what do you think.........is bush a good or bad presidnet?

i think he is a bad prez. thank god there is a new electon. im tierd of him , sending our troops to a different country for a war. we would'nt be there if it wasnt for him. we really need a new president.

Foreign Policy = good, not afraid to do what needs to be done to protect America from foreign threats.

Domestic Policy = terrible, illegal immigration, crime, housing market falling apart, rising inflation, etc

Bush is a nice guy but in the future people will look back at him and see all the things that you don't want in a leader little alone president.

Bush is clearly out of his depth and far to easily influenced by those around him. Bush poor decision making indicators that he is far out of his depth. Bush is just a figure head the real players in his admin are/were Cheney and Rumsfeld . Clearly when it comes to Iraq Bush was influenced by the Neo Cons many of whom later became members of his admin.

Just to top it off Bush is a poor communicator of ideas and I'm not talking about his verbal blunders . Bush is unable to communicate ideas effectively.

Those quality's by themselves aren't to bad but when all the boxes are ticked you get a lousy leader and the disaster that is the Bush admin.

Bush is a great President, and will go down in history as such.

Just to give you an idea of how good he is doing, just take a look at the current crop of wannabes trying to take his place. No one, either Republican or Democrat is capable of being the leader he is.

As a man, I think he is probably a decent but misguided one..

History will probably rate him as being a decent president, never a good one and certainly not a great one.

Certainly Bush cant be assessed in a black and white manner . I don't buy the partisan accusations of him and his admin being Nazis but I still stand by the things I said in my above post. The accusations of being anti American that were thrown at anyone who had enough sense to oppose the Iraq madness will come back to haunt the American right .

Even thou its not not in the best interest of the US payback is coming big time when Hillary wins the White House it could well be "anti American " to oppose her policy's. Make no mistake when it is seen as bad thing that a person is trying to steer there country or the leader of the free world away from an unwise course action a very bad precedence has been set.

I hope like hell you are wrong. A Hilary Clinton presidency will destroy this country, in my honest opinion.

Well even without Hillary : shudders : the US is tearing itself apart with the partisan ship which infects every issue . Both sides are guilty of this . No war can be won by a country that is so divided little alone the global struggle against Islamic extremism. The US is in a leadership draught that looks set to continue along with the highly charged partisan atmosphere that is so damaging.

Leadership wise the problem goes far beyond Bush and co. People seem to forgot that Congress failed in its job to provide oversight. Congress could have put a stop to the Iraq venture to begin with because they were afriad of being painted weak on national security.

The levels of corruption and self interest that is seen in US politics at the Federal level would corrupt any political system anywhere .

xpert, unfortunately, you may be right..

I have said for quite some time that America would never win a "war against terrorism" because Americans no longer have the testicular fortitude to withstand a war of any length. I think I am being proven correct more and more everyday..Of course, anyone who is familiar with my posts know that I view the "war on terrorism" as a veiled religious war, but we don't need to get into that here.

[edit on 19-12-2007 by SpeakerofTruth]

[edit on 19-12-2007 by SpeakerofTruth]

Bush isn't a great leader, a "nice guy," or well intentioned. He plays his role perfectly as the "bumbling idiot," to get every dumb American to steer their attention towards him instead of the hard issues facing the country. He makes a mockery of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, but is an amazing pawn in the grand scheme of things. Never breaks character for a moment.

Bravo! Mr X11! Well said and concise too. Now let me say in 2000 words what you said so well in less than 200.

I believe Bush43 is Mr Neo Con himself! Remember their foreign policy dogma is that following the demise of the Soviet Union (1989-1991), the US as the “last man standing” would have a generation to RE-SHAPE the world according to our vision alone. About 25 years. Then, by a fluke in 2000 Bush43 despite losing by more than 500,000 votes country-wide, became president by 537 mis-counted votes in Florida. Thank you Founding Fathers. You muffed it again. It was payback time at the Supreme Court which did its most dubious political act in 2 centuries. And America had its first “Designated President” by a vote of 5 to 4.

After January 20, 2001, Bush43 with the Newt Gingrich Congress quickly reversed the economic policies of the prior administration which had finally brought the US national budget into the black - in balance - and which had forecast a surplus of over $1.5 trillion. We were actually debating whether to spend the surplus on debt pay-down or on needed repairs to our nation's infrastructure. Or some of both. But alas, Republican tax cuts for the rich took priority.

It is Neo Con (and GOP) dogma that tax cuts to the rich - implicitly the better informed and more capable - puts money into their hands to invest privately and hence, to create jobs for the poor and not so well informed or capable. This argument was first made by Reagan trying to justify his so-called ‘Trickle-Down Economics’ to explain how the newly freed-up money in the hands of the rich would stimulate the economy and benefit the poor. But that was not reality. Just as Reagan had “borrowed” his way into better economic conditions, so also has Bush43 used "borrowed" money to stimulate the economy. He like Reagan has instead deceptively assigned credit for good economic times to his selfish tax cuts. Q. Do you have to be deceptive to be a Republican?

The huge sums of debt added under Bush43 to our national debt will fall to our grandchildren to pay. They will have to choose to pay debt instead of paying for better education to make Americans more competitive in the new world economy dominated by services. Yup, WE traded YOUR future for OUR 7,000 square foot homes in gated communities. No drive-by shootings for us! In the end, it all comes down to choices and priorities. And personal honor. Or the lack thereof.

Aside: Living on borrowed money is a cleverly contrived way to shift the tax burden from those now alive and well, to those yet to be born. It has a double barreled effect. The first shot is that those who are perfectly able to pay the tax burdens they incurred by their decisions, are instead excused from a pay-as-you go tax regimen. The second shot is this: today’s rich and famous use their undeserved tax reductions to buy the same bonds issued by the government to fund its operations and they thereby collect not only interest on what should have been their taxes, but are able to pass - say bequeath - the same bonds to their children so they will have several 'legs up' on your children! And we (the poor) are so dumb we go nuts over repealing the ESTATE tax. Wow! End.

The Middle East is essential to the world and the US. It has over half of the known oil reserves on this planet. America uses 22 million barrels per day (mpd). We produce 7 mbd. We import the remaining 15 mbd. (It is pure demagoguery to offer energy independence to the voters). The British and French mucked up the Middle East after World War One. They divided the 400 year old political entity, the Ottoman Empire, into a maze of administrative regions we have gratuitously called “countries.” Today, we are confronted by the hand picked autocrats the British and French installed in 1922 and then propped up at gun point. Or their lineal or political descendants.

Then came the ME bombshell! In 1948, after the Christians of the world had tolerated the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, we - the War victors - decided to GIVE half the Land of Palestine to the Jewish survivors of WW2. It never occurred to any of the Euro-types to ASK the inhabitants of Palestine what they thought about US giving away HALF of THEIR land. It just never occurred to us. And this issue is still unresolved. It is the No. 1 issue to Arabs of every stripe. Which we Americans much prefer to ignore. Or stage side-shows at Annapolis. To our continuing dishonor and peril. As we sleep, Israel is busily proceeding with its cruel ethnic cleansing! Woe unto us. IF there was a God in Heaven, we must surely be incurring His wrath! But as usual, God also seems to be sleeping.

At the cost of many lives, a delicate balance of power evolved in the region which has seen a 1948 War of Independence, a 1956 Suez War, a 1967 Six Days War, a 1973 Yom Kippur War, a 1982 Lebanese Incursion, and a 1991 First Gulf War, then the 2003 Second Gulf War and last, a second Lebanese War in 2006. How many people died in those wars? Does any one know? Does any one care? They are darker-skinned that we are.

Q. Is the world better off now than it was then?

Bush43 wrecked the delicate balance of power in the Middle East with his unprovoked incursion into Iraq on March 18, 2003. Surely a war crime. Then on May 1, on the USS Lincoln, under a great banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’ he, Bush43 declared victory despite early warnings that all was not well in Baghdad. Whether or not Bush43 was emulating his fathers easy victory in the 1991 Gulf War 1, after merely 100 hours of combat, we may never know. I am strongly suspicions that was his, Bush43's primary goal! It was all about his L E G A C Y. And a meandering son with a cloudy record who had at last surpassed his more notable father!

And for such as that, men and women die every day. When will America’s KIAs reach the 4,000 mark? Perhaps by March 18, 2008? That would be ironic. What do you think? PS. Bush43 is no stranger to the death of others. In his 6 years as Texas governor he ordered the execution of 154 prisoners, about 1 man every 2 weeks on average. A record unmatched by any other governor. Hmm?

[edit on 12/21/2007 by donwhite]

Don what interests me the most is the fact that you think that Bush is Mr Neo Con himself. Of course this is the benefit of hindsight but the impression I get is that Bush heart was never really into the Iraq war.
If Bush heart was in remaking the ME wouldn't he have had the same resolve he had in the after mouth of 9-11 ?

Sure Bush made had statement about staying the course as long as his dog and wife are with him but IMO the stance wasn't back up by the level of conviction that Bush tried to give . Now I support replacing rogue regimes and countries that just politically unstable with democracy's but this idea of re making the ME in our or the US image is pure fantasy. Turkey shows that democracy can work amongst a differnt belief system and culture but expecting people to whole sale adopt western culture is something else all together .

reply to post by xpert11

---

Is this a “time out Don” advisory? You know by now Mr X11 that it is almost impossible for me to confine myself to a few words on the topic. See Note 1.



Good question. We attacked al Qaeda in Afghan in December, 2001. At the State of the Union speech on January 29, 2002, (109 days post Nine Eleven Event) before a cheering joint session of Congers, Bush linked Iran, North Korea and Iraq. The “Axis of Evil.” I see Bush43's domestic policies as 100% consistent with Reagan-ism and the Neo Con socio-political philosophy which codified Reagan-ism. The Neo (New) Conservative movement will not rest until it has KILLED the social aspects of the Federal Government. These are best exemplified by the New Deal and the Great Society. The Neo Con choice of means to reach their goals requires incurring huge national debt so that ultimately, Congress will be faced with choosing between defense, debt and a rudimentary bureaucracy or incurring more debt (or raising taxes) which (debt) will become so large as to be unmanageable. The ultimate Neo Con Triumph! See Note 2. www.treasurydirect.gov...

I first wrote this a few days afterwards that the Nine Eleven Event was serendipity for the Bush43 Administration. Moreover, it provided the needed opening the Neo Con philosophers had searched for. ATS being a conspiracy board, this surely offers a lot of conspiracy debate opportunities. If you believe in the 1980 election winning "October Surprise" of Reagan and Casey, then this one is no harder to make a case for.


Note 1. From Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan. He writes "Too many of us have become creatures of the moment . . It seems the past and all it’s lessons have ceased to exist. The greater the disregard of the past the greater the delusions regarding the future."

Note 2. America’s National Debt was $9.139 trillion (T) on 12/28/07. $30,643 for each of 300 million Americans. There is a sinister fact lurking the background. The total debt is divided into 2 categories. First, the so-called Public Debt is $5.138 T. This includes such obligations as Treasury bonds, notes and bills. This is what China and the Persia Gulf states buy with overpriced oil revenues and lead painted toys. And not to overlook our own R&Fs flush with money they should have paid in taxes.

The sinister fact mentioned above is the so-called Private Debt now called “intra-institutional” debt. $4.001 T. Never before has the proportion of private debt to the whole debt been so high. Nearly 45% and rising! Not Good. This is money committed to one purpose but spent on another. IF we continue on this path, Bush43 will have privatized - say wrecked - Social Security without signing a single law.

This "private" debt is held in TRUST FUNDS. A trust fund is “storage place” for some taxes levied for a specific purpose. In 1935 the Social Security Act provided the OASI tax on wages and employers would be set-aside to use when the worker retired. Old Age and Survivors Insurance. Currently OASI is part of FICA. It is 6.2% of wages matched by employers or 12.4% on self employed persons on earnings up to $96,000. This money is held in a trust fund. Likewise, the Medicare Trust Fund is the depository for the 1.45% Medicare tax also matched by employers or paid in full by the self employed (15.3%). No cap on wages for this tax. Both OASI and Medicare tax are now referred to as FICA. Federal Insurance Contributions Act.

Unfortunately, governments - not being analogous to private persons or firms - cannot SAVE money. Instead our government spends Trust Fund money as it comes in. In exchange of money the Trust Funds get special indicia of debt. Promissory notes. The government pays interest on such funds based on a esoteric formula I do not care to repeat here. But there is no place on earth were there is $4.001 T. waiting to be paid out in social security and Medicare. There are also Road Tax Trust Fund, Airport Trust Fund, Fish and Wildlife Trust Fund and more. All of this info is available at www.Firstgov.org.

The current US Budget runs about $3 T. The American GDP is given at $12+ T. Federal expenditures are approximately 25% of our GDP. States and local governments add another $1.5 T. so the total US outlay for all governmental functions is about 38% of GDP. Lower than any other so-called Western industrial state, which run in the mid to high 40%. Sweden goes over 50%. This number indicates there is less civility in the US than in the other Euro-type countries. But you knew that!

The next Defense budget will be $600 B. Special poorly explained appropriations mostly for the Bush43 L E G A C Y - the endless War on Terror - will add another $120 B. annually. It is carried OFF BUDGET because Bush43 does not want Congress to have time to go over his expenditures. He has essentially by-passed Congress on War on Terror expenditures. Periodically he sends them a bill. Pay it or else! Hey, B43 is after all the country’s Commander in Chief and answers to NO one. Another reason he wants the WoT to be perpetual! Unending!

Debt service runs about $375 B. Because Social Security and Medicare are now and have always been in the black, most of the Debt is attributable to past DoD budgets. I add 80% ($300 B) of debt service to the cost of WAR we are paying in the US. The VA Department got $37 B. this year but the DAV says it ought to have been $51 B. to fulfill its promises to the veterans. But what’s new here? This puts the real COST of the WoT at about $950 B. a year. WOW! It's no wonder our bridges are falling down!

Anyone recall reading about the 1932 Veterans Bonus March on Washington? The WW1 vets were tear gassed by the US Army to expel them from Washington, DC. The Army was led by its Chief of Staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was ordered by Pres. Herbert Hoover. But see US Con Amendment 1. Congress shall make NO law . . [limiting] the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. My caps.

Summary. The money withheld for FICA has been spent. As the retirees grow in number - by 2020 - the annual outlay for SS and Medicare will exceed the amounts paid in by workers. This money crunch will worsen until 2040 when demographics are predicted to put the trust funds back in the black. We will have to borrow upwards of $12 - $15 T. to carry us past the shortfall period. By squandering the balanced budget bequeathed to Bush43 by Bill Clinton, we are digging ourselves a hole out of which we may not come unscathed. (My Yiddish).

[edit on 12/28/2007 by donwhite]

Shot thru the heart, cleaned, washed, and popped in the oven. You stuck your epicurial fork in it once again DFB. I can add nothing. Except perhaps for a fresh bag of pretzels. Kudos.

Don you should know by now that I enjoy reading your posts. If I didn't I wouldn't have responded to them for nearly fifty pages on another thread .

I have to respectfully disagree that we are seeing Reagan legacy at work in the Bush admin . Elements of the agriculture sector in the US still get hand outs from the US government something that can only be termed welfare. Although corporate welfare is conveniently overlooked by those who have a bee in there bonnet about welfare . It is just like those obsessed with lowing taxes ignore fiscal sanity .

The Department of Homeland Security has seen the creation of a new kind of ineffective super bureaucracy something that Reagan would surely have opposed. Republicans claim Reagan as there idol but the party has certainly abandoned his legacy. IMO Reagan would have dealt with Saddam by arming the Kurds rather then the Bush plan of wholesale invasion.

: Awaits Don customary anti Reagan rant :

A foot note of my own.
Much like the perceived threat of Iraq's current stockpiles of WMDs and Nuclear program there was said to be dangerous Red element amongst the marches ....
MacArthur personally lead the troops against the bonus marches . A member of his staff was a promising office who went by the name of Ike. MacArthur would later say that Ike was the best staff office that he ever had.

[edit on 30-12-2007 by xpert11]

reply to post by xpert11

---

Thanks, Mr X11, for saying nice things.

Because I see everything as interconnected, I have great difficulty staying “on topic.” My motto is “Nothing in human affairs happens by accident.” Someone always gains, others always lose. Life is an endless struggle by the R&Fs against the P&P-ers. Rich and famous. Poor and poorer. So far, the R&Fs have won every round!



I call that another Founding Fathers’ muck-up. J/O denies they did that. Muck it up. I say it is mainly due to our bicameral legislative branch that we cannot end such unnecessary tax supported expenditures. That - the bicameral legislature - was in turn improvised to assure the slave holders of a place to block the Federal government in any act related to slavery they did not approve. Keep in mind the Continental Congress which was the legislative body during the Revolutionary War was unicameral. 1775 to 1789. They must have done something right? In 1787, GA, SC, NC, VA, MD, DE and NJ were slave states. PA, NY, VT, MA, CT, and RI were not.

MORE. America’s farmers - the world’s farmers - were always on their own. Always subject to the unpredictable vagaries of Mother Nature. No rain. Too much rain. Rain at the wrong time. Hail storms. Tornadoes. Early winter. Late spring. You name it, farmers always had very unpredictable crop yields.

The American farmer made a serious blunder in the early 1920s. At the end of the First World War, Europe was devastated. Financially bankrupt. Eight million dead young men, perhaps 15% of the total populations of France, Germany and Great Britain. Millions more had been injured for life by poison gas and loss of limbs. Not to even mention Russia. Herbert Hoover was put in charge of a great food relief effort to keep more Europeans from starving to death. This new market caused here a sharp increase the price of wheat, corn and sugar cane to make into processed sugar. US farmers raced to the banks to borrow money to buy or rent more land, to buy new farm equipment, to hire extra laborers and to buy the seed and newly improved chemical fertilizers to meet the future demand. Farm debt rose sharply in the US, but no one was much concerned. France, Germany and the UK total population was about the same as ours. In other words, our farmers saw the market for their produce doubled! Let the good times roll!

Then came Mother Nature. Beginning in the mid-1920s, Europe enjoyed several years in a row of near perfect farming weather! By the late 1920s there was no market in Europe for American farm produce. See Note 1. Forced back to feeding 120 million people but saddled with a farm economy based on feeding 240 million people. That meant plummeting farm prices coupled with gross over-production. Which in turn meant even lower prices and that caused skipped and late payments to the banks. That in turn brought on more and more foreclosures. Adding to this was the poor farming methods employed in thin-soil states of Oklahoma and parts of Kansas, which created what we called the Dust Bowl. The novel “Grapes of Wrath*” accurately portrayed an Oklahoma family aimlessly heading west always hoping tomorrow will be better than yesterday. “Oakies” they were called in California where most of them ended their journey. A re-run of the Great Trek in South Africa.

AND STILL MORE. Republican Herbert Hoover as president was a devotee of the classical Adam Smith economic philosophy espousing unrestrained capitalism. See note 2. The US economy went “deep 6" on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. Roosevelt came to power in the 1932 election. FDR was always a capitalist and never a socialist, but he was also a rare bird, a capitalist with a conscience. And pragmatic.

In the first “One Hundred Days” - Congress was seated on January 3, 1933, but the new president was not inaugurated until March 4, 1933. President Hoover vetoed all the Dems relief bills including TVA. The time from March 4 to the July 4 recess was about 100 days and because so much legislation was enacted became the label for a period of Congressional hyper-activity. Aside: the 1932 election was held o November 8. The president took office the following March 4. A lapse of nearly 4 months from election (Nov. 8, 1932) to taking office. 117 days. Thank you, FFs, you did it to us again. (Changed to January 20 by the XXth Amendment). This time it is worse, all of 2008 wasted while the "world turns" to partly quote a sop opera.

AND NOW THE POINT. Two enactments of the New Deal were the pillars on which it all rested. Abbreviated as the ‘AAA’ and the ‘NRA.’ Agricultural Adjustment Act and National Recovery Act. It, the NRA, was a/k/a as the Blue Eagle act, for the symbol it adopted.

The AAA set minimum prices for farm produce for the first time in the US. To achieve that price, the government offered to buy farm produce at about 85% of the predicted market price. If wheat was forecast to bring $1.00 a bushel, then the US floor price would be set at 85 cents a bushel. At a certain point in time, farmers began to grow wheat for both the commercial market ($1) and the Federal market (85 cents). After all, 85% was still profitable for wheat. As price supports rose, so did surpluses. To store the increasing surpluses, the Government began to “loan” farmers steel storage bins to put their excess wheat into. The Government paid rent to the farmer to store his own surplus - well, not his own anymore - on his land. The justification was the desirability for the government to have food in reserve if drought should threaten .

CONCLUSION. Here’s a list of the agricultural states as of around the 1960s. The 2 Dakotas. Montana. Minnesota. Wisconsin. Iowa. Kansas. Nebraska. Missouri. Colorado. Wyoming. These 11 states were major agricultural economy dependent states.

Add to those states these where agricultural is a strong secondary economic component. Pennsylvania. Ohio. Indiana. Illinois. Michigan. Maryland. Virginia. The 2 Carolinas. Alabama. Mississippi. Kentucky. Tennessee and Florida. Add both Oklahoma and Texas as large farming states. As are also New York, Oregon and Washington state. And then add the KING of American Agriculture, CALIFORNIA.

That's another 20 states. Total states with a strong agricultural connection: 31. Total votes in the Senate 62. Will all the senators who wish to publicly vote AGAINST some of their best organized constituents please rise?
END.


*Written by John Steinbeck in 1939, he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Note 1. There were plenty of hungry people in the world but they were not white - bad - and they had no money - worse. Tough. Seated in softly padded opera chairs in our air cooled Mega-Churches, the best we can do is to pray for them. Maybe GOD who is said to number the sparrows will feed them?

Note 2. The short title “Wealth of Nations.” The full title is “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, published on March 9, 1776 during the Scottish Enlightenment. [FYI 2588 characters]

[edit on 12/30/2007 by donwhite]

So the Bush43 War in Iraq has come down to this. I learned today we are paying the young Sunni men $300 a month not to kill or maim an American. Each month you don’t do that - kill or injure one of us - we give you $300. (That’s 3X the average wage of an unskilled Iraqi). With 50% unemployment in Iraq, it’s no surprise we are getting takers.

I wonder how much we are paying the Sunni LEADERS to let their young men take our $300 a month stipend? $10,000 a month? More? Much more? Well, war has finally come down to who has the deep pockets more than who has the better SURGE plan. Yes Mr Gates this is better than Herr Oberfuhrer Rumsfeld ever did.

good or bad ???

I think you can look at my avatar to know my feelings
on that one.

Bush will go down in US history .......
as the worst prez we ever had

but don't take my word for it
read what the Washington Post says about Bush:




Washington Post

I hate playing skeptic, but by chance do you have a
source for that statement ???

nevermind I found it !!!!

OMG !!!!

now we're hiring and paying 70,000 insurgents to work public jobs
for the military. No wonder we are going broke in this war.
When in the history of war has any nation bought out the opposition??
No wonder Bush is saying that his policy is working and American
deaths are decreasing. If Bush paid me each month NOT to kill
somebody ...... dang if I wouldn't be in the front of the line.
That's easy money

Bush pays Sunni insurgents off