Posted on 05/08/2014 9:51:24 AM PDT by TangledUpInBlue
If you've just crash-landed from the planet known as Kepler-186f and have no experience with the human life form or its recent history, let me just clarify something for you: George W. Bush was a divisive and unsuccessful president. Economically, internationally, culturally — you name the category of leadership, and the results pretty much range from disappointment to disaster. A CBS News/New York Times poll clocked Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent, which is about as low as you can go in politics without needing a parole officer.
You may get confused about this, because lately Bush is enjoying a public restoration. The Bush you read about these days is the kind of inclusive conservative you can deal with, a guy who bikes with wounded veterans, a sensitive portraitist of world leaders. A graphic this week on FiveThirtyEight.com showed how fewer and fewer Americans blame Bush for the country's economic morass, even though his successor, Barack Obama, won two presidential campaigns based on precisely that premise.
Bush's critics will argue that this is testament to how quickly we forget the past. But it has more to do, really, with how we distort the present.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
They want a Clinton vs Bush race...that way, Heads they Win, Tails they Win.
Bushes and Clintons are just two sides of the same coin.
My biggest problem with GB was the enactment of the Patriot Act.
Although it’s also obvious that the act had been penned long before it was implemented, the fact that it was gave license to the joker we have in office today.
Well, most academic historians are Democrats and have an urge to write hagiographies about Democrat Presidents, so Obama will get lots of mulligans and excuses. Maybe the academics will figure that the meme that “W was the worst President ever” is so self-evident that they won’t bother writing books about GWB, so the handful of conservative historians will have a chance to fill the gap.
Deep down they know there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Bushes and Clintons.
This way, if for some reason Hillary flounders, they could live with Jeb winning. It won’t make any difference in the end.
I know, I was cracking up when I read that. “Ultimately”??? So in other words right now he is thought of as a great President? LOL!
The Media is currently rehabilitating the image of GWB that they destroyed... WHY?
Because the Elite want Jeb Bush to run in 2016 that is WHY!
If 911 hadn’t happened, he would probably been viewed much differently. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his shos for a second when those planes crashed into the towers. Everything changed after that. He was thrust iton a an extremely difficult and stressful situation pretty quickly after assuming office. I respect the man. He had to do whatt he had to do. I think some of our agencies took advantage of some of the legislation that was enacted and he took a bad rap for it. I don’t think he acted intentionally to harm The People like the current traior and liar in chief.
The financial crisis happened at the end of the Bush presidency, so how in the world can anyone reasonably blame Obama for that? Plus, Bush was president for nearly 8 years before said crisis, so he rightly deserves some blame for it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending Obama, because I think he was the absolutely worst possible person to deal with the financial crisis. He’s only prolonged the misery and made it much worse. However, I don’t see how we can blame him for creating the problems to start with.
I’m not a big fan of President Bush, but I don’t think he was all bad. For example, I think he’s an honorable and moral person, but he’s was no conservative. He did virtually nothing to reign in the federal government and he couldn’t articulate a clear vision of where he wanted to lead the country.
I wish President Bush well, but I hope to never see another Bush in politics again. They and their GOPe ilk are a big part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party today.
The 2008 financial crisis has it’s roots in Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac and all the bad loans they were forced to make under the Clinton Administration so IDIOTS that couldn’t afford a cardboard box were allowed to get loans for homes.
Dodd should be tried for Treason.
bump
Actually, the article bashes Bush in all the usual ways. It only acknowledges how absurd the most ridiculous accusations about being a war criminal and conspiracy crap a lot of it was. It praises Bill Clinton while simultaneously suggesting that Clinton was even more vilified than Bush.
The truth is, Bush was great on a great many issues. BUT, where he went wrong, he went REALLY wrong (Government expansion, Education, Medicaid/Medicair, etc.) On National Defense, Bush started strong and wimped out when the winds turned. Had he brutally executed the wars, ie not letting sacred mooslim holy spots become forbidden targets and sanctuaries, a lot more innocent Iraqi's would have been killed. But it would have been over by now. Hell, had his father not stopped when the "Highway of Death" was shown on TV, Stormin Normin would have taken out the entire Iraqi military and Saddam Hussein and Iraq wouldn't have been an issue after 9/11. In fact, had we replaced the government in Iraq the first time, we likely would have had a decent foothold next door to Iran, which, back then would have been a serious deterrent and kept Iran in line (as well as much of the ME). They would still hate us but they would be behaving today.
In the end, I think W. Bush was a mediocre President that deserved to be vilified most for what he did in his second term. At one point we had both the House and Senate. THEN we took a hard left with all that power. It's politically unforgivable and the reason the TEA Party came to be. Bush fomented the conservative frustration but Obama has cemented the movement.
The financial crisis happened because the Dems had taken over the legislature and passed bills that Bush should have vetoed...but didn’t, because he was busy being “bipartisan” and “listening to the will of the majority,” something that has obviously never mattered to his successor.
Curiously, the Dems have never gotten the blame that they deserve for things like the housing melt-down, etc. Bush should have fought back, but by then, late in his term, he was under such attack that he probably thought it was impossible.
He was a good president, but not great. Few are great, and most of us have seen at most one in our lifetime. The list of positives for Bush is fairly long. There are also some real negatives. He definitely exceeded his dad, who raised taxes, folded to the opposition, killed off the Reagan majorities and couldn’t muster a second term despite a significant military victory.
Yeah, guess it was that democrat controlled congress in the 1990’s that repealed glass-steaggle, refused to use their funding authority to put Fannie and Freddie on a leash, trumpeted the “ownership society” and appointed ben Bernanke to chair the fed. Oh...wait...that was the GOP teamed up with the democrats who did all that. Tell you what, just keep all that between us and we’ll pretend it was all them dems fault.
President Obama cannot be blamed, but Senator Obama was certainly in the mix. Look where the economy was before the Democrats took majorities in 2006. Their collective agenda on the left contributed greatly and directly to the crash. Frankly, many magnitudes larger than Bush. Bush’s biggest fault lies in allowing the government to mangle the banking system for the left’s ‘affordable housing’ agenda in the name of ‘helping’ minorities. Obama was lockstep with Frank, Dodd, Schumer and the rest, and the right allowed that agenda in part to avoid the fight and in part because they are just as bought by the banks as the Democrats.
There is no one issue or stance Bush had that led to that crash in 2008. It surely wasn’t ‘tax cuts for the rich’ as the idiots on the left like to point at. If anything, the spending, bad monetary policy and racial politics in banking are the cause, and that’s at worst a 50/50% blame on Bush an the Republicans.
“Execpt he should have vetoed spending bills”
In other words he pushed us further along the road to economic collapse.
You bet that's interesting. The Left would love the Bushies riding high again.
The man was a complete disaster for the USA, the GOP, and the world. Live in Bushbot denial if it makes you feel better. I won't get fooled again.
I don’t have a clue how the financial crisis originated, but I do know President Bush was in charge when it erupted in 2007. I also know Republicans held congress and the presidency for a period of time leading up to that point. They are far from blameless in the matter, because even if they didn’t start it, they didn’t do much to stop it. Maybe even President Bush knew what was going on and tried to stop it, but if he did, he couldn’t articulate it to the nation. That’s for sure.
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