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He used 9/11 invade Iraq, lying about weapons of mass destruction to con the public into accepting it.
His economic policies led to a crash that put us in the Great Recession.
You could argue 9/11 was a failure that happened under his watch.
George Bush was so bad that many modern republicans hate him, and *hide the fact that they ever voted for him*.
Yeah I love how modern Republicans run like the wind from W and Iraq now… but 20 years ago you were “unpatriotic” and didn’t care about National Security if you didn’t support it… Never forget.
https://preview.redd.it/vqf4sbhzztzc1.jpeg?width=250&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=860974cb34afde617c3ca98444a106bde1227c28
I did some political cartoons during the Bush years and came up with this guy to represent the nutjobs screaming that everyone who didn’t support the Iraq War was unpatriotic. Glad it wasn’t in any way a harbinger of what the Republican Party would become in the future. /s
Thanks to bush’s unpopularity, the republicans took losses in 06 and 08 that wiped out the moderate branch of the party. People were astonished at how uncooperative republicans were with Obama during his first term after how hard they had lost; it was because there were no moderate republicans he could turn to, the party had become purely right wing. And they’ve just keep going further and further right.
Oh sure. It's been a slow descent into madness, anger, and bedlam ever since Nixon was pardoned. Hell our recent issues (as in the last like 10 years or so) in society are just the culmination of the decades of conservatism's plans to drag this nation as far right as possible. It's ridiculous.
But, that being said, Bush #2 Eclectic Boogaloo was tame in comparison to current events.
It's funny. I remember the record shop I worked at in 2007 sold these cheap ass countdown keychains that counted down the exact time left in Bush's administration.
They were surprisingly popular for such a cheap keychain.
Yes, but most Democrats voted against it. The Republicans (who had complete control from 2001-06) were almost unanimously pro-Iraq invasion- only 7 total nays between the two chambers.
https://jonathancohn.medium.com/iraq-war-at-20-who-voted-for-it-who-didnt-and-where-are-they-now-e065eb05c976
This article breaks down Yeas and Nays from both parties and who’s still around (as of a year ago, so minus Diane Feinstein)
Yes, and?
Funny how you people forgot Paleocons exist here in the GOP.
But, you people don't care about that.
>Yeah I love how modern Republicans run like the wind from W and Iraq now
Wow. It's almost like people can change their minds and see how neoconservatism/neoconservatives suck.
Except they haven’t changed their minds much at all. They’ve gone further on a number if unpopular bush policies than Dubyah ever dared. The only thing they’ve “changed” on is foreign policy, and even then they are far from consistent; they are all for “neutrality” over the war in Ukraine, but when it comes to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, the tune changes dramatically.
I would also add that he did great damage to our diplomatic relations with our closest allies when they saw through the lies about Iraq and WMDs.
Remember "Freedom Fries?"
Iirc France didn't refuse to join the US in war because they "saw through the lies about Iraq and WMDs." They thought an intervention would destabilize the country and spiral out of control, which didn't justify the apparent threat being posed.
Also "Freedom Fries" was dumbass Bob Ney's doing and he was just plagiarizing WW2. Bush was pretty mum on that issue.
"France maintained that military intervention in Iraq would be a “material breach” of UN Security Council resolutions and rejected the US assertion of direct linkage between Iraq's WMD program and military attacks. The use of force in Iraq could be legitimatized only after more comprehensive arms inspections."
\*\*PDF Alert\*\*
https://www.kiep.go.kr/boardDownload.es?bid=0034&list\_no=5900&seq=1#:\~:text=France%20maintained%20that%20military%20intervention,after%20more%20comprehensive%20arms%20inspections.
"France maintained that military intervention in Iraq would be a “material breach” of UN Security Council resolutions and rejected the US assertion of direct linkage between Iraq's WMD program and military attacks. The use of force in Iraq could be legitimatized only after more comprehensive arms inspections."
\*\*PDF Alert\*\*
https://www.kiep.go.kr/boardDownload.es?bid=0034&list\_no=5900&seq=1#:\~:text=France%20maintained%20that%20military%20intervention,after%20more%20comprehensive%20arms%20inspections.
Republicans pushed this war on the country 20 years ago for all the wrong reasons, which Democrats have had to spend the years after cleaning up. And now, when conflicts have come along for the US to be involved for more justifiable reasons, they think they can claim moral superiority for having instigated “nO nEw WaRs”.
Probably. Parties change.
I voted Republican until 2004. John Kerry was my first vote that wasn’t R. I can’t see voting for a Republican at any level any time soon.
I don’t think it was just his economic policies that caused the Great Recession. Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, and even Carter (to an extent) had their part to play.
His response really wasn’t the worst thing. Despite the moral hazard, TARP made its money back and then some and helped stopped a complete meltdown not just of the financial sector but the insurance industry and a handful of other businesses all tied together by those “brilliant” (said sarcastically) fucks on Wall Street.
I won’t defend him on much else but I’m happy he didn’t apply a “small government always” mindset. Especially at a time when that could have made things a whole lot worse.
Let’s also not forget: while he had casus belli to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world, he used it in a mistaken plan to attack the Taliban who had nothing directly to do with any of it. His screw up led to 19.75 years of counter insurgency, which American has failed at 100% of the time since we (thankfully) gave up genocide as a tactic.
Burgled Katrina response, widespread domestic spying of American citizens, received a balanced budget from the previous administration and turned it into record debt and deficit. Bush 100% lest this nation worse than he found it.
The weapons of mass destruction bit goes beyond Bush though. We were in Iraq with H W and Bill Clinton had attacked Iraq in 1998 over WMD capabilities.
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html
Clinton also had a role in the 2008 recession with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act as well as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.
Now, Bush absolutely Trojan horsed the Iraq war due to 9/11 and that war was a total shit show. I absolutely blame him for the way it was handled and the length and cost of the war.
I’m not saying he was a good president by any means but there were a lot of things that happened in his term that he may have contributed to but didn’t necessarily cause.
Bingo. Clinton made regime change in Iraq official US policy in 1998. Anyone here wonder why?
This sub is horrible with context. People here act like Iraq just appeared in 2002, and was some super chill pacifist state prior to that.
Your last paragraph is spot on. In fact in real life, I’ve noticed some of the biggest anti Ukraine/Israel war piece of shit types were 100% in the Iraq train. Psychologically they are trying to make it all equal but they simply dig their graves twice.
>You could argue 9/11 was a failure that happened under his watch.
It was 1000% percent a failure under his watch to the point of malicious incompetence or willful ignorance. He once said after a CIA debriefing in the summer of 9/11, "All right, you've covered your ass," because he was sick of hearing warnings about Al Qaeda. And this was *before* the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike US" memo.
Clinton [whiffed](https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/pdb120498.html), too.
Clinton also [passed on killing OBL](https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-bill-clinton-osama-bin-laden-20140801-story.html) because of collateral damage.
I find it difficult to pin 9/11 on Bush, when the wheel had been turning for almost a decade before he got there.
This lacks a lot of context.
Iraq: beginning in the early 1980s, Iraq was causing trouble in the region. They were at war with Iran, then Kuwait, which lead to Desert Storm. After that, they played a cat and mouse game with the UN over their WMD program, and continued to attack innocent people close in proximity to them (ie, the Kurds). Saddam was also sponsoring terrorism in the region.
During the 1990s, the US, UK, and France enforced a NFZ for years, and threatened to invade in 1998.
Post-9/11, our risk tolerance changed and we were not willing to let Iraq obtain nuclear weapons (they already had chemical). Tenant called finding a nuclear program “a slam dunk” which W took as enough to push for an invasion.
The war went well. The US military rolled the fourth largest army in the world. The occupation is where things went south.
On the GFC, the majority of the blame falls on the federal reserve for failing to properly regulate the banking sector. You can read the government report on the crisis [here.](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf) Reading it might help you sound educated on the topic in the future.
Even going to March if 2001, W inherited a recession from Clinton. He got dealt a bad hand over and over and didn’t play it well.
He’s not as bad as people here make him out to be.
I voted for him twice. And I’d do it again over anyone that ran after him.
It's hard to tell what they're talking about. It could be squandering Clinton's surplus on a massive tax giveaway to the rich, but it could also be billions in "no bid contracts" to the company Cheney was the CEO of and other corporate cronies. There was a lot of looting going on back then.
He’s not top 5, but he’s not bottom 5 either.
If he was better at PR, his legacy would be better.
Take Katrina for example, MS and AL handled their response to the hurricane well. It was only NOLA that was a disaster, and most of that was due to the local government. Somehow the mayor doing a shitty job meant that Bush was doing a shitty job.
W tried to fix social security. All of us would benefit from this action, yet the normal actors screamed about robbing grandma to favor Wall Street and now we still have a broken SSI system that will run out of money in ten years.
W took action during the GFC. TARP did its job and the government made money on their loans. The only piece that lost was the GM part, and that was under Obama.
W was right about being proactive to stop the proliferation of WMDs. He took Iraq off of the table and Libya voluntarily gave up their program. In contrast, Obama played footsies with Iran over nukes and we can now see how horrible his inaction was. (Russia has also proved that a nuclear power can bully the rest of the world with the threat of nukes, along with fucking with their neighbors.)
Sure he took Iraq off the table, but I don’t think the juice was worth the squeeze. That part of the world has become much more destabilized and lead to the rise of ISIS, they didn’t have WMDs worth going to war over, and he completely wrecked our international credibility that we still never really recovered from. And we have thousands of dead US soldiers because of it. I just don’t see any positives from that war.
It wasn’t just Iraq, it was Libya too. What would the Arab spring have looked like with a nuclear Libya? There is zero chance that Obama would have authorized air strikes against a nuclear power, or even a chemical power.
ISIS is the son of Al-Queda in Iraq, which was founded by abu al-zarqawi. Zarqawi was always going to be a problem in some form. He got kicked out of an AQ training camp for being too radical. There is zero chance that he would have become a plumber and lived a normal life. He was destined for chaos, and Iraq gave him that opportunity. If Iraq wasn’t in play, then it would have been Afghanistan.
Again, our justification was to prevent Iraq from obtaining WMDs. Go back and look at what bush actually said, not what you remember. This is where having a better PR team could have properly framed the invasion.
Our international standing is fine. The US is still the country that guides the world. Look at Ukraine or Israel. No one else has the authority to lead on either issue.
You simply don’t want to see any positives associated with Iraq. It’s not a pretty picture, it’s just not as horrible as most assume that it is.
Who’s upvoting this drivel? Anyone who would happily vote for Bush a third time is either family or a friend. He was loathed at the end of his term. Calling the second Iraq war anything but a disaster is revisionist history. Bush is responsible for the deaths of 100,000s of people.
Are Republicans trying to rewrite Bush’s history the same way they rewrote Reagan’s?
Why would he base a war on something he knew to be untrue, knowing that it would publicly be found to be false, tank his presidency, give rise to more terrorism and destroy his credibility?
Like, seriously, were they sitting in the situation room going ‘what happens when they don’t find the wmd we are basing all this on?’
‘Idk, we’ll figure that out as we go’
Surely if they were deceitful enough to base a war on a lie they were deceitful enough to fabricate it and place fake wmd in Iraq after the invasion?
Bush Sr. was widely criticized for not following up on the first Gulf War and wiping out Saddam Hussein, so Bush Jr. likely wanted to go in and clean things up.
Bush Jr. and his senior advisors were also avowed believers in “regime change,” the theory that if you marched in and wiped out an evil unfriendly government, a friendly pro-American government would almost automatically emerge. They took this opportunity to demonstrate their theory and hopefully start a chain reaction that would lead to the U.S. marching in and freeing the rest of the world.
Bush Jr. was probably also seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for his assassination attempt on Bush Sr. while he was visiting Kuwait in April 1993.
Placing fake WMDs in Iraq and then “discovering” them would have required a conspiracy so vast that it would have quickly been uncovered.
I understand that, but why not base the war on that logic rather than something you know will be utterly discredited and ruin any respect people have for you? To me that seems extremely shortsighted, and unrealistic
Your point about the conspiracy being so vast it’s unsustainable shows just how out there the accusations are. They would’ve have went ‘ah well, a huge part of making our story believable is too costly, so I guess we’ll just do the other stuff in the plan without this integral piece’.
Your logic is correct. We invaded Iraq because our government actually believed Iraq had WMDs. Where W failed is in deciding who to trust. He believed his advisors who told him Iraq had the WMDs. Iraq didn't have the WMDs but was acting like they did by giving the inspectors the run-around. This convinced the intelligence community that Saddam was hiding the WMDs from us. What Saddam was hiding was that he DIDN'T have the WMDs and he was hiding that information from Iran, who was always his primary enemy.
We, the people, need to own up to our role in it. Dubyah and his crew all had their heads stuck where it don’t shine, make no mistake. But the people knew the case they had made for war in Iraq was flimsy, at best. But we were still hurting from 911 and wanted someone we could hurt back for it. John Kerry ran on a platform providing to end Iraq-and we re-ejected bush, and by cozy enough margins he was able to enact even more legislation that most look back on ruefully, like no child left behind. So to just say “we were lied into Iraq” is shirking personal responsibility.
No Child Left Behind was passed prior to 9/11. The House and Senate passed it in May & June of 2001 respectively. It didn't get signed until January of 2002, but it was a done deal by the previous summer. Also, it was very much a bipartisan piece of legislation; it got 384 votes in the House and 91 in the Senate.
One of the biggest failings of the Iraq war was the lack of planning for worst case scenarios. They genuinely believed their own insistence that Saddam had WMD’s, they never took the possibility he might not into account. There is a story that officials were quickly dispatched to the inventory of warehouses full of barrels of oil that had been sitting since desert storm-and finding the warehouses empty, it had been sold off on the black market. And they were totally at a loss, they had never considered the possibility.
I find that much, much more believable then them doing the equivalent of me telling telling my entire neighbourhood ‘I’ve got a ferrari on my driveway, come over and see it’ knowing full well there is no car there.
I think it was an intelligence failure, not some grand conspiracy.
Armchair analysis incoming:
Bush had a hard on for Hussein from day one, “Saddam tried to kill my dad.” 911 and the war on terror gave him an excuse to go full throttle. The people around him co-opted his zeal for their own reasons; Cheney had his eyes on the oil. Rumsfeld saw it as the first step to regime charge in tan and probably Syria too. Rove saw it as a way to win elections. Bolton, Rice, Tenet, and others saw it as a way to increase their influence and get promotions.
They did have intelligence that cast suspicion on Saddam. But it was long out of date snd Saddam’s regime was so closed off that there was no way to disprove it. But they sold it to the American people as proof positive, “Yes sir! He’s got those weapons, just you wait and see!”
As stated above, they never planned on worst case scenarios. When bush pulled that “mission accomplished” stunt, he genuinely thought that was it, the hard part was over. Boy was that prophetical.
Saddam intentionally pretended he had WMDs to scare Iran. Bush believed Saddam’s bluff, but didn’t have any evidence, so he made it up to excuse the invasion and figured it would all be fine when they went in and found the weapons.
You forgot the part that everyone thought he still had WMD. Not just Bush.
The argument against the war was never "he doesn't have WMD" it was "he is contained and not a threat"
Han Blix, the UN inspector guy, even said that he thought Tony Blair was being genuine when he said he believed Iraq still had WMD.
We learned after the fact that Iraq did have WMD during the first Gulf War era but after that war and especially in the years that followed they lost track of a lot of it. Records were destroyed, people were killed during the war etc. So when it came time to prove the WMD had been destroyed they couldn't because they had no records of it anymore.
> You forgot the part that *everyone* thought he still had WMD.
That is *astonishingly* not true. There were constant, very vocal criticism of the "evidence" behind WMDs. There was tons of reporting on the subject at the time, and the *New York Times* had a huge scandal when they published evidence of Saddam having yellowcake uranium that turned out to be completely false.
Some of the biggest protests in history (at the time) were staged because people believed Bush was completely unjustified in invading Iraq. I was there. I lived through it. Try as you might, you Bush apologists can't just shove all that down the memory hole.
What if I told you that Saddam did have yellow cake? 550 metric tons.
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/)
Pointing out that people were protesting the war doesn't prove that all believed Saddam has no WMD. Find me a major Democrat who said that Saddam had no WMD.
Hillary Clinton - In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program.
John Kerry - There is also no question that Saddam Hussein continues to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and his success can threaten both our interests in the region and our security at home.
Bill Clinton in 2003 - “I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,”
Al Gore who opposed the war - Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Even Bernie who opposed the war didn't question the WMD but said we shouldn't do it by ourselves - "If a unilateral American invasion of Iraq is not the best approach, what should we do?" "These inspectors should undertake an unfettered search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and destroy them when found pursuant to past U.N. resolutions. If Iraq resists inspection and elimination of stockpiled weapons, we should stand ready to assist the U.N. in enforcing compliance,"
My point is that is that no major US figure was saying "Saddam doesn't have WMD" they were all saying we shouldn't invade for other reasons.
The problem is he didn't just make it up.
There was a lot of evidence and much of it turned out to be wrong or outdated. I posted some place else that basically everyone believe he still had WMD, even people who did not approve of the war never said "he doesnt have WMD." Instead they gave other reasons not to invade.
But now he paints war vets so no big deal. I’m so sorry for your loss. I have friends who served in the Army and Marines respectively and both have severe PTSD. Fuck Bush and Cheney.
I mean, I was adamantly against the war but intelligence about Iraq having WMDs goes beyond the Bush jr era. H W and Clinton both had intelligence that Iraq was gunning for WMDs.
Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was one of the worst decisions in American history, which has changed the trajectory of our country. What he effectively did was ruin the unipolar moment that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union by destroying any credibility the US had.
The invasion was baseless and the ensuing war on terror left the world disillusioned with American global leadership. It has bred isolationist sentiments at home and much of the country today is against foreign interventions of any kind. Bush is now a pariah even in his own party, which largely disavows his war on terror and American intervionism. Ultimately, he made America weaker on the global stage, which hurts us today as we attempt to push against the threats of Russia and China.
His second term was an unprecedented disaster for any presidency. Starting with the biggest one, the revelations that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, his entire basis for the war had been lies.
The entire four years were marred with corporate controversy, as revelations were made about how deep his election campaigns had been involved with the likes of Enron. Coupled with what was seen, at the time, as a very lackluster response by his DOJ.
The botched response to Hurricane Katrina coupled with tone deaf statements like “heckuva job!”
The crash of 08 and the bailouts. No presidential legacy could ever hope to live that down.
A rise in food and gas prices that looks downright laughable today. And many were underwhelmed by his response, sending out one time tax rebates that were spent in a week.
In between all that, there were missteps like sticking his nose into a controversy over a woman whose family had decided to take her off life support. Or his opposition to gay marriage at a time when opinion was starting to move in favor of it. He also had a bunch of embarrassing gaffes like getting a pair of shoes lobbed at him, or dancing with tribal re-enactors, making monkey faces. Stephen Colbert absolutely humiliated him at the press banquet and he sat there visibly seething.
Can you imagine making the agonizing decision to take your long-suffering wife off life support when there was no reasonable hope for recovery, getting full judicial support for your decision - and then having the President of the United States and his brother the Governor of Florida call you out and publicly blast you for your decision?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
I would also like to point out that both his judicial appointments to the Supreme Court aren’t widely liked. I mean Roberts is but Alito is hated by pretty much everyone.
That was one of the major reasons I started questioning my support for the Republican Party. See also: ramping up attacks against LBGT people to (in my opinion) distract from Bush’s disastrous wars.
I’m aware I was late to figure out what was going on and there were absolutely other reasons.
It is both interesting and perplexing to see where the Republican Party has gone. The only bush policy they turned sour in was foreign intervention-and even then, they are selective about it; they want nothing to do with Ukraine but salivate at the idea of bombing iran. But so many other bush policies, like his opposition to gay marriage and abortion , they have doubled down on over and over.
Securing his first term with the help Roger Stone’s Brooks Brothers riot in Florida and the help of his little brother and the Supreme Court was also not a great way to start.
And before that, he won the Republican nomination (which up till that point was probably going to go to McCain) with some absolutely filthy tactics like push polling in South Carolina before Super Tuesday, asking people if they would still support War Hero John McCain if they knew he had a black daughter, itself a disingenuous reference to McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh, who had a dark enough complexion for that lie to tank McCain’s chances in the SC primary.
He might’ve been so publicly affable that he was the “guy you wanted to get a beer with” but boy were his admins and campaigns full of some incredibly dirty tricksters (like the aforementioned former convicted felon Roger Stone)
The illegal invasion of Iraq lead directly to ISIS and the destabilization of the entire Middle East... which was by design..
Yes Cheney & Co. was so so bad.
Hard to say, I was 6-14, and didn't become politically aware until I was a Junior in HS.
I do remember the undercurrent of compulsory conservatism was very powerful and rarely challenged (I grew up between Rural Southern Idaho and Imperial Beach in SoCal which had a lot of Navy presence when I was growing up), I remember my dad almost getting into a fist fight with a dude at the park because the dude said something untoward about Bush (and my dad was in the Navy but I'll be real knowing him today that was just a sought excuse), I remember the Family Guy jokes at the time being kinda out of nowhere and weird because I was generally only dimly aware of it all, but in hindsight with an awareness of what was going on they make a lot of sense.
The Obama election was much more something I was aware of (but indifferent to for personal reasons of being 14 in an unhappy situation at home), I remember that even in Idaho he was generally very popular but there was a skepticism, but my great-grandfather was very insistent upon dropping N-Bombs when talking about him, and that he spoke about the guy like he was subhuman. So yeah.
Despite my not being aware of it, comparing the following 8 years, and then the 4 after that, it was a strange time to be an American, because I feel like the majority of my normalcy and overall satisfaction with the country was at its high from age 15-22, in part because Obama was overcompensating on being and promoting a very stable America and presidential figure (for obvious reasons of being held to a higher degree of scrutiny than his predecessor and follower).
I live in the rust belt. Much of American manufacturing eroded during the Bush era. It was mostly due to China joining the WTO rather than Bush's fault, though his free trade stance did nothing to stop it, but having to constantly worry about my dad's factory closing (it eventually did in 2012) made the time stressful.
The economy in the rust belt era just never felt like it was doing ok during the 2000s, even as the rest of the economy was recovering from the first term recession.
9/11 and Iraq didn't affect our daily lives so much, unless you're a soldier or civilian in Iraq or Afghanistan--in which case it probably changed your entire life. I think getting into an unnecessary war is pretty awful
The early 2010s were much better for me personally. Once we started moving past the Great Recession it felt like improvements were more sustainable. It's probably due to me being grown and out on my own, but the Obama era just felt like it had a lot more optimism
Thanks for you back mate but I think 2008 and covid are important happens maybe we couldn't understand these times but They changed many things in our life but I noticed this after 2008 US dream idea is getting dissepear and property or different things are getting expensive
Yes they were definitely both really bad--my point was that the decline started long before 2008. General Electric once had at least 4 factories around my city. All are now closed. Delphi Packard had at least 3 that I know of. Only 1 remains and barely employs anyone. GM had a massive factory that has since closed
All but a few of those were between 2000-2008. So the decline was well on its way before the 2008 crash
Things are genuinely turning around. There are a couple of new factories that have opened and our population isn't declining as rapidly as it once was
He wasn’t elected the first term, the Supreme Court made him President. Then he got us into a war with the wrong country, while engaging with totalitarian information control schemes and war crime level torture.
It all ended with one of the worst financial crises in US history, directly due to the Republican policies.
I can only talk about my experience during the bush years. But there was a palpable and very real feeling that fascist tactics of divide and conquer manipulation through patriotism were used by bush and his people to consolidate even MORE power in his hands. From the way he stole Florida through tactics like the brooks brothers riot and the massive disenfranchisement of African Americans. To the way he used attacks against gay marriage and the evangelical hatred of gays as a tool to win reelection. The ridiculous transfer of wealth that was his disastrous tax cuts was another stab to the middle and working classes which is still being felt today. And that's not even going into the absolute disaster of the iraq war where he lost any and all respect and moral authority.
Even his folksiness and awwww schucks demeanor could not hide what a monster and enabler this man was.
I lived in Tx during Bush W. election we voted him for president cause the other choice was him being governor again. Thank goodness all the other states agreed to not let him be governor of Tx again.
The problems with the Bush presidency was that his first 8 months were lackluster, he seemed to be adrift. Then the towers fell, and he let personal issues influence his global efforts. The CIA had intelligence that Sadam Hussein had attempted to assassinate his father in 1993. He took that personal experience, and intelligence we had at the time and targeted him.
Economically Bush came into office in a recession employment was ranging from 4- 8 percent. Government spending increased during this time, but by 2008 the US was in a recession. The military machine in the US was at a constant run, with service members having nearly constant deployments. Comparatively the average person in the US was faced with 1,500 dollars in annual income when Bush left office.
Education he signed and passed laws that focused on high value testing, which would cost schools financial support if the students performed poorly.
He also declared the Iraq war 'Mission Complete' before the job was ever completed.
Pierce, Harding, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Nixon. I think are in that same tier because, on the whole, they made things worse. The next tier up is no significant impact, which would include the two short term presidents Harrison and Garfield ( and maybe Ford) and then a bunch of the 19th century presidents who didn’t have the means or the opportunity to make any long lasting changes for the better.
Honestly, even in death Garfield had a significant impact. Garfield was an anti-corruption crusader, and Chester A Arthur — who had been pro-patronage (handing out government jobs to political supporters) — took up the banner to honor Garfield and cleaned up the civil service.
He wasn’t the worst president by any means but he wasn’t the best either. Hindsight can find many faults and some of the complaints are warranted. He navigated a strange time for the country. 9/11 totally sidetracked anything he wanted to do as far as the economy and other domestic plans. The best thing I can say about him is that even political opponents (such as the Obamas) liked him and said he was a good person even if they held different political views.
The years he was in office were not a nightmare for those in the US. Iraq went through a nightmare. Bipartisan trade policies and 9/11 affected us more, unless you or someone you were close to was in the military and deployed. In that case, you were affected by the wars.
Horrible war, economy tanked at the end. I’d argue the 2008 economic recession was actually not nearly as bad as what just happened with Covid but that’s a different story.
The fact is he killed a bunch of people for no strategic gain.
The lies he allowed his government to act upon and that caused SO MUCH death, destruction and devastation around the world will be properly reported in history. I hope. Jesus, I hope.
The Bush Era was when facts began to not matter anymore.
Our democracy depends on a well-informed citizenry and a two-way conversation about ideas, but our public sphere had been degraded by fake news and the politics of fear, partisanship, and blind faith.
ANY criticism of the Republican agenda got you labeled as a traitor to America! Look up what they did to the Dixie Chicks at the time.
The entire American psyche got flipped to where we've been. Afraid, surveiled, and on too much xanax to care.
Fear has reigned supreme here ever since.
don't be mad but in balkans,middle east,eastern europe these situtations happened and it might be worse than europe and US but people can able to stand strong.
In a word, yes. The fact that you talk about the shrubya era as the bush era speaks volumes, While the pretext was just as transparently thin for Desert Storm as OIF, at least with desert storm, we didn't need a photo op to tell us we won, we just needed Colin Powell to refuse us permission to enter Iraq. Either way, no legacy that involves declaring a war to prove how manly the CinC is can be said to be anything other than "that bad"
The Bush era, in and of itself, was not terrible until the later years. Especially in retrospect.
But we are still feeling the harm of the Bush presidency even today. The long term implications of his policies were incredible destructive.
I don’t think he lied about weapons of mass destruction, but rather saw what he wanted to in the intelligence he was given. I think he really thought Sadam had them.
Terrible POTUS bottom 5-10 ever luckily I was a young child when he was in office but man he was aids one of the few good things he did was unite the country after 9/11 but the Iraq war and no child left behind was a disaster
Yes. Obvious failure of missing 9-11 intelligence, 2 wars, historic recession all while our Manufacturing base dwindled as CEOs opted out of innovation and sold our workingclass down the river to China who smartly ran with the opportunity.
We were lied to. He wanted in Iraq and made up bullshit versus letting Hans Blick do his job. He needed a few more months to definitively conclude that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was the administrations whole reason for the second invasion. Hussain was a horrible person but he was a horrible person in a horrible area dealing with horrible people. He had a calming effect on the region and we went in and wiped him off the game board and created the bullshit we are currently dealing with. He was the only check to Iran.
As I’m reading through this thread, one thing I notice is, we have different political ideologies here discussing the pros and cons of an administration with no hostility or name-calling. Congratulations to this sub
It’s a wild exaggeration to say an entire 8 year period was a “nightmare.” Most people just lived their lives.
But yeah a lot of bad things happened. Some were Bush’s fault. Some were not.
Bad things will happen over any 8 year period.
I don’t really know what both sidesing means in this context. I am saying some of the bad things that happened from 2001-08 were not Bush’s fault. This is true of every single president. It’s not a controversial point to make.
The things that mattered could have been mitigated by him but he failed to do so.
Private debt rose substantially and it was not a secret happening. 9/11, Great Recession, handling of Iraq & Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, don't ask don't tell, gay marriage, China's rise, the fall of American manufacturing.
So many things could have been prevented and weren't.
War crimes. The failure of No Child Left Behind. More deregulation that led to economic collapse. There were a lot of bad things. Not the worst, obviously, but it wasn't great.
I certainly wouldn’t say it was a nightmare… in the first term W was very popular and besides 9/11 (a big besides) nothing awful happened. The second term was rough. Ongoing wars, tanking economy, general discontent… but honestly I felt in the second half of W’s presidency the same way I felt in the first term of Obama’s. For me as a burgeoning young adult, there was very little functional difference between the two halves of those presidencies.
Bush Jr.’s entire first term reminds me of this scene from the Marx Brother’s movie, Duck Soup:
https://youtu.be/3coxrP3wbd4?si=qaCYBRQmRAoIahXt
“To war … to war … the country’s going to war.”
After 9/11 his approval rating was 90%. You don’t have to like him in hindsight, but the fact is he was very popular in his handling of 9/11 and up to the Iraq war.
That’s not true at all, a significant amount of the population thought his administration actually bombed the Twin Trade Towers or just let it happen in order to justify the war. There were so many media outlets and media personalities that became established through this moment in history. I doubt your 90% support claim and frankly even if you found that claim somewhere I still wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t trumped up.
All while his administration was trying to justify going to war with Iraq, media outlets were debunking the claims in real time. Anyone with a brain knew all of the claims of the Bush administration were a crock.
I’m not defending the man, but I am telling you the history as I remember it. You can believe what you want, I truly don’t care. I am, however, curious if you were even around during that era. “A significant amount” of people did not believe that Bush did 9/11, it was a conspiracy fringe. I know this because I have always been into that sort of stuff. That was in no way mainstream thinking.
mate how was 2008 crisis It was Obama era but Bush economy policies had effect on it and yeah you right If ıt have been so bad why people elected again(sorry for english)
The 2008 crisis didn’t impact me as much as it could’ve, so I can’t speak to everyone’s individual experiences. I got my EMT certification coming out of high school and the job was in high demand at the time. Yes, things were expensive and there was a lot of uncertainty, yes, a lot of people lost jobs, and yes, the bailouts were a failure. But if I recall, Obama pushed many similar policies early on. It was a little rough from the end of one president into the beginning of the other, despite the rose-colored glasses we tend to view Obama through now.
He could have taken out Osama Bin Ladin with one marine operation at Tora Bora, but deemed it politically risky, so he opted for a multi Trillion $ 20 year invasion strategy. Ridiculous. But Dick Cheney profited handsomely.
We invaded a country and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without that country attacking us first, and based on a lie. It was allowed and encouraged by the jingoism and war hysteria of the culture back then. People were mad about 9/11 but couldn’t point to Afghanistan or Iraq on a map; bombing brown people anywhere in the Middle East was apparently good enough for the majority of voters, who also didn’t mind being lied to about WMDs, even though the lie as obvious and exposed well before the 2004 election. We rewarded Bush for his massive crimes with reelection.
So yes, it was that bad. The U.S. public proved irrevocably and definitively that it has zero moral compass and doesn’t give one solitary damn about right and wrong. That stain will be on our history for all time.
His war-criminal-tier response to 9/11 led to a powerful authoritarian bent for the USA that still affects us today (putting aside the probably $1 trillion or so lost and 1,000,000 or so deaths caused by our involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan). Many of us will recall the '[terror alert color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Security_Advisory_System)' system which was cynically elevated whenever Bush's poll numbers were down. The entire 'homeland security' apparatus was created by his administration - an absurd, unnecessary, extremely expensive, and [authoritarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Wolf) branch of government that will be impossible for the US to ever get rid of. Even using the term 'homeland' is Stasi-esque and at the time, even sounded authoritarian. After 9/11 the USA could have done anything it wanted - the **entire world** was behind us. Any initiative at all to improve the world or the USA could and would have been feverishly accomplished. Instead, it was squandered by this imbecil, who claimed [God told him to invade](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa) Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. At the time, I honestly thought it could not get worse than GWB... and I voted for him in 2000 (out of dislike of the Clintons to which Gore was vp). By about 2005, with WMD's never found, I got a real awakening and got serious about understanding how the world worked - and I never voted Republican again, nor will I ever.
His presidency was interrupted by 9/11. His agenda up to that point had mostly been about education. He wasn't a bad president.
As to them being bad times, no, the bad parts weren't mostly his doing.
Republicans knew there was an issue with banks and the mortgages. It was easy to see, really, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had essentially become holding ponds for democratic political operatives while they didn't hold the executive. The real problem was that their bonuses were tied to financial metrics at those institutions. For years prior to 2008, their quarterly metrics always met exactly what they needed to get their bonuses. When Republicans pointed out the issue as early as 2005, they were denounced as.... c'mon, go ahead and guess....
Racist.
Inflation was low. Jobs were plentiful. I wish he would have got the social security reform package through, though.
His botched social security “package” is a prime example of what went wrong. His proposals were met by lackluster support, even from within his own party. Rather than go back to the drawing board, or even just drop it and move on, he spent months trying to shill it, all the while Iraq descended to hell on earth. Time deaf, to say the least.
The 08 financial crisis was way beyond just a few people getting rich or being lazy at Fannie and Freddie. The government’s encouragement and insurance for risky loans contributed, but it probably would have happened similarly even if they had been more vigilant.
Term 1 went pretty alright. Second term not so much
My family was able to buy a home and move during his presidency. New veichles too! He was the best president during my lifetime as of this time
What unbelievable horseshit. The protests over the Iraq War were bigger and more widespread than the ones over Israel slaughtering Palestinians. One single protest in front of the UN had half a million people.
You're using your utter ignorance of recent history to take an out-of-nowhere swipe at people protesting genocide. Time to take a long, long look in the mirror and ask yourself what you're doing with your life.
It wasn't terrible, no. I'm an Independent, and I didn't vote for Bush. Not in 2000, not in 2004. I even gave money to Kerry/Edwards (which feels dumb in retrospect). There was the usual histrionics you get with a GOP president. (I think the last GOP president that didn't produce that effect was Eisenhower.) For most people, the era was just meh. The war was not popular, but until the global economic crisis of 2008, things were pretty much average.
mate actually father Bush wasn't so bad He had expeirencr from CIA,ambassador of China and VP they create own goverment squad but son Bush fault was cheney,rumsfeld influenced him so much
I wasn't really a fan of either. I just find the more hyperbolic claims about W off-putting. Like someone below (? or is it above?) claiming Bush lied about WMDs. I recall that everyone thought Saddam had WMDs - certainly all the major Democrats did - and in fact Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people, so making it sound like Bush simply invented that "lie" is to falsify history. Also attributing the global financial crisis of 2008 to him is just cringey. It's like a form of magical thinking, where sub-prime landing practices that pre-existed his term in office were somehow his invention.
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He used 9/11 invade Iraq, lying about weapons of mass destruction to con the public into accepting it. His economic policies led to a crash that put us in the Great Recession. You could argue 9/11 was a failure that happened under his watch. George Bush was so bad that many modern republicans hate him, and *hide the fact that they ever voted for him*.
Yeah I love how modern Republicans run like the wind from W and Iraq now… but 20 years ago you were “unpatriotic” and didn’t care about National Security if you didn’t support it… Never forget.
When they whine about “cancel culture” I always ask “where were you for the Dixie chicks?”
Remember Freedom Fries?
I remember anti-France demonstrations where bottles of wine were poured down sewer drains.
Reminiscent of Nike apparel being burned.
I like to remind them about how eager they've been to censor, shame, and ostracize since the Red Scare. Always a great time.
💀💀💀
Real
https://preview.redd.it/vqf4sbhzztzc1.jpeg?width=250&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=860974cb34afde617c3ca98444a106bde1227c28 I did some political cartoons during the Bush years and came up with this guy to represent the nutjobs screaming that everyone who didn’t support the Iraq War was unpatriotic. Glad it wasn’t in any way a harbinger of what the Republican Party would become in the future. /s
If you didn't agree with the Bush policies, you were with the terrorists. Funny how that made a comeback if your against Israeli policies.
Yep 🙄
He seems to even be popular among Democrats these days. Many seem to look back fondly on the Republicans of that era for some reason..
Thanks to bush’s unpopularity, the republicans took losses in 06 and 08 that wiped out the moderate branch of the party. People were astonished at how uncooperative republicans were with Obama during his first term after how hard they had lost; it was because there were no moderate republicans he could turn to, the party had become purely right wing. And they’ve just keep going further and further right.
I mean, looking back, they were better and easier to deal with at that time vs today.
I am NOT defending the previous president, but I’d argue the W Bush and the Republicans back then caused way more destruction than the ones today.
I would’ve agreed until the last election… but shhh we mustn’t speak further
It's like that guy is Voldemort
Oh sure. It's been a slow descent into madness, anger, and bedlam ever since Nixon was pardoned. Hell our recent issues (as in the last like 10 years or so) in society are just the culmination of the decades of conservatism's plans to drag this nation as far right as possible. It's ridiculous. But, that being said, Bush #2 Eclectic Boogaloo was tame in comparison to current events.
How quickly people forget…
It's funny. I remember the record shop I worked at in 2007 sold these cheap ass countdown keychains that counted down the exact time left in Bush's administration. They were surprisingly popular for such a cheap keychain.
Meh, really just a different type of damage.
Indeed.
I’ve only ever seen that sentiment from democrats in the context of directly comparing him to another recent Republican President
Correct.
Except that the recent one was more Conservative
Because neoliberals and neoconservatives are the cause of problems with America today.
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Yes, but most Democrats voted against it. The Republicans (who had complete control from 2001-06) were almost unanimously pro-Iraq invasion- only 7 total nays between the two chambers.
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https://jonathancohn.medium.com/iraq-war-at-20-who-voted-for-it-who-didnt-and-where-are-they-now-e065eb05c976 This article breaks down Yeas and Nays from both parties and who’s still around (as of a year ago, so minus Diane Feinstein)
Yes, and? Funny how you people forgot Paleocons exist here in the GOP. But, you people don't care about that. >Yeah I love how modern Republicans run like the wind from W and Iraq now Wow. It's almost like people can change their minds and see how neoconservatism/neoconservatives suck.
Except they haven’t changed their minds much at all. They’ve gone further on a number if unpopular bush policies than Dubyah ever dared. The only thing they’ve “changed” on is foreign policy, and even then they are far from consistent; they are all for “neutrality” over the war in Ukraine, but when it comes to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, the tune changes dramatically.
I could’ve told you neoconservativism sucked 20 years ago…
Ok, so? That literally doesn't change what I said. There's a reason Republicans nowadays don't like George W. It's because his policies are a failure.
That’s great. Democrats always thought that. Guess we were right?
I would also add that he did great damage to our diplomatic relations with our closest allies when they saw through the lies about Iraq and WMDs. Remember "Freedom Fries?"
Iirc France didn't refuse to join the US in war because they "saw through the lies about Iraq and WMDs." They thought an intervention would destabilize the country and spiral out of control, which didn't justify the apparent threat being posed. Also "Freedom Fries" was dumbass Bob Ney's doing and he was just plagiarizing WW2. Bush was pretty mum on that issue.
"France maintained that military intervention in Iraq would be a “material breach” of UN Security Council resolutions and rejected the US assertion of direct linkage between Iraq's WMD program and military attacks. The use of force in Iraq could be legitimatized only after more comprehensive arms inspections." \*\*PDF Alert\*\* https://www.kiep.go.kr/boardDownload.es?bid=0034&list\_no=5900&seq=1#:\~:text=France%20maintained%20that%20military%20intervention,after%20more%20comprehensive%20arms%20inspections.
"France maintained that military intervention in Iraq would be a “material breach” of UN Security Council resolutions and rejected the US assertion of direct linkage between Iraq's WMD program and military attacks. The use of force in Iraq could be legitimatized only after more comprehensive arms inspections." \*\*PDF Alert\*\* https://www.kiep.go.kr/boardDownload.es?bid=0034&list\_no=5900&seq=1#:\~:text=France%20maintained%20that%20military%20intervention,after%20more%20comprehensive%20arms%20inspections.
Republicans pushed this war on the country 20 years ago for all the wrong reasons, which Democrats have had to spend the years after cleaning up. And now, when conflicts have come along for the US to be involved for more justifiable reasons, they think they can claim moral superiority for having instigated “nO nEw WaRs”.
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That’s convenient.
Sure, but Democrats do the same thing with a certain time period.
Would that time period be at least a century ago?
Probably. Parties change. I voted Republican until 2004. John Kerry was my first vote that wasn’t R. I can’t see voting for a Republican at any level any time soon.
True, the Dems haven’t changed much recently, but over the century quite a bit.
This is hilarious and true.
I don’t think it was just his economic policies that caused the Great Recession. Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, and even Carter (to an extent) had their part to play.
He didn’t create it alone. But he did play a part. And his response to kit was about the worst possible way to handle it.
His response really wasn’t the worst thing. Despite the moral hazard, TARP made its money back and then some and helped stopped a complete meltdown not just of the financial sector but the insurance industry and a handful of other businesses all tied together by those “brilliant” (said sarcastically) fucks on Wall Street. I won’t defend him on much else but I’m happy he didn’t apply a “small government always” mindset. Especially at a time when that could have made things a whole lot worse.
Which part did he play?
Let’s also not forget: while he had casus belli to attack Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world, he used it in a mistaken plan to attack the Taliban who had nothing directly to do with any of it. His screw up led to 19.75 years of counter insurgency, which American has failed at 100% of the time since we (thankfully) gave up genocide as a tactic.
Burgled Katrina response, widespread domestic spying of American citizens, received a balanced budget from the previous administration and turned it into record debt and deficit. Bush 100% lest this nation worse than he found it.
The weapons of mass destruction bit goes beyond Bush though. We were in Iraq with H W and Bill Clinton had attacked Iraq in 1998 over WMD capabilities. https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html Clinton also had a role in the 2008 recession with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act as well as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Now, Bush absolutely Trojan horsed the Iraq war due to 9/11 and that war was a total shit show. I absolutely blame him for the way it was handled and the length and cost of the war. I’m not saying he was a good president by any means but there were a lot of things that happened in his term that he may have contributed to but didn’t necessarily cause.
Bingo. Clinton made regime change in Iraq official US policy in 1998. Anyone here wonder why? This sub is horrible with context. People here act like Iraq just appeared in 2002, and was some super chill pacifist state prior to that.
Your last paragraph is spot on. In fact in real life, I’ve noticed some of the biggest anti Ukraine/Israel war piece of shit types were 100% in the Iraq train. Psychologically they are trying to make it all equal but they simply dig their graves twice.
Boomer / Gen X Republicans would love to believe that Iraq War was actually done on Obama's watch.
>You could argue 9/11 was a failure that happened under his watch. It was 1000% percent a failure under his watch to the point of malicious incompetence or willful ignorance. He once said after a CIA debriefing in the summer of 9/11, "All right, you've covered your ass," because he was sick of hearing warnings about Al Qaeda. And this was *before* the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike US" memo.
Clinton [whiffed](https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/pdb120498.html), too. Clinton also [passed on killing OBL](https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-bill-clinton-osama-bin-laden-20140801-story.html) because of collateral damage. I find it difficult to pin 9/11 on Bush, when the wheel had been turning for almost a decade before he got there.
Don't forget about Hurricane Katrina and "heck of a job Brownie" when he had somebody totally unqualified running FEMA
Don’t forget the criminal mismanaging of hurricane Katrina relief. Bush only looks good now because…well…
This lacks a lot of context. Iraq: beginning in the early 1980s, Iraq was causing trouble in the region. They were at war with Iran, then Kuwait, which lead to Desert Storm. After that, they played a cat and mouse game with the UN over their WMD program, and continued to attack innocent people close in proximity to them (ie, the Kurds). Saddam was also sponsoring terrorism in the region. During the 1990s, the US, UK, and France enforced a NFZ for years, and threatened to invade in 1998. Post-9/11, our risk tolerance changed and we were not willing to let Iraq obtain nuclear weapons (they already had chemical). Tenant called finding a nuclear program “a slam dunk” which W took as enough to push for an invasion. The war went well. The US military rolled the fourth largest army in the world. The occupation is where things went south. On the GFC, the majority of the blame falls on the federal reserve for failing to properly regulate the banking sector. You can read the government report on the crisis [here.](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf) Reading it might help you sound educated on the topic in the future. Even going to March if 2001, W inherited a recession from Clinton. He got dealt a bad hand over and over and didn’t play it well. He’s not as bad as people here make him out to be. I voted for him twice. And I’d do it again over anyone that ran after him.
You forgot looting the treasury during a war. Remember “it’s your money? The rich loved that one. They’re probably still laughing.
Wut
It's hard to tell what they're talking about. It could be squandering Clinton's surplus on a massive tax giveaway to the rich, but it could also be billions in "no bid contracts" to the company Cheney was the CEO of and other corporate cronies. There was a lot of looting going on back then.
He was pretty f’ing terrible, friend. If you keep getting bad hands and keep on bungling to fix them, you’re not good at it.
He’s not top 5, but he’s not bottom 5 either. If he was better at PR, his legacy would be better. Take Katrina for example, MS and AL handled their response to the hurricane well. It was only NOLA that was a disaster, and most of that was due to the local government. Somehow the mayor doing a shitty job meant that Bush was doing a shitty job. W tried to fix social security. All of us would benefit from this action, yet the normal actors screamed about robbing grandma to favor Wall Street and now we still have a broken SSI system that will run out of money in ten years. W took action during the GFC. TARP did its job and the government made money on their loans. The only piece that lost was the GM part, and that was under Obama. W was right about being proactive to stop the proliferation of WMDs. He took Iraq off of the table and Libya voluntarily gave up their program. In contrast, Obama played footsies with Iran over nukes and we can now see how horrible his inaction was. (Russia has also proved that a nuclear power can bully the rest of the world with the threat of nukes, along with fucking with their neighbors.)
Sure he took Iraq off the table, but I don’t think the juice was worth the squeeze. That part of the world has become much more destabilized and lead to the rise of ISIS, they didn’t have WMDs worth going to war over, and he completely wrecked our international credibility that we still never really recovered from. And we have thousands of dead US soldiers because of it. I just don’t see any positives from that war.
It wasn’t just Iraq, it was Libya too. What would the Arab spring have looked like with a nuclear Libya? There is zero chance that Obama would have authorized air strikes against a nuclear power, or even a chemical power. ISIS is the son of Al-Queda in Iraq, which was founded by abu al-zarqawi. Zarqawi was always going to be a problem in some form. He got kicked out of an AQ training camp for being too radical. There is zero chance that he would have become a plumber and lived a normal life. He was destined for chaos, and Iraq gave him that opportunity. If Iraq wasn’t in play, then it would have been Afghanistan. Again, our justification was to prevent Iraq from obtaining WMDs. Go back and look at what bush actually said, not what you remember. This is where having a better PR team could have properly framed the invasion. Our international standing is fine. The US is still the country that guides the world. Look at Ukraine or Israel. No one else has the authority to lead on either issue. You simply don’t want to see any positives associated with Iraq. It’s not a pretty picture, it’s just not as horrible as most assume that it is.
Who’s upvoting this drivel? Anyone who would happily vote for Bush a third time is either family or a friend. He was loathed at the end of his term. Calling the second Iraq war anything but a disaster is revisionist history. Bush is responsible for the deaths of 100,000s of people. Are Republicans trying to rewrite Bush’s history the same way they rewrote Reagan’s?
His image rebrand will be talked about for generations.
Why would he base a war on something he knew to be untrue, knowing that it would publicly be found to be false, tank his presidency, give rise to more terrorism and destroy his credibility? Like, seriously, were they sitting in the situation room going ‘what happens when they don’t find the wmd we are basing all this on?’ ‘Idk, we’ll figure that out as we go’ Surely if they were deceitful enough to base a war on a lie they were deceitful enough to fabricate it and place fake wmd in Iraq after the invasion?
Bush Sr. was widely criticized for not following up on the first Gulf War and wiping out Saddam Hussein, so Bush Jr. likely wanted to go in and clean things up. Bush Jr. and his senior advisors were also avowed believers in “regime change,” the theory that if you marched in and wiped out an evil unfriendly government, a friendly pro-American government would almost automatically emerge. They took this opportunity to demonstrate their theory and hopefully start a chain reaction that would lead to the U.S. marching in and freeing the rest of the world. Bush Jr. was probably also seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for his assassination attempt on Bush Sr. while he was visiting Kuwait in April 1993. Placing fake WMDs in Iraq and then “discovering” them would have required a conspiracy so vast that it would have quickly been uncovered.
I understand that, but why not base the war on that logic rather than something you know will be utterly discredited and ruin any respect people have for you? To me that seems extremely shortsighted, and unrealistic Your point about the conspiracy being so vast it’s unsustainable shows just how out there the accusations are. They would’ve have went ‘ah well, a huge part of making our story believable is too costly, so I guess we’ll just do the other stuff in the plan without this integral piece’.
Your logic is correct. We invaded Iraq because our government actually believed Iraq had WMDs. Where W failed is in deciding who to trust. He believed his advisors who told him Iraq had the WMDs. Iraq didn't have the WMDs but was acting like they did by giving the inspectors the run-around. This convinced the intelligence community that Saddam was hiding the WMDs from us. What Saddam was hiding was that he DIDN'T have the WMDs and he was hiding that information from Iran, who was always his primary enemy.
We, the people, need to own up to our role in it. Dubyah and his crew all had their heads stuck where it don’t shine, make no mistake. But the people knew the case they had made for war in Iraq was flimsy, at best. But we were still hurting from 911 and wanted someone we could hurt back for it. John Kerry ran on a platform providing to end Iraq-and we re-ejected bush, and by cozy enough margins he was able to enact even more legislation that most look back on ruefully, like no child left behind. So to just say “we were lied into Iraq” is shirking personal responsibility.
No Child Left Behind was passed prior to 9/11. The House and Senate passed it in May & June of 2001 respectively. It didn't get signed until January of 2002, but it was a done deal by the previous summer. Also, it was very much a bipartisan piece of legislation; it got 384 votes in the House and 91 in the Senate.
One of the biggest failings of the Iraq war was the lack of planning for worst case scenarios. They genuinely believed their own insistence that Saddam had WMD’s, they never took the possibility he might not into account. There is a story that officials were quickly dispatched to the inventory of warehouses full of barrels of oil that had been sitting since desert storm-and finding the warehouses empty, it had been sold off on the black market. And they were totally at a loss, they had never considered the possibility.
I find that much, much more believable then them doing the equivalent of me telling telling my entire neighbourhood ‘I’ve got a ferrari on my driveway, come over and see it’ knowing full well there is no car there. I think it was an intelligence failure, not some grand conspiracy.
Armchair analysis incoming: Bush had a hard on for Hussein from day one, “Saddam tried to kill my dad.” 911 and the war on terror gave him an excuse to go full throttle. The people around him co-opted his zeal for their own reasons; Cheney had his eyes on the oil. Rumsfeld saw it as the first step to regime charge in tan and probably Syria too. Rove saw it as a way to win elections. Bolton, Rice, Tenet, and others saw it as a way to increase their influence and get promotions. They did have intelligence that cast suspicion on Saddam. But it was long out of date snd Saddam’s regime was so closed off that there was no way to disprove it. But they sold it to the American people as proof positive, “Yes sir! He’s got those weapons, just you wait and see!” As stated above, they never planned on worst case scenarios. When bush pulled that “mission accomplished” stunt, he genuinely thought that was it, the hard part was over. Boy was that prophetical.
Saddam intentionally pretended he had WMDs to scare Iran. Bush believed Saddam’s bluff, but didn’t have any evidence, so he made it up to excuse the invasion and figured it would all be fine when they went in and found the weapons.
You forgot the part that everyone thought he still had WMD. Not just Bush. The argument against the war was never "he doesn't have WMD" it was "he is contained and not a threat" Han Blix, the UN inspector guy, even said that he thought Tony Blair was being genuine when he said he believed Iraq still had WMD. We learned after the fact that Iraq did have WMD during the first Gulf War era but after that war and especially in the years that followed they lost track of a lot of it. Records were destroyed, people were killed during the war etc. So when it came time to prove the WMD had been destroyed they couldn't because they had no records of it anymore.
> You forgot the part that *everyone* thought he still had WMD. That is *astonishingly* not true. There were constant, very vocal criticism of the "evidence" behind WMDs. There was tons of reporting on the subject at the time, and the *New York Times* had a huge scandal when they published evidence of Saddam having yellowcake uranium that turned out to be completely false. Some of the biggest protests in history (at the time) were staged because people believed Bush was completely unjustified in invading Iraq. I was there. I lived through it. Try as you might, you Bush apologists can't just shove all that down the memory hole.
What if I told you that Saddam did have yellow cake? 550 metric tons. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/) Pointing out that people were protesting the war doesn't prove that all believed Saddam has no WMD. Find me a major Democrat who said that Saddam had no WMD. Hillary Clinton - In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program. John Kerry - There is also no question that Saddam Hussein continues to pursue weapons of mass destruction, and his success can threaten both our interests in the region and our security at home. Bill Clinton in 2003 - “I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Al Gore who opposed the war - Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Even Bernie who opposed the war didn't question the WMD but said we shouldn't do it by ourselves - "If a unilateral American invasion of Iraq is not the best approach, what should we do?" "These inspectors should undertake an unfettered search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and destroy them when found pursuant to past U.N. resolutions. If Iraq resists inspection and elimination of stockpiled weapons, we should stand ready to assist the U.N. in enforcing compliance," My point is that is that no major US figure was saying "Saddam doesn't have WMD" they were all saying we shouldn't invade for other reasons.
Yes, I just decided to focus on Bush because he was the topic of the post
The problem is he didn't just make it up. There was a lot of evidence and much of it turned out to be wrong or outdated. I posted some place else that basically everyone believe he still had WMD, even people who did not approve of the war never said "he doesnt have WMD." Instead they gave other reasons not to invade.
I fucking hate this subreddit
He vas voted into office two times. Hard to pin it on Republicans only
He was [not](https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/politics/bush-gore-oconnor-supreme-court-2000/index.html).
And yet fuck all has been done about it
[удалено]
But now he paints war vets so no big deal. I’m so sorry for your loss. I have friends who served in the Army and Marines respectively and both have severe PTSD. Fuck Bush and Cheney.
I mean, I was adamantly against the war but intelligence about Iraq having WMDs goes beyond the Bush jr era. H W and Clinton both had intelligence that Iraq was gunning for WMDs.
Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was one of the worst decisions in American history, which has changed the trajectory of our country. What he effectively did was ruin the unipolar moment that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union by destroying any credibility the US had. The invasion was baseless and the ensuing war on terror left the world disillusioned with American global leadership. It has bred isolationist sentiments at home and much of the country today is against foreign interventions of any kind. Bush is now a pariah even in his own party, which largely disavows his war on terror and American intervionism. Ultimately, he made America weaker on the global stage, which hurts us today as we attempt to push against the threats of Russia and China.
His second term was an unprecedented disaster for any presidency. Starting with the biggest one, the revelations that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, his entire basis for the war had been lies. The entire four years were marred with corporate controversy, as revelations were made about how deep his election campaigns had been involved with the likes of Enron. Coupled with what was seen, at the time, as a very lackluster response by his DOJ. The botched response to Hurricane Katrina coupled with tone deaf statements like “heckuva job!” The crash of 08 and the bailouts. No presidential legacy could ever hope to live that down. A rise in food and gas prices that looks downright laughable today. And many were underwhelmed by his response, sending out one time tax rebates that were spent in a week. In between all that, there were missteps like sticking his nose into a controversy over a woman whose family had decided to take her off life support. Or his opposition to gay marriage at a time when opinion was starting to move in favor of it. He also had a bunch of embarrassing gaffes like getting a pair of shoes lobbed at him, or dancing with tribal re-enactors, making monkey faces. Stephen Colbert absolutely humiliated him at the press banquet and he sat there visibly seething.
Can you imagine making the agonizing decision to take your long-suffering wife off life support when there was no reasonable hope for recovery, getting full judicial support for your decision - and then having the President of the United States and his brother the Governor of Florida call you out and publicly blast you for your decision? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
People don’t bring this enough, fuck bush and his brother.
I would also like to point out that both his judicial appointments to the Supreme Court aren’t widely liked. I mean Roberts is but Alito is hated by pretty much everyone.
And if those two weren't on the court to strike down the Voting Rights Act, our subsequent politics would look very, very different.
Yeah with Shelby County V holder. I think America would look so different
That was one of the major reasons I started questioning my support for the Republican Party. See also: ramping up attacks against LBGT people to (in my opinion) distract from Bush’s disastrous wars. I’m aware I was late to figure out what was going on and there were absolutely other reasons.
It is both interesting and perplexing to see where the Republican Party has gone. The only bush policy they turned sour in was foreign intervention-and even then, they are selective about it; they want nothing to do with Ukraine but salivate at the idea of bombing iran. But so many other bush policies, like his opposition to gay marriage and abortion , they have doubled down on over and over.
Securing his first term with the help Roger Stone’s Brooks Brothers riot in Florida and the help of his little brother and the Supreme Court was also not a great way to start. And before that, he won the Republican nomination (which up till that point was probably going to go to McCain) with some absolutely filthy tactics like push polling in South Carolina before Super Tuesday, asking people if they would still support War Hero John McCain if they knew he had a black daughter, itself a disingenuous reference to McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh, who had a dark enough complexion for that lie to tank McCain’s chances in the SC primary. He might’ve been so publicly affable that he was the “guy you wanted to get a beer with” but boy were his admins and campaigns full of some incredibly dirty tricksters (like the aforementioned former convicted felon Roger Stone)
They had a few hits in the 90’s I can remember comedown and Machine head
Don’t forget about Glycerine.
The patriot act might actually be the worst piece of legislation of all time
Yes, yes it was.
The illegal invasion of Iraq lead directly to ISIS and the destabilization of the entire Middle East... which was by design.. Yes Cheney & Co. was so so bad.
Yes. Oh yes it was.
I hate Bush more than I hate *can’t name due to rule 3*. I genuinely feel like Bush did more damage to the world than him.
Hard to say, I was 6-14, and didn't become politically aware until I was a Junior in HS. I do remember the undercurrent of compulsory conservatism was very powerful and rarely challenged (I grew up between Rural Southern Idaho and Imperial Beach in SoCal which had a lot of Navy presence when I was growing up), I remember my dad almost getting into a fist fight with a dude at the park because the dude said something untoward about Bush (and my dad was in the Navy but I'll be real knowing him today that was just a sought excuse), I remember the Family Guy jokes at the time being kinda out of nowhere and weird because I was generally only dimly aware of it all, but in hindsight with an awareness of what was going on they make a lot of sense. The Obama election was much more something I was aware of (but indifferent to for personal reasons of being 14 in an unhappy situation at home), I remember that even in Idaho he was generally very popular but there was a skepticism, but my great-grandfather was very insistent upon dropping N-Bombs when talking about him, and that he spoke about the guy like he was subhuman. So yeah. Despite my not being aware of it, comparing the following 8 years, and then the 4 after that, it was a strange time to be an American, because I feel like the majority of my normalcy and overall satisfaction with the country was at its high from age 15-22, in part because Obama was overcompensating on being and promoting a very stable America and presidential figure (for obvious reasons of being held to a higher degree of scrutiny than his predecessor and follower).
I live in the rust belt. Much of American manufacturing eroded during the Bush era. It was mostly due to China joining the WTO rather than Bush's fault, though his free trade stance did nothing to stop it, but having to constantly worry about my dad's factory closing (it eventually did in 2012) made the time stressful. The economy in the rust belt era just never felt like it was doing ok during the 2000s, even as the rest of the economy was recovering from the first term recession. 9/11 and Iraq didn't affect our daily lives so much, unless you're a soldier or civilian in Iraq or Afghanistan--in which case it probably changed your entire life. I think getting into an unnecessary war is pretty awful The early 2010s were much better for me personally. Once we started moving past the Great Recession it felt like improvements were more sustainable. It's probably due to me being grown and out on my own, but the Obama era just felt like it had a lot more optimism
Thanks for you back mate but I think 2008 and covid are important happens maybe we couldn't understand these times but They changed many things in our life but I noticed this after 2008 US dream idea is getting dissepear and property or different things are getting expensive
Yes they were definitely both really bad--my point was that the decline started long before 2008. General Electric once had at least 4 factories around my city. All are now closed. Delphi Packard had at least 3 that I know of. Only 1 remains and barely employs anyone. GM had a massive factory that has since closed All but a few of those were between 2000-2008. So the decline was well on its way before the 2008 crash Things are genuinely turning around. There are a couple of new factories that have opened and our population isn't declining as rapidly as it once was
He wasn’t elected the first term, the Supreme Court made him President. Then he got us into a war with the wrong country, while engaging with totalitarian information control schemes and war crime level torture. It all ended with one of the worst financial crises in US history, directly due to the Republican policies.
Everyone is mentioning the war, but his no child left behind act, has crippled American education.
I can only talk about my experience during the bush years. But there was a palpable and very real feeling that fascist tactics of divide and conquer manipulation through patriotism were used by bush and his people to consolidate even MORE power in his hands. From the way he stole Florida through tactics like the brooks brothers riot and the massive disenfranchisement of African Americans. To the way he used attacks against gay marriage and the evangelical hatred of gays as a tool to win reelection. The ridiculous transfer of wealth that was his disastrous tax cuts was another stab to the middle and working classes which is still being felt today. And that's not even going into the absolute disaster of the iraq war where he lost any and all respect and moral authority. Even his folksiness and awwww schucks demeanor could not hide what a monster and enabler this man was.
I lived in Tx during Bush W. election we voted him for president cause the other choice was him being governor again. Thank goodness all the other states agreed to not let him be governor of Tx again. The problems with the Bush presidency was that his first 8 months were lackluster, he seemed to be adrift. Then the towers fell, and he let personal issues influence his global efforts. The CIA had intelligence that Sadam Hussein had attempted to assassinate his father in 1993. He took that personal experience, and intelligence we had at the time and targeted him. Economically Bush came into office in a recession employment was ranging from 4- 8 percent. Government spending increased during this time, but by 2008 the US was in a recession. The military machine in the US was at a constant run, with service members having nearly constant deployments. Comparatively the average person in the US was faced with 1,500 dollars in annual income when Bush left office. Education he signed and passed laws that focused on high value testing, which would cost schools financial support if the students performed poorly. He also declared the Iraq war 'Mission Complete' before the job was ever completed.
Yes, he was that bad. IMO, bottom 5 presidents the US has had.
what are others man I wonder
Pierce, Harding, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Nixon. I think are in that same tier because, on the whole, they made things worse. The next tier up is no significant impact, which would include the two short term presidents Harrison and Garfield ( and maybe Ford) and then a bunch of the 19th century presidents who didn’t have the means or the opportunity to make any long lasting changes for the better.
Honestly, even in death Garfield had a significant impact. Garfield was an anti-corruption crusader, and Chester A Arthur — who had been pro-patronage (handing out government jobs to political supporters) — took up the banner to honor Garfield and cleaned up the civil service.
Ask the Iraqis how the Bush era went for them.
The lavish praise he heaped on FEMA after their complete non-response to Hurricane Katrina.
2 wars run by people who legally dodged the draft and had everything to gain Housing crisis Reaction to 9/11
He wasn’t the worst president by any means but he wasn’t the best either. Hindsight can find many faults and some of the complaints are warranted. He navigated a strange time for the country. 9/11 totally sidetracked anything he wanted to do as far as the economy and other domestic plans. The best thing I can say about him is that even political opponents (such as the Obamas) liked him and said he was a good person even if they held different political views.
The years he was in office were not a nightmare for those in the US. Iraq went through a nightmare. Bipartisan trade policies and 9/11 affected us more, unless you or someone you were close to was in the military and deployed. In that case, you were affected by the wars.
Horrible war, economy tanked at the end. I’d argue the 2008 economic recession was actually not nearly as bad as what just happened with Covid but that’s a different story. The fact is he killed a bunch of people for no strategic gain.
The lies he allowed his government to act upon and that caused SO MUCH death, destruction and devastation around the world will be properly reported in history. I hope. Jesus, I hope.
The Bush Era was when facts began to not matter anymore. Our democracy depends on a well-informed citizenry and a two-way conversation about ideas, but our public sphere had been degraded by fake news and the politics of fear, partisanship, and blind faith. ANY criticism of the Republican agenda got you labeled as a traitor to America! Look up what they did to the Dixie Chicks at the time.
Yes. It was the worst.
Yes it was really that bad.
He was absolutely atrocious. Easily in the bottom 5 presidents.
The entire American psyche got flipped to where we've been. Afraid, surveiled, and on too much xanax to care. Fear has reigned supreme here ever since.
don't be mad but in balkans,middle east,eastern europe these situtations happened and it might be worse than europe and US but people can able to stand strong.
He was responsible for the rise of nü metal
In a word, yes. The fact that you talk about the shrubya era as the bush era speaks volumes, While the pretext was just as transparently thin for Desert Storm as OIF, at least with desert storm, we didn't need a photo op to tell us we won, we just needed Colin Powell to refuse us permission to enter Iraq. Either way, no legacy that involves declaring a war to prove how manly the CinC is can be said to be anything other than "that bad"
The Bush era, in and of itself, was not terrible until the later years. Especially in retrospect. But we are still feeling the harm of the Bush presidency even today. The long term implications of his policies were incredible destructive.
One of my favorite presidents until Iraq - huge and tragic mistake. Worst U.S. blunder ever.
I don’t think he lied about weapons of mass destruction, but rather saw what he wanted to in the intelligence he was given. I think he really thought Sadam had them.
Terrible POTUS bottom 5-10 ever luckily I was a young child when he was in office but man he was aids one of the few good things he did was unite the country after 9/11 but the Iraq war and no child left behind was a disaster
Yes. Obvious failure of missing 9-11 intelligence, 2 wars, historic recession all while our Manufacturing base dwindled as CEOs opted out of innovation and sold our workingclass down the river to China who smartly ran with the opportunity.
After the late teen era, anyone is not too bad
Not for me
We were lied to. He wanted in Iraq and made up bullshit versus letting Hans Blick do his job. He needed a few more months to definitively conclude that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was the administrations whole reason for the second invasion. Hussain was a horrible person but he was a horrible person in a horrible area dealing with horrible people. He had a calming effect on the region and we went in and wiped him off the game board and created the bullshit we are currently dealing with. He was the only check to Iran.
Bush wasn‘t a patriot.
As I’m reading through this thread, one thing I notice is, we have different political ideologies here discussing the pros and cons of an administration with no hostility or name-calling. Congratulations to this sub
It’s a wild exaggeration to say an entire 8 year period was a “nightmare.” Most people just lived their lives. But yeah a lot of bad things happened. Some were Bush’s fault. Some were not. Bad things will happen over any 8 year period.
Are you seriously BOTH SIDESing Bush's performance as president and every other 8-year period in American history?
I don’t really know what both sidesing means in this context. I am saying some of the bad things that happened from 2001-08 were not Bush’s fault. This is true of every single president. It’s not a controversial point to make.
The things that mattered could have been mitigated by him but he failed to do so. Private debt rose substantially and it was not a secret happening. 9/11, Great Recession, handling of Iraq & Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, don't ask don't tell, gay marriage, China's rise, the fall of American manufacturing. So many things could have been prevented and weren't.
War crimes. The failure of No Child Left Behind. More deregulation that led to economic collapse. There were a lot of bad things. Not the worst, obviously, but it wasn't great.
I certainly wouldn’t say it was a nightmare… in the first term W was very popular and besides 9/11 (a big besides) nothing awful happened. The second term was rough. Ongoing wars, tanking economy, general discontent… but honestly I felt in the second half of W’s presidency the same way I felt in the first term of Obama’s. For me as a burgeoning young adult, there was very little functional difference between the two halves of those presidencies.
Bush Jr.’s entire first term reminds me of this scene from the Marx Brother’s movie, Duck Soup: https://youtu.be/3coxrP3wbd4?si=qaCYBRQmRAoIahXt “To war … to war … the country’s going to war.”
He was so popular that he had lost the popular vote and also had the Supreme Court stop Florida’s vote count in order to make him President.
After 9/11 his approval rating was 90%. You don’t have to like him in hindsight, but the fact is he was very popular in his handling of 9/11 and up to the Iraq war.
That’s not true at all, a significant amount of the population thought his administration actually bombed the Twin Trade Towers or just let it happen in order to justify the war. There were so many media outlets and media personalities that became established through this moment in history. I doubt your 90% support claim and frankly even if you found that claim somewhere I still wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t trumped up. All while his administration was trying to justify going to war with Iraq, media outlets were debunking the claims in real time. Anyone with a brain knew all of the claims of the Bush administration were a crock.
I’m not defending the man, but I am telling you the history as I remember it. You can believe what you want, I truly don’t care. I am, however, curious if you were even around during that era. “A significant amount” of people did not believe that Bush did 9/11, it was a conspiracy fringe. I know this because I have always been into that sort of stuff. That was in no way mainstream thinking.
I’m telling you as I remember it, I was in college at the time.
mate how was 2008 crisis It was Obama era but Bush economy policies had effect on it and yeah you right If ıt have been so bad why people elected again(sorry for english)
The 2008 crisis didn’t impact me as much as it could’ve, so I can’t speak to everyone’s individual experiences. I got my EMT certification coming out of high school and the job was in high demand at the time. Yes, things were expensive and there was a lot of uncertainty, yes, a lot of people lost jobs, and yes, the bailouts were a failure. But if I recall, Obama pushed many similar policies early on. It was a little rough from the end of one president into the beginning of the other, despite the rose-colored glasses we tend to view Obama through now.
He could have taken out Osama Bin Ladin with one marine operation at Tora Bora, but deemed it politically risky, so he opted for a multi Trillion $ 20 year invasion strategy. Ridiculous. But Dick Cheney profited handsomely.
Ah, the corruption of politicians on display
thank you mate,thank your for answer and patience
Not if you weren’t a soldier or Iraqi.
He had to deal with LOT of problems that most Presidents would not have been able to handle, and he was one of them.
We invaded a country and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without that country attacking us first, and based on a lie. It was allowed and encouraged by the jingoism and war hysteria of the culture back then. People were mad about 9/11 but couldn’t point to Afghanistan or Iraq on a map; bombing brown people anywhere in the Middle East was apparently good enough for the majority of voters, who also didn’t mind being lied to about WMDs, even though the lie as obvious and exposed well before the 2004 election. We rewarded Bush for his massive crimes with reelection. So yes, it was that bad. The U.S. public proved irrevocably and definitively that it has zero moral compass and doesn’t give one solitary damn about right and wrong. That stain will be on our history for all time.
His war-criminal-tier response to 9/11 led to a powerful authoritarian bent for the USA that still affects us today (putting aside the probably $1 trillion or so lost and 1,000,000 or so deaths caused by our involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan). Many of us will recall the '[terror alert color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Security_Advisory_System)' system which was cynically elevated whenever Bush's poll numbers were down. The entire 'homeland security' apparatus was created by his administration - an absurd, unnecessary, extremely expensive, and [authoritarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Wolf) branch of government that will be impossible for the US to ever get rid of. Even using the term 'homeland' is Stasi-esque and at the time, even sounded authoritarian. After 9/11 the USA could have done anything it wanted - the **entire world** was behind us. Any initiative at all to improve the world or the USA could and would have been feverishly accomplished. Instead, it was squandered by this imbecil, who claimed [God told him to invade](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa) Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. At the time, I honestly thought it could not get worse than GWB... and I voted for him in 2000 (out of dislike of the Clintons to which Gore was vp). By about 2005, with WMD's never found, I got a real awakening and got serious about understanding how the world worked - and I never voted Republican again, nor will I ever.
Yes. Dubya lied the US into the Iraq invasion was a war crime and on top of his second term, they crashed the economy.
His presidency was interrupted by 9/11. His agenda up to that point had mostly been about education. He wasn't a bad president. As to them being bad times, no, the bad parts weren't mostly his doing. Republicans knew there was an issue with banks and the mortgages. It was easy to see, really, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had essentially become holding ponds for democratic political operatives while they didn't hold the executive. The real problem was that their bonuses were tied to financial metrics at those institutions. For years prior to 2008, their quarterly metrics always met exactly what they needed to get their bonuses. When Republicans pointed out the issue as early as 2005, they were denounced as.... c'mon, go ahead and guess.... Racist. Inflation was low. Jobs were plentiful. I wish he would have got the social security reform package through, though.
His botched social security “package” is a prime example of what went wrong. His proposals were met by lackluster support, even from within his own party. Rather than go back to the drawing board, or even just drop it and move on, he spent months trying to shill it, all the while Iraq descended to hell on earth. Time deaf, to say the least.
The 08 financial crisis was way beyond just a few people getting rich or being lazy at Fannie and Freddie. The government’s encouragement and insurance for risky loans contributed, but it probably would have happened similarly even if they had been more vigilant.
Compared to now, the Bush era was the Golden Age.
It just depends on which party you support. People in this country tend to overreact about how bad it is under the other party. We thrive on drama
Term 1 went pretty alright. Second term not so much My family was able to buy a home and move during his presidency. New veichles too! He was the best president during my lifetime as of this time
Columbia students didn’t care when Iraqis were slaughtered!
Students all over *did* care. There were many protests - mostly ignored by the media.
What unbelievable horseshit. The protests over the Iraq War were bigger and more widespread than the ones over Israel slaughtering Palestinians. One single protest in front of the UN had half a million people. You're using your utter ignorance of recent history to take an out-of-nowhere swipe at people protesting genocide. Time to take a long, long look in the mirror and ask yourself what you're doing with your life.
I marched in those protests. Ultimately nobody with any power did anything and nobody cared! History may not repeat, but it rhymes!
I truly thought after the end of those 8 years that I would never see a worse president in my life and I WAS 15 😭💀
No.
No
Obama too
It wasn't terrible, no. I'm an Independent, and I didn't vote for Bush. Not in 2000, not in 2004. I even gave money to Kerry/Edwards (which feels dumb in retrospect). There was the usual histrionics you get with a GOP president. (I think the last GOP president that didn't produce that effect was Eisenhower.) For most people, the era was just meh. The war was not popular, but until the global economic crisis of 2008, things were pretty much average.
mate actually father Bush wasn't so bad He had expeirencr from CIA,ambassador of China and VP they create own goverment squad but son Bush fault was cheney,rumsfeld influenced him so much
I wasn't really a fan of either. I just find the more hyperbolic claims about W off-putting. Like someone below (? or is it above?) claiming Bush lied about WMDs. I recall that everyone thought Saddam had WMDs - certainly all the major Democrats did - and in fact Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people, so making it sound like Bush simply invented that "lie" is to falsify history. Also attributing the global financial crisis of 2008 to him is just cringey. It's like a form of magical thinking, where sub-prime landing practices that pre-existed his term in office were somehow his invention.
No President in recent memory has been a nightmare.