Theoretical question about GWBFollow

I suspect that the vast majority don't hate hate us, just dislike us in a vague I'm-annoyed-with-how-much-you-are-in-our-face way. And I'm sure that there is a valid bit of concern for how we are conducting our foreign affairs. No argument there. But I'd say our reasons for ousting Hussein were immaterial and that yellow cake or no yellow cake makes no difference, as do the lack of WMDs.

There's a bit of the isolationist in me, to tell the truth. Had I had my way, we'd have gone in and snatched Hussein out of his palace, tried him, and executed him for violating the unconditional surrender agreement. Then we'd have gone back home and glared at any other petty dictator/unruly country who pisses us off.

We'd wouldn't have so much a foreign policy as much as a treat us squarely and fairly and we'll get along just fine policy. Of course that'd mean we need to live up to our own standards-- something which is sorely lacking around here, but hey, I'm not the man running this show.

Totem

Completely independent of Iraq, (and amid a multitude of lesser issues I have with the way he's conducting the business of running the country) there is one reason why Dubya will forever and always be completely unfit for office in my opinion.

The 2000 elections.

No, I'm not going to debate here whether or not he was legitimately elected. That's not my point here.

My problem is that he CLAIMED victory while the results of the election were still in doubt.

Our Constitution sets certain rules by which the election of our Commander in Chief is supposed to be conducted. Specifically:



While there was still even a shadow of a doubt about the results of the Florida election, then there was no true majority of electoral votes. Yet Bush proceded to claim victory as though there was.

If he had truly cared about upholding the Constitution and honoring the most sacred right that we, as Americans, cherish--that being the right to be governed by officials we have legitimately elected--then he would have waited until there was absolutely no question about the legitimacy of his election before claiming victory. It would have been, for lack of a better word, the HONORABLE thing to do.

Instead, he assumed the victory as though it were his God-given right. Which says, to me, that he cared more about claiming the power of the office than about abiding by the will of the people.

His Oath of Office includes a vow to uphold the Constitution. But by taking that oath while there was any hint of a question of the true results of the election, he betrayed the oath in the very same breath with which he took it.

(And yes, I would be saying the same exact thing if Gore had claimed victory while the results were still in question.)

If we are to judge Bush's place in history without considering Iraq, then we'll have to remove every debacle from every administration's history before judging them as well (ie: Nixon w/o Watergate, Johnson w/o Nam, FDR w/o WW2 and the Depression etc). Which, ultimately leaves Bush somewhere between a chimp and Millard Fillmore.

How our leaders respond to the crises have to be included in any consideration of their place in history. Bush totatlly blew it. He had more political capital and international sympathy after 9/11 then any President in history and he decided ('cause he's the Decider), to use it to put the Neo-con plan for middle eastern domination into effect - just as it had been written by PNAC.

The only question that really remains is whether Bush was an active participant in deceiving the nation, or whether Cheney/Rumsfeld (et al), manipulated him. To be honest, I'm not even certain which scenario I find more horrifying.

Edited, Feb 15th 2007 6:29am by Deathwysh

Your facileness doesn't do much to make Bush sound better

No, I can't think of any grave crisis that Ford faced either. He had no crisis to either dazzle us with his response, or horribly disappoint us. As such he has no great legacy of accomplishment as President. All agree he was a swell guy, but that won't earn you a monument next to the reflecting pool.

Trying to judge Bush without considering Iraq is like judging Ted Bundy without all the murders.

Without 9/11, the best legacy Bush would have left was as a care-taker president. There'd probably be some partisan quibbling over nuclear proliferation issues, ecological stuff, energy issues (assuming we had the same spikes without 9/11) and the like but I remain convinced that Bush would have been a minor note in the history of the presidency most remarkable only for the Supreme Court decision which put him there. If you want Bush to be considered a "wild success", you'll need to do better than the DOW.

With 9/11 and if, by the divine hand of God, we never entered Iraq, I think that Afghanistan would be judged less harshly than Iraq is (for motive if nothing else) although I doubt anyone would hail it as successful nation building and we'd remain in there the same as today, unable to leave because most of the nation isn't under control. Without the omnipresent spectre of Iraq, people would be a lot more cognizant of our failure to locate and capture bin Laden. Even without Iraq, I'll assume a post-9/11 America has the same civil rights debates as it does today and I think that'd weigh against Bush unless he pulled off such a major victory that the success overshadowed the means (see Roosevelt & Lincoln). Even then I'd give him no more than 20 years before the bloom was off the rose and high school students debated the morality of Gitmo the same as they do the internment camps and Hiroshima today.

Edited, Feb 15th 2007 12:40pm by Jophiel

Edited for some sort of weird time-warping doublepost

Edited, Feb 15th 2007 11:15am by Deathwysh

Man, Buchanan did suck. Every time I read a book about Lincoln I come away thinking how much different the country would be if Buchanan had sacked the hell up.

If you were able to take 9/11 and Iraq out of the historical facts of Bush's presidency, I still would rate him poorly.

My biggest problem is how he has used both to undermine our Constitution. Problem is we can't know if he would have done without the crisis of his "War on Terror" in trampling all over on our constitutional rights. Only thing I think he would have still done the same is use Presidential statements on bills he disagree on, instead of veto's or accepting that his duty to enforce laws as congress writes them.

Economy policy tends to affect me within one or two years, due to the fact that I am disable and without assets that would let me live without needing to depend on State and Federal Programs to keep me feed, pay for my housing and get substandard health care. Each year my housing, food and medical costs have gone up faster then the COLA, so for the last 4 years I find I'm having to do with less.

The one thing that has help, is that with Jonwin help I can enjoy some level of stability that a lot of people I know don't have. His job is in the non-profit sector though and we had to make some very hard choices about where we can spend on our entertainment. With him getting laid off this last summer and having to take a job with hourly pay, while hoping to get a salary job with benefits, has us staying in and watching old movies on Basic Cable, and not spending any money on new computer games. The cable modem is consider a necessary since there are times when my health keeps me from being able to go out socially.

Unfortunately there are very few salary jobs in the History Museums field right now, as most have had to make large cuts over the last 6 years, since 9/11. Jonwin current job didn't want to lose an experience historical interpreter, so starting yesterday they gave him health care benefits on top of his part time pay. Thankfully for his health the job requires that he swab the decks and some other tasks, of a sailor from the 1850's. Last job he used to only come home tired of talking for hours.

Yes, Kelvy got US$300. I got a crapload because I make a lot of money. Not very fair. Yes it would have. Without Iraq. Do the math.



Yes it has. One had to go to the secret FISA court and there was legal review. This was the law. Bush, a law unto himself, simply chose not to since the law was too slow.



A US citizen is held without charges for the duration of a conflict against a method used since biblical times (aka indefinitely). Worse things used to happen? Sure. At that time, there was segregation in the US. Racism was the national pastime. We used to have slavery - does that mean if we enslave a person now that doesn't count?

When you don't have a leg to stand on, pulling out historical relics doesn't help.



Previously, any warrant to search records was for an individual: e.g. all the books Mr. X. checked out in the last five years. Now we've decided to allow the government to ask a different question: give us the list of anyone who checked out the following book - without a warrant.

FISA never rejected warrant requests prior to this administration. Once they did, they were circumvented.

In times where the existence of the nation is at stake some liberties may be curtailed briefly until the emergency passes.

For this threat, in my estimation, not a single liberty should be curtailed one bit. That is courage. Tossing aside a branch of government when it becomes inconvenient is cowardice.

No. One didn't. FISA does not, nor has it ever restricted the executive branch's power to conduct "searches" on foreign soil (wiretapping included). In fact, the FISA Court's own review (the first one ever btw) declared clearly that the President held the power to conduct warrantless foreign surveillance, that this power was inherent in the powers under Article II of the Constitution and that FISA had no jurisdiction on such cases.

If and when the Bush administration places a wiretap on someone inside the US without gaining FISA approval, you are free to make this argument. Until then, you're just repeating a grossly inaccurate accusation that has been legally disproven multiple times at the circuit level and at least once at the Supreme Court level. FISA in now way limits or affects the presidents power to conduct foreign surveilance. It never has.


Sorry. This one's just a pet peeve of mine. No matter how many times this comes up, and no matter how many times I prove conclusively that the surveilance being conducted without FISA approval does not legally need FISA approval, you guys keep repeating this same false argument. It gets tiresome...



As to the general question? I think that had Bush not gone into Iraq, he'd likely be more hated and considered a worse president then he is now.

Why? While I'm obviously guessing, here's what I think would have happened. We'd have managed Afghanistan just fine. However, Al-queda would have largely escaped unscathed (it's a multinational terrorist network, not a single group sitting in one country). OBL may or may not have been taken out (likely not), but it would have made no difference. Since we didn't go into Iraq, we'd have continued to allow the existing system of UN sanctions, inspections, and restrictions on Iraq instead. This would have required the US (and other nations) to continue to hold soldiers in Saudi Arabia. Given that this was the triggering cause for 9/11 (and all the attacks leading up to it), this would have continued to give great reason for the various terrorist groups associated to the Al-queda network to plan attacks in secret. With no "war" in the ME to distract them and their recruits, their numbers would have grow. We can debate to what degree, but 100% of them would have been planning attacks rather then largly throwing their lives away by getting invovled in fighting in Iraq.

Of course, without Iraq having occured, there would be about 3-4 more nations in the region still actively supporting terrorist groups (at least some of which would be tied to the Al-queda network). Thus, the result of 9/11 would actually embolden them. Afterall, if the US is unwilling and apparently unable to deal with Saddam in Iraq despite his blatant violations of the terms he agreed to, they'll figure there's no way they'll get in any "trouble" themselves. They just have to not be as obvious about it as the Taliban. By and large, support for those groups would have continuted, weapons would be recieved, money would pass hands unhindered and the US would continue to suffer a series of terrorist attacks.

I'd argue in fact that the rate and number of attacks would increase dramatically after 9/11 had we not invaded Iraq. After the initial attack on Afghanistan settled, the attacks would have resumed. Once the various terrorist groups and the nations supporting them realized that the US wasn't actually going to do anything beyond Afghanistan, they'd return to business as usual. Bush would be seen as having been an ineffectual leader, unable to protect the US and it's citizens. Emboldened by this, Iran and North Korea would be even farther along on nuclear weapons development. Of course, they'd now know that the US wouldn't actually do anything about it, so why not?

Whether Iraq would have succeeded in building more WMDs or not is somewhat irrelevant. They'd certainly have continued to try. But we'd never know if they succeeded or not. We'd still be just as in the dark about their real capabilities as we were before. Except that over time the chance that they'd succeed in rebuilding their weapons would grow.


But hey. That's just a guess... Maybe blinking with Saddam would have resulted in the nations of the world all realizing that we're all really just one big happy family and they'd all have gotten together to sing Kumbiya and live happily ever after or something... Doubtful, but I suppose it's possible.

So each of you don't care about Dubya creating the largest nature preserve evah? You don't care that he is presiding over a record bull market? Yes, the Dow hit another high again today and the Nasdaq, S&P 500, all are doing extraordinarily well, but he gets no love.

Tough crowd.

Totem