| |
Move Over, Hoover - washingtonpost.com
by ubernoir at 8:41 am EST, Dec 3, 2006 |
Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.
|
| |
RE: Move Over, Hoover - washingtonpost.com
by Mike the Usurper at 7:58 pm EST, Dec 4, 2006 |
adam wrote: Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.
This is of course, wrong. What I expect to be found when all is said and done, the other things this administration has done behind its veil of secrecy will leave it damned beyond any measure save possibly the antipathy the Klan has for Lincoln freeing the slaves. If you don't believe that, let's go down the list we already know about. The Cheney energy group, ignoring bin Laden pre 9/11, "Wanted Dead or Alive", "I don't really care where he is", where IS bin Laden? the botched war in Afghanistan that we could have won, the botched war in Iraq we should have never started, leaking a CIA operative, blowing the cover of an ENTIRE CIA GROUP in doing so, Katrina, Haliburton and Cheney, Tamiflu and Rummy, hell Rummy all by himself, John Bolton and the dismantling of the UN, "Coalition of the willing", Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, habeus corpus, domestic spying, TSA, Homeland inSecurity, K Street, Jack Abramoff. And that's off the top of my head. Every single one of those is a real problem. When everything shakes out of this, and it will, these bufoons will make Warren Harding and Richard Nixon look like saints. |
|
Move Over, Hoover - washingtonpost.com
by Lost at 4:10 pm EST, Dec 3, 2006 |
Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors -- they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, was deemed a "chameleon on plaid," changing colors regularly to control the zeitgeist of the moment. Other presidents are submariners, refusing to zigzag in rough waters, preferring to go from Point A to Point B with directional certitude. Harry S. Truman and Reagan are exemplars of this modus operandi, and they are the two presidents Bush has tried to emulate. The problem for Bush is that certitude is only a virtue if the policy enacted is proven correct. Most Americans applaud Truman's dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they achieved the desired effect: Japan surrendered. Reagan's anti-communist zeal -- including increased defense budgets and Star Wars -- is only now perceived as positive because the Soviet Union started to unravel on his watch. Nobody has accused Bush of flinching. After 9/11, he decided to circumvent the United Nations and declare war on Iraq. The principal pretext was that Baghdad supposedly was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. From the get-go, the Iraq war was a matter of choice. Call it Mr. Bush's War. Like a high-stakes poker player pushing in all his chips on one hand, he bet the credibility of the United States on the notion that Sunnis and Shiites wanted democracy, just like the Poles and the Czechs during the Cold War.
|
|
|
