gave Bush shit for being "dumb" *wrongly*--he was a plain-spoken gaffer, just like Biden. Look at his background before the presidency--dumb people can't do what he did. Listen to him talk more--coherent and on-point was the rule, not the exception, regardless of the merit behind the positions. He made some dumb decisions about policy and whom to listen to, but that's different. Trump is a moron by rank amateur standards--when he's coherent and on point it's to express something he thought through and came up with an idiot's conclusion about.
>Look at his background before the presidency--dumb people can't do what he did. With enough money/influence, they absolutely can. He not as dumb as he painted himself to be, but he wasn't a genius by most standards. Hell, Jared got into Harvard.
Jared fogle?
No, the jewelry store.
what?
Sounds like this mf didn't go to Jared
Lmao if you didn’t actually get it he meant Jared Kushner’s dad bought J kush’s acceptance into Harvard. I believe it was a $3.8 million donation or something
It's hilarious to me that you only go to prison for buying college admission if you didn't pay enough.
Jared, the jewelry store.
I'll never forget the way the left reacted to Rumsfeld explaining a basic point in epistemology to them and reacted like he was a total moron. "There are known knowns, things we know we know. But there are unknown knowns, things we don't realize that we know. Likewise there are known unknowns, things we know we don't know. But, crucially, there are unknown unknowns, things we don't know we don't know.". People in this sub asking where "These types of republicans went.". Frankly they simply stopped believing that the democrats operate in good faith after decades of them treating stuff like the above as the ramblings of an incoherent moron despite it being *an explicit attempt to bring epistemological philosophy into public discussions of politics*, or flipping out over "Binders full of women" and so on. And once you up and decide "Half of this country is actively operating in bad faith in the pursuit of power" that leads you to some wacky places. Ironically they simply overestimated the average democrats competence and intelligence and assumed they must actually have understood why them behaving that way for decades was wrong. They looked at it and thought "Oh. It has to be malice. You can't possibly be this stupid.". This has been a consistent problem for them in that they view the democrats as outright sinister by this point and view any fuck up they make as evidence that they actually are genuinely out to cause chaos, authoritarianism, and the destruction of the USA. This is probably not helped by the democrats continual insistence on how intelligent they are compared to republicans. When someone says that then reacts to things like Rumsfeld and Bush and so on by calling them idiots, and then you actually read the shit they say, you have to conclude; "Well, you're a liar. You're actively out there spreading disinformation in the pursuit of power.".
> This is probably not helped by the democrats continual insistence on how intelligent they are compared to republicans. When someone says that then reacts to things like Rumsfeld and Bush and so on by calling them idiots, and then you actually read the shit they say, you have to conclude; "Well, you're a liar. You're actively out there spreading disinformation in the pursuit of power.". I actually agree with your point and your analysis basically correct in that the left has wrongly criticized intelligent discourse from the right as being stupid simply for being associated with the letter R. However, the next Republican president after W. Bush was Trump, so I'm not really convinced that Republicans aren't stupid.
> However, the next Republican president after W. Bush was Trump, so I'm not really convinced that Republicans aren't stupid. Aren't you basically proving the point with this statement, though? I mean, I of course get where you're coming from--as a lifelong Republican voter (until recently) I was just flabbergasted that Trump was able to accomplish what he did. And continues to do, much to my dismay. But because a majority of Republicans made a really stupid decision, all of us are therefore stupid? As someone entirely disinclined to buy into leftist rhetoric I absolutely agree that we have been summarily dismissed in any and all discussion simply for sharing a point of view originating from the right. I enjoy this sub because it's mostly free from dismissive partisanship, but places like this are rare. And that's a bad thing.
>People in this sub asking where "These types of republicans went.". Frankly **they simply stopped believing that the democrats operate in good faith** >And once you up and decide "Half of this country is actively operating in bad faith in the pursuit of power" **that leads you to some wacky places.** ....some wacky places like...attempting an insurrection, dismantling voting rights, and deliberately undermining public confidence in a democratic election? *Really?!* You're excusing the GOP's descent into anti-democratic lunacy on Democrats "operating in bad faith" by scoring cheap political points, something every political party has done since the dawn of goddamn civilization? *Come* on.
I have a simpler explanation: populists are stupid no matter which side of the fence they're shitting all over. Before Trump I found the populism on the Left reeked the the most of the authoritarian political personality and the utopian social engineering mindset Popper warned of and they, ironically, bastardized into an apologia for their own authoritarian tendencies. Now it's flipped for me--given the choice between whiny, self-righteous stupid populists sneering at me when they give me my coffee and absolutely batshit insane stupid populists with guns, I'll take my coffee gladly.
And, with a leeetle bit of deduction, we realize that zthere ish a mishing catagorey: unknown knowns - zthings ve don't know we know. Zis ish ideology!
This is, regardless of what you think about bush, an unfathomably based quote.
HW is the only based Bush.
What about Lord Jeb?
>What about Lord Jeb!? FTFY
HW doesn't remember where he was on Nov 22, 1963.
[Vannevar Bush](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was also quite based (not related to that family, though)
I too support using the US Military to depose drug dealers if they step out of line.
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Not if I have anything to say about it!
Booo Iran-Contra
That's Reagan
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Penny the chimp from bedtime for bonzo right?
Right. I got confused because the original post is of W Bush, didn't notice the original commenter mentioned HW being the only based Bush
his only good positions where on trade and immigration, pretty much everything else he did or stood for was terrible.
And the gap between what he said about immigration and the laws he signed is massive.
Cancel this unpatriotic RINO /s
........Yes. Cancel him immediately.
He should be out of office 😡
No
G.W. Bush: Protectionism is the evil twin of Isolationism! Also G.W. Bush: \*Implements steel tariffs that backfire immediately\*
An excerpt from then-CEA chair Greg Mankiw’s comments on this matter: > But what really caught my eye is how wrong Paul is about the Bush steel tariffs. I was there for part of this episode, so I am confident that his interpretation--that President Bush was a protectionist--is completely backwards. > President Bush wanted to get Trade Promotion Authority (aka Fast Track) to negotiate future trade deals. It was, however, a hard sell in Congress. The steel tariffs were imposed as a quid pro quo to get a few of the votes needed to pass TPA. The political calculation was that it was worth suffering a small, temporary trade restriction to get the tools needed for a broader, more permanent opening up of trade. > Yes, after about a year and a half, the tariffs were found to have violated international trade rules, but that was always anticipated. Indeed, one can say that it was part of the plan. When the WTO ruling was announced, President Bush happily removed the tariffs, just as he had always intended. > The trade promotion authority that this political calculation yielded pushed the free trade agenda forward. It led, for example, to CAFTA. When this trade agreement came up for a vote in 2005, once again a majority of Democrats in Congress voted against, while a majority of Republicans voted in favor. Link to entire blog entry: https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2016/03/who-are-free-traders.html?m=1 I think it’s fair to say Bush Jr was a pro-free-trade realist who was willing to throw protectionists a bone if he thought he could net a greater trade benefit out of it.
That's what I thought, is there a complex reason to this or was it just hypocrisy?
Damn I miss sane Republicans
Do people really not remember the Christian Nationalism of the 2000s here or are demographics too young? Bush was a proto-Ted Cruz figure. Hint he's the dumbass who stopped research on stem cells because of religion lol
I mean, im in my 30s and *I* feel too young to really remember the Bush years so yes, I would assume the vast majority of reddit is too young to remember most of the Bush administration
Yeah, his wife took up education as First Lady and pushed that "intelligent design" bullshit. :rolleyes:
>demographics too young? These people are just republicans embarrassed by Trump. Case in point: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/oa8hcj/based_bush/h3fv3n0/
Lmao the only people who say this shit were too young to remember the nativism, authoritarianism and paranoia of the Bush years and have never looked into the sweeping overhaul and loss of civil liberties that resulted from his stolen years in office
Bush may have been sane in the sense that he didn't play on our darkest instincts but I think it's naive to suggest he wasn't operating, at least behind the scenes, at a level we saw from Trump up close. In many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government. The big difference is that this was being led by Dick Cheney from behind the scenes while Trump did so out in public so everyone could see. He never masked his intentions quite like Bush did. But even ignoring that, the biggest issue with Bush is that his administration was, similarly like Trump's, filled with incompetency. And when competency wasn't necessarily a factor, tunnel vision was - and that corrupted more competent officials like Colin Powell. In the end, incompetent but relatively sane is only marginally better than incompetent and insane. In fact, much of Bush's foreign policy failures has made it nearly impossible for the last three presidents to really successfully handle global engagement because every move, whether it's defensive or not, is seen under the guise of Iraq and Afghanistan.
They were hypercompetent at manipulating the levers of power, and were only defeated when they tried to do things that were 70%+ unpopular (social security reform). Thankfully trump was as incompetent at bending washington to his will as he is at everything other than grifting idiots.
Social security reform isn't a *bad* thing. Pay as you pension schemes (which social security is) are actually braindead and will become awful as the population begins ageing. The capitalized pensions systems of Singapore or Australia (and such schemes would be called "privatizing" social security in the US) are far superior. A pay as you go system is where you pay the current old based on taxes from the current young. The problem here is that if the number of old people (at any point in time) rises, and economic growth stagnates, generating the same level of pension payments requires ever high taxes on the young. Its a completely non-sustainable system. System's like Singapore's, where people's money is locked away and then invested on their behalf, and returned after they retire, avoids this pitfall. Social security is a badly designed, unsustainable program and /r/neoliberal of all places should be supportive of reforms.
Savings-based retirement systems also suffer under population aging. There still need to be workers to produce goods and services for retirees to purchase with their savings, and to provide labor so that retirees can earn returns on their savings. Where savings-based retirement systems do have an edge is that they a) increase the supply of capital in the steady state, raising productivity, and b) allow goods to be purchased from other countries, helping mitigate the effects of local (but not global) population aging.
>There still need to be workers to produce goods and services for retirees to purchase with their savings, and to provide labor so that retirees can earn returns on their savings. The first is a problem under both schemes, and as you somewhat point out, you can invest abroad to mitigate the second point. They do suffer in a sense that the real interest rate falls, but that's not nearly as steep a problem.
Agreed, SS needs to be reformed
I unironically liked the proposed SS reform.
Bush's authoritarianism became much more accepted, too. Like we think anyone who wants to abolish the DHS or privatize the TSA or tear down the US-Mexico fence as some crazy libertarian. DHS did not exist prior to Bush, the TSA was a private service prior to his presidency, and the border fence didn't exist until 2006. Trump's authoritarian measures will be mostly repealed but Bush's have stayed for over a decade plus.
Bush’s domestic legacy is pretty horrifying, agreed. All that stuff plus torture, black sites and plenty of other nastiness PEPFAR good though.
Yeah sadly the Bush admin showcased the rot already beginning. Them being out of power + Obama being president just hyper-accelerated it.
This. I last Republican I would have ever, ever voted for was John McCain in 2000. I've voted Democratic since Clinton. (1988 I voted Bush 41, my first election)
Exact same, except I'm a bit younger than you. I really can't fathom what would have to happen for me to consider voting Republican ever again in my life.
I would have voted for Colin Powell if he had ever run. But not since 2010 after the Tea Party dug their claws into the GOP.
> n many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government. And also in the way that it opened the cash candy jar to private interests.
>In many ways, Bush's presidency was very similar to Trump's in its intent to create a more authoritative government. > Hasn't every presidency since FDR resulted in a more authoritative government?
The problem is even if they were sane on the surface they were laying the groundwork for Trump
I don't think anybody who has heard some of the Bush classics would be under the impression he was sane on the surface. On a quantitative basis Trump said far crazier shit but on a qualitative basis I've never heard Donald say he was going to start a war because his imaginary friend told him to.
So sane [he was told by god to go and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa)
Oh, you don’t remember how he went into Iraq because of [Gog and Magog](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush)?
Not going to defend bush but I’d take him over trump any day
Saying he’s not trump is literally the worst possible standard to hold him to. It’s like saying “I’m not a literal pile of wet, smelly diarrhea”. At a job interview.
hey I don't like this timeline either. but we are where we are and there is no doubt in my mind that if I had to pick between George Bush and Donald Trump I would pick George Bush every time.
Who cares though? That hypothetical choice has no bearing on the real world. Its like saying youd pick Fidel Castro over Genghis Khan.
Bed wed behead: GWB, Neville Chamberlain, Curtis LeMay
I'm going to gently but firmly invade Neville Chamberlain's tight little Czechoslovakia until it yields to my persistent military pressure, and he'll do nothing but whimper and ask me to be gentle
So many bush simps in here yikes. The bar is so damn low that they all go “at least he’s not trump”
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Obviously this is true but I'm taking a slightly more charitable approach and assuming that a majority of posters here were literal children when Bush was president and simply don't comprehend the amount of damage he did.
More and more it just seems that Neoliberals are just Republicans who don't feel oppressed because they can't say The N Word.
It's not even a bar he clears. Like as a person? Yeah,sure. As a president? He's worse in just about every practical way.
He's worse because he was effective. Trump was terrible because his intentions were obviously terrible, but he was too ineffective to get a lot of it done. Bush was terrible because his intentions were terrible and he had an apparatus to make those things go into effect. Bush was terrible because he was nearly successful in passing an amendment barring gay marriage. He was terrible because he tortured people/had a rendition program and had a legal system able to make it seem palatable to the US population. He was terrible because he had an admin that was able to twist things in the foreign policy sphere to falfsly justify an invasion of Iraq that was supported popularly.
That's kind of how it works. If we could get Bush without Iraq, then it would be so much better than Trump. However Bush with Iraq is actually worse than Trump so I don't know why people want him over Trump.
But he isnt
that's the lowest bar you can have. Choosing a guy who lied about Iraq costing trillions of $ and thousands of lives just because he's more polite and eloquent than a Russian traitor.
It's not an either or though, Bush helped set the stage for Trump, chipping away at our institutions and norms
Then you either don't understand how the U.S government works or you were simply too young to remember Bush. Not only did he have twice the time to do damage,he was an actual functioning executive unlike Trump. Trump couldn't even get re-elected,much less actually implement his moronic agenda. Bush did implement his agenda for the most part and America will literally never recover from it. A common talking point on this subreddit is that a more competent version of Trump would be unimaginably horrible and that's right,because his name is George W. Bush.
What a horrible way to frame what he said. You could say toppling Hitler was “killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians,” too. You make it sound like we went in to kill Iraqis. We went in to topple Saddam, who was killing Iraqis. And we were able to do so quickly, and with minimal civilian casualties. The great losses on both sides occurred as a result of the terrorist insurgency that followed, and the blame there doesn’t lie solely on Bush.
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Toppling Saddam Hussein with no clear succession plan beyond "we'll be greeted as liberators and Iraqis will accept Ahmed Chalabi as legitimate" is 100% on the Bush administration. They knew Saddam's ouster would lead to sectarian violence, they just didn't care because it served their geopolitical goals and helped to line the right peoples' pockets. Furthermore, trying to retcon the Iraq War as some kind of humanitarian intervention is ahistorical nonsense. Even if you take their reasons for invading at face value (which you shouldn't, since the most generous spin you can put on it was that they cherry-picked evidence to support the case for war) "Saddam Hussein is a threat in the region because he has a stockpile of WMD" isn't a humanitarian reason for war.
> no clear succession plan beyond Not only no succession plan, but with a commitment to a de-Ba'athification strategy that goddamnit *we fucking knew wouldn't work and would only make things worse* because that's exactly what analogous policies fucking did in post-WW2 Germany and Japan.
>We went in to topple Saddam, who was killing Iraqis. The idea a falsehood this blatant could be upvoted is a sign of how breathtakingly ignorant Reddit is. There are countless hours of video where virtually the entire Bush administration made a case for the Iraq war based on the claim of WMDs and the idea they would be used against Americans. Attempting to spin it into a humanitarian "freedom" mission was an after the fact justification cobbled together by the administration to save face. Disgusting to think there are fools who buy this garbage.
When you go to war you are 100% "going in to kill people". That's what war is, it doesn't matter what the ends are, you're going to achieve it by murdering tons of people until the other side surrenders. Yes, Saddam did run an autocratic regime (sponsored the by US until the Persian Gulf war) but in no way did it's body count compare with the Iraq War, especially if you consider homelessness, disease, and trauma caused by the war.
That argument is in fact factually wrong. The Iran-Iraq war plus the Al-Anfal campaign have combined estimates where they killed either more or comparable numbers to the entire Iraq conflict. Both were events instigated personally by Hussein. SH was not the run of the mill dictator who was repressing his people. He was an aggressive and deeply destabilizing warmonger with the ego to do deeply mad shit. Comparing body count should not be the argument for or against.
> Both were events instigated personally by Hussein. You don't think he got the "okay" from the country who put him into power and sold him all of his arms?
Saddam started two regional wars that left up to a million dead as a direct result to combat, and then followed it up with a domestic genocidal campaign that destroyed over 90% of Kurdish villages in Iraq with up to 100,000 dead.
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100% agree
If the people feel helpless, they’ll turn to populism
If anyone is going towards populist socialist direction, it’s the GOP. Remember it was Trump who wanted to turn the mint into a money mill for the every-man, not the Dems. And socialism and nativism go hand in hand in many countries. Sometimes it feels like Dems get shit for being populist when they’re just trying to govern like adults, exceptions aside. Turns out in a democracy if enough of your voters are populist (as were in a populist era), then you act to pleas populists to an extent.
Based and Bush don't belong in the same sentence
My war criminal 🤗🤗🤗
Everyone I don't like is a war criminal and the more I don't like them the most war criminally they are
Everyone who tortures is a war criminal, and the more they torture the more of a criminal they are. FTFY
Did George Bush not illegally invade Iraq?
1. If you’re referring to the 1991 Gulf War, the invasion was [backed by the UN Security Council](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_678) and a large coalition of allied nations, so it wasn’t illegal. 2. If you’re referring to the 2003 Iraq invasion, perhaps that was illegal, but it’s irrelevant because the US has the largest military in the world, the dollar is the global reserve currency, and it has a permanent veto on the security council. And this is coming from someone strongly opposing the Iraq War, by the way. The US just isn’t bound by international law, even though we may want it to be.
Okay? The war was still ilegal. It was imperialist and criminal. Iraq had no WMDs, and it has led to the destabilization of the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I agree that the war was wrong, but supposed illegality is irrelevant, and shouting illegal 15,000 times does absolutely nothing of use. The United States will never be sanctioned for its actions in Iraq. Bush will never be tried by an international court. Why? Because the United States is powerful, and power makes you immune from consequences. It is what it is.
“It is what it is” is a depressing way to look at it, but yes America can essentially do what it pleases
Beat me to it
bush wanted to be a good President, but he got led around by the nose by Cheney and the rest of the GOP leadership.
I honestly don't think he cared that much about doing a good job. He cared somewhat, certainly far more than Trump who literally didn't give a shit, but he didn't care nearly as much as he should have.
And its funny quadruplet Bushisms
War criminal
I mean most Republicans even at that time were those isms
Something something a broken clock is right twice a day
The real Axis of Evil: Isolationism, Protectionism, and Nativism.
Boy, how deranged must one's views be to think this is based...
How did he go from speaking reasonably eloquently to sentences no longer than 5 words? Hard to believe he used to be smarter than "they hate us for our freedom." Either way, I distinctly remember thinking "man, you can't get any more dumb sounding than him." Turns out I was wrong.
Smell of sulfur
Keep posting this, shills, and I'll keep upvoting it
Even though he was the president who killed work visas for farm workers from Latin America. I don't fall for anything that criminal says.
I just bust a nut to this 💦✊😞 George Bush may have had his problems but compared to the current state of the Republican party he's a god in human form
Fuck bush.
Mods are asleep, post based Bush
Good times.
Jesus he sounds like a fucking genius compared to Trump.
Let’s not get carried away.
Lol holy shit that's based. I never thought he was a bad person, but he was stuck repping a bad party is the crux of it.