Bush - Bad for the Country

[Racoon]

I think so, but I've run out of steam for now on this topic.
Politics is exhausting, and rarely does arguing about it accomplish anything..

But what the hell!

I think Bush is Bad for this country.
Had the Gut-Feeling ever since he ran in 2000. Yes I'm a Democrat
(a dick-'em rat ) And I proudly voted for Gore and Kerry.

My problems with Bush are, among many: (and I'll look for links and stats)

#1 - The Budget!
Clinton left with a record surpluss. Now we have a record Deficit.
granted, Clinton was at the right place and time with NAFTA and free trade,

But Bush Cut taxes for the rich while going to war which always costs more than they say it will...

#2 - The EPA and Environment - Bushes Special Interests include easing Clean Water Standards, Drilling in ANWAR, and totally blowing off the Kyoto Treaty
I could say more, but right now it's making me sick...

#3 - The intractable war we're in??
What the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden?? I thought he is who we were after
To name a few...

#4 - Took the support the world had for us after 9/11 and turned it around into more hatred! Cowboy Politics

to respond to Clays last question:
They wanted to Impeach Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky deal.
Bush lied about Iraq having WMD, The deal with the CIA agent leak, and the Karl Rove, Tom Delay fiascos...
I'll look into that some more.
I do not support Impeachment, for reasons I stated earlier.

Bush Bad for The USA? YES! The whole Cabinet seems totally inept (FEMA), special interest motivated, and sneaky bad!
Condolezza Rice is his only saving grace.

Feel free to counter, agree, or throw your 2-bits into the ring.

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by Racoon

*OOPs>>> Can a Moderator move this into Social Sciences?? my bad. Lounge for quiet contemplation. I got ahead of myself* Thanks!

Done.

[InfiniteNow]

A little of both. We've clearly had some issues during his presidency, and many changes culturally. However, he's not the only one responsible. Although he's got a lot of options available to him, there are others involved as well. Further, maybe in the long run it will be a good thing because people who have been dormant to the impacts of decisions around them might just wake up and start demanding changes... So,

A little of both.

[Boerseun]

Dumb question, I know, but I'm more in tune with African politics than American:

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

[TheBigDog]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

Dumb question, I know, but I'm more in tune with African politics than American:

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

Not really. The President picks his cabinet heads and they are approved by the Senate. He can fire tham without any approval. They get as much authority in setting policy as he wishes them to have. They are essentially there to put his policies into those departments. Different Presidents give different cabinet leaders more or less rooom to set their own direction.

Bill

[bpjg2fat]

bah, bush.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Racoon

I think so, but I've run out of steam for now on this topic.
Politics is exhausting, and rarely does arguing about it accomplish anything..

#3 - The intractable war we're in??
What the hell happened to Osama Bin Laden?? I thought he is who we were after
Feel free to counter, agree, or throw your 2-bits into the ring.

I always knew Americans (USAans?) where bad at geography but really guys. . . Bin Laden is in AFGANISTAN. You know that little bit of high country just north of India. Ask the CIA where it is. During the Russian invasion they sent a bil. or two of arms there. They must know the address. eh. . . - don't bother they would have thown it away after the Russians left.
Saudi Arabia will know where it is -ask them- they have sent a bil. or two of arms and other "aid" there too

O yes a lot of Bin Laden's money comes from Saudi Arabia. (I know you think they are your friends; I know,. . I know,. . .)
Saudi Arabia is a little county near. . ( well its a bit hard to explain where it is -buy a globe-but they have lots of oil, lots of US$, big desalination plants,and wear frocks.


the FUNNY
" I
don't really know how to begin talking about the current situation in
the United States, but I thought I'd read a few passages from senior
high school and college examination papers and essays. Various
professors of history collect these remarks and send them to the
magazine and every three or four years we publish a small anthology,
and I have saved some of the ones that please me the most. These are a
fair indication of the state of the American mind at the moment.

This is a history of civilisation as told in a collection of college
and high level high school students:

Civilisation woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. Flooding
was erotic.

David was a fictional character in the Bible who pleased the people
with his many erections and saved them from a tax by the Philippines.

Religion was polyphonic. Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.

The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and
Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

Plato invented reality. Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle.
Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.

Rome was founded sometime by Uncle Remus and Wolf.

Neoplatonists celebrated the joys of self-abuse.

A German soldier put Rome in a sack. During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.

Machiavelli who was often unemployed wrote The Prince to get a job
with Richard Nixon.

Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his
later personality.

The government of England was a limited mockery. When Queen Elizabeth
exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, Hurrah! Then her
Navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

When the Davey Jones index crashed in 1929, many people were left to
political incineration.

The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent.

We in all humidity are the people of current times. This concept
grinds our critical seething minds to a halt.

That is a fairly accurate description of the Bush Administration's
foreign policy."



The DEPRESSING:
"We live in a civilisation in the United States where the number of
people who believe in the literal truth in the Book of Revelation
exceeds the number of people who lived in all of mediaeval
Christendom.

The American War against the intellect – by which I mean the drug
trade, television, the pornographic film industry and so on – is now
worth anywhere between $500 billion and a trillion dollars a year. In
other words, it's a more expensive undertaking than our military
establishment. Our leading export at the moment is money. We borrow $4
billion a day in order to ... well, the position is, that our global
war on terror is being funded by the People's Republic of China, and
the war itself is, to my mind, a futile enterprise. It would be like
having a war on lust. It's a war against an unknown enemy and an
abstract noun.


As to the religious superstition and the numbers of people who believe
in the liberal truth of the Book of Revelation – at a press conference
briefing in Washington last March, the National Association of
Evangelicals declared its intent to lend a hand in the making of an
American politics faithful to the will and abundant wisdom of God.

The pastors handed around a twelve-page manifesto for a Bible-based
public policy entitled An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.
And the first few sentences of their joint statements stand as fair
indicators of the tone in which they describe the rest of the program.
As follows:

We engage in public life because God created our first parents in
his image and gave them dominion over the earth. We also engage in
public life because Jesus is lord over every area of life. To restrict
our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important
part of this dominion, and to functionally abandon it to the evil one.
To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the
private and domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing lordship
of Jesus.



And that is the kind of thinking that we have in Washington. I don't
know whether I mentioned this already but Bush is a born-again
Christian, so is Tom De Lay, the majority leader in the House of
Representatives; so is Condoleezza Rice; so are one hundred and thirty
members of the House of Representatives. And by and large they take
the point of view that we are all, or they are all, on God's side, as
is the United States of America. And the guarantee of terrible
punishment for God's enemies combined with the assurance and the
ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates
provides the plaque for the left behind series of neo-Christian
fables, thirteen volumes, sixty-two-million copies sold that have
risen in popularity over the last ten years, in concert with the
spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the resurrection of
the militant Christ.

The co-authors of the books, Tim La Hay, and Jerry P Jenkins, tell the
story of the rapture on that marvellous and forthcoming day when the
sage shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in
pain. Like most of the prophets who have preceded them, they express
their love of God by rejoicing in their hatred of man. Just as the Old
Testament devotes many finely wrought phrases to the extermination of
the Midionite, also to the butchering of all the people and fatted
calves in Moab, La Hay and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the
wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles. And you
read the book and these are gays, blacks, secular humanists, liberals,
New York newspaper columnists and so forth.

And the twelfth book in the series delights in the spectacle of divine
retribution at the battle of Armageddon and I quote: 'Their innards
and entrails gushed to the desert floor and as those around them
turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in
the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.'

So we have people, quite a few people, wandering around the United
States with those notions in mind and the faith-based initiative
descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of unknowing that
over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of the American
mind in the fogs of superstition. It isn't only the fundamentalist
crowd, it's also the challenges and the teaching of evolution mounted
in forty-three states, attested to by the – Bush himself is reserving
judgment as to whether evolution is a sound theory."

THE FULL LONG DEPRESSING ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigidea/stories/s1481032.htm

michael

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by Racoon

to respond to Clays last question:
They wanted to Impeach Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky deal.
Bush lied about Iraq having WMD, The deal with the CIA agent leak, and the Karl Rove, Tom Delay fiascos...

They wanted to impeach Clinton for committing perjury in his testimony in the Paula Jones case. There are plenty of people serving 5 year sentences now for lying about their lover while under oath. Clinton should have been treated the same. Perjury is perjury, quit trying to say it isn't. Clinton lied under oath in a court of law and he was disbarred for it. He is a perjurer, no ifs, ands or buts.

Bush did not lie about Iraq having WMD. Bush was lied to about Iraq having WMD and passed on what he was told. For that matter, small traces of WMD have been found since we went there so we don't even know if they did or did not have any activity at this time on that subject. We may never know. The claim that he knew Iraq did not, for a fact, have WMD and told the people otherwise is an unsubstantiated, unprovable claim at this point. Feel free to prove otherwise.

At this point there is no proof that Valerie Plame was even undercover. It is known that she had not had any clandestine assignments for over 5 years and her friends and family knew what she did for a living. The special prosector has not been able to even prove that any such crime even occured. You should wait for more convincing proof before passing judgement on this one. Feel free to provide such proof if you have it though.

Tom Delay made his own bed, Bush had nothing to do with it so put the blame where the blame is due.

Bush is somewhat of a moron but trying to pin things on him that he is simply not guilty of does little to support your case.

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

Is the American President an Executive President, or more like the Chairman of the Cabinet?

His powers are limited. Thomas Jefferson probably said it best in his letter to the Danbury Baptists when he wrote:

Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts....

The power of the Executive branch is controlled by Congress as is the power of the Judicial branch. The President has executive power but he can ultimately be trumped by the people, i.e. Congress.

[C1ay]

Originally Posted by Racoon

the 2007 EPA budget will be cut another 4%!

You don't know that. The President sends a suggested budget to Congress but Congress ultimately decides what the actual budget is. If the EPAs budget gets cut it will be Congress that did it, not the administration.