The Decider returns to haunt Mr Nuance as George W. Bush eclipses Barack Obama

The Telegraph ^ | 11/13/2010 | Toby Harnden

[Albion Wilde]

Question from Matt Lauer: “Would you OK it (waterboarding) again?
Answer from GWB: “Yeah, I would.”
Any answer from Obama on any subject would be a five to ten minute, stumbling obfuscation.

I have been struck by how easily GWB talks and how well-spoken he is when he is not formally addressing the camera, as we so often saw him during his presidency.

In the Greta van Susteren interview, he made it a point that he was in control, not Dick Cheney.

Rarely has an American president been so misunderstood and reviled -- since Abraham Lincoln.

[Verginius Rufus]

I remember in high school English being told of the book by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. I never realized before what the title meant.

Was looking at the new book by GWB at the bookstore today. He's talking about when they moved to west Texas when he was a child and remembers someone asking his father if he had gone to college. GHW Bush tells him that he had gone to Yale. The guy replies, "Never heard of it."

[HarleyD]

Ditto. GWB was a RINO but a well intention and honorable RINO. Right now I’d take him back.

[pgyanke]

Any answer from Obama any Democrat on any subject would be a five to ten minute, stumbling obfuscation.

For your consideration, I offer a partial transcript from the second Presidential Debate in 2004 (audience asked the questions):

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.

That's why I think it's important. That's why I think it's important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

You'll help prevent AIDS.

You'll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.

You'll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.

GIBSON: Mr. President, minute and a half.

BUSH: I'm trying to decipher that.

[Turns to the woman directly and says to her...]

My answer is, we're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion.

ME: I may not have agreed with everything he did... but he was a good man with integrity. Beats the snot out of what we have now...

[Hunton Peck]

You took my post more seriously than it was intended. It was just a goof on a famous Monty Python line. :-)

(But it is too bad we can't get a Reagan every time)