[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Enough of you (click to view)
Date: January 18, 2009
I've recently come to the belated conclusion that George W. Bush was not a very good president. But, hey, there's only two days left of him. Here's an interesting article dissing the man from a decidedly conservative perspective.

What do you think history's verdict will be? Post in my forum!

[Arctic_Menace]

Hopefully the man is vilified.

[thealmightynarf]

I can't think of any president who's remembered particularly poorly... and there are many much more deserving of it than Bush. In fact, some of our worst presidents are remembered quite fondly (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson off the top of my head).

[mogman1]

I was excited to hear a conservative take on Bush's presidency and it did start out pretty well (the title was incredibly witty). There are some ideological things I disagree with the author on, like the Department of Education, but that doesn't get at the heart of it.

It got bad when he started decrying the legislation that will effectively ban incandescent bulbs by 2014. Only one of the two articles he cited even mentioned the potential problem from the trace amounts of mercury contained in the halogen bulbs. The other spent its time moaning about the the loss of choice, even though its author had to concede that the new light bulbs were vastly more efficient, longer lasting, and pay for themselves in energy savings. That's light-years away from the danger of Microsoft forcing people to upgrade for very nebulous and uncertain benefits.

Instead, Murdock's arguments seem to be lamenting the ouster of an antiquated, inefficient bit of technology simply because it was an American invention ("But for this quintessentially American creation to be prohibited by federal law is precisely the sort of abomination the Republican party was invented to prevent"). Free markets are about bringing better and more efficient systems to the market, not sentimentality over old ones.

His arguments about the war in Iraq are even worse. He cites a case wherein a judge, appointed by Clinton (a fact Murdock states twice so you don't miss what he's implying), ruled that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked. Never mind that both sides in the courtroom are often known for presenting extremely biased information to support their respective cases, a judge ruling that such and such happened is far from immutable.

The article he cites even acknowledges that the arguments presented were "meager", "relied heavily on 'classically hearsay' evidence", and "barely" enough. Furthermore, it states that "the judge ruled against them by default in January after they [al-Qaida, former Iraqi government, et al] failed to respond" (ya' think?). So it wasn't even decided by trial, just ruling by default. If you try your enemies in your own courts, do you really expect them to show up? That is hardly the slam-dunk connection that Murdock was implying.

Then there's the issue of the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction he tackles. Murdock mentions the uranium that was found, but again he is undermined by his own cited sources. The one explicitly states that this was material "U.N. inspectors had documented and safeguarded...[and] which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Persian Gulf War." In other words, we already knew about it, it had already been documented and contained by the UN, and the article infers that it was all just as the UN had left it. Seventeen years ago. It even states that there was "no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991" found, further suggesting that there really were no WMD programs active when we invaded.

There are plenty of reasons, even from a conservative stance, for why President Bush failed. Murdock managed to miss just about all of them and played up the ones that didn't matter or were even just plain wrong. In short, Murdock comes off just as clueless and out of touch with reality as President Bush was. This is why the conservative movement has been so thoroughly disgraced. It bills itself as being the group against large, slow, and unresponsive government yet it has itself become those very things. It is out of touch with its constituents and reality and rather than admit that it was wrong, it continues to "stay the course." It blithely disregards the facts and fails to adapt to a world that is ever-changing.

[Psudo]

Am I the only one who can't see the comic image? The HTML <IMG> tag isn't even pointing to an image filename when I view the source.

thealmightynarf wrote:

I can't think of any president who's remembered particularly poorly

Buchanan is sometimes remembered as the President who caused the civil war by advocating slavery too strongly. I don't know if that view is mainstream or popular, but I know your assertion that Lincoln was one of the worst US Presidents isn't so it shouldn't matter.

mogman1 wrote:

Then there's the issue of the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction he tackles. Murdock mentions the uranium that was found, but again he is undermined by his own cited sources. The one explicitly states that this was material "U.N. inspectors had documented and safeguarded...[and] which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Persian Gulf War." In other words, we already knew about it, it had already been documented and contained by the UN, and the article infers that it was all just as the UN had left it. Seventeen years ago. It even states that there was "no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991" found, further suggesting that there really were no WMD programs active when we invaded.

Technically, then, there were WMDs in Iraq, just not ones that were unknown before the invasion or built in secret and -- I assume -- not illegal ones. But it's stupid for him to base the rest of his argument on a technicality.

mogman1 wrote:

There are plenty of reasons, even from a conservative stance, for why President Bush failed. Murdock managed to miss just about all of them and played up the ones that didn't matter or were even just plain wrong. In short, Murdock comes off just as clueless and out of touch with reality as President Bush was. This is why the conservative movement has been so thoroughly disgraced.

That first sentence! I could not agree more.

But I don't see how "Conservatism sucks." logically follows from "Bush was lousy at conservatism." It's like people arguing that Marxism sucks because the USSR fell, or that Christianity sucks because such-and-such an evangelical preacher was involved in a sex scandal. The individual case is demonstrably and significantly different than what the ideology advocates, and thus does not reflect on the ideology at all -- except a little on whether it's feasible to implement that ideology.

Bush's failures better represent a criticism of neoconservative ideology specifically (a pretty powerful criticism, I think), since his administration was a better implementation of neoconservative ideology than of conservative ideology generally (which, for example, conflicts with Bush's immigration policy and condemns massive centralization and government spending projects like Homeland Security and the bailouts).

[Mr_Canada]

Yeah Psudo, I can't see it either.

[Mr_Canada]

Found the comic...



Maybe he got the wrong date? (It is dated the 19th...)

PS: LOL'd.

[Tricks]

thealmightynarf wrote:

I can't think of any president who's remembered particularly poorly... and there are many much more deserving of it than Bush. In fact, some of our worst presidents are remembered quite fondly (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson off the top of my head).

Did you just say Lincoln was a bad president? What drug are you on, I need some.

[JJ]

He probably just subscribes to the extreme libertarian / Confederate-apologist view that argues Lincoln was a wicked tyrant because of his wartime suppressions of individual freedom, and undermines and discounts the importance of his, you know, saving the country and getting rid of slavery.

[sidd2600]

The article loses all credibility when it mentions Saddam had large stockpiles of unenriched uranium.

Considering that uranium can be distilled from beach sand like silicon, yeah. No duh, unenriched uranium is commonplace. The enriching of uranium is a safeguarded, incredibly complex process requiring more real estate and power than Iraq could probably even ever muster. The facility would be impossible to hide in the era of spy satellites. You could never put that in a "Mobile weapons lab."

We handed the reins of our country over to someone who couldn't run a baseball team or an oil business for profit. The Texas Rangers baseball club weren't profitable until the city of Arlington built them a new, world class stadium. And really, a failed oil business when you have governmental support?

I saw Bush the Governor, and Bush the President. Neither did much I can approve of.

[Kjorteo]

There's really nothing I can say about the Bush administration that wouldn't come across as a massive "I told you so." Really now, I've been against him since 2000 (when I supported Gore) and that was already completely solidified even before 2004 (when I supported Kerry,) so what can I say other than that it's refreshing that more and more of the public perception finally seems to be coming around to what I've been trying to say this whole time?

Edit: Well, for the sake of having actual back-and-forth discourse rather than a one-sided Bush Bash, I suppose I can take on Psudo's statement about Bush failing != Conservatism failing. While Bush was remarkably bad at his job, he seemed to toe the Republican line on most social issues well enough, with the solitary exception of immigration, which happens to be the solitary example of a Bush stance I agree with. I've seen Bush-hating conservatives usually fall back to Ronald Reagan as their example of conservatism gone right, but I see Reagan as very ideologically similar to Bush--sharply against most social progressive ideals, yet willing to run up the defecit like mad on the more hawkish things both foreign (conflicts and such) and domestic (War on Drugs, etc.)

On the other hand, maybe I'm just too liberal for conservatism itself, and the amount by which I am put off by the traditional platform's stances on social issues makes it harder for me to distinguish the finer details and differences between the two overall. So, I shall put this as an earnest question: Psudo, who, if anyone, is an example of a good conservative today, and why?

[Bacardi4206]

thealmightynarf wrote:

I can't think of any president who's remembered particularly poorly... and there are many much more deserving of it than Bush. In fact, some of our worst presidents are remembered quite fondly (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson off the top of my head).

Did you just say Lincon was a bad president? You were thinking of somebody else right unless you were southern? Lincon freed the slaves, he faught for good reasons and did a good job and set a good example for the rest of the world. Like any president that tries to do good and set good examples. They all for some reason tend to get shot. Like JFK.

Maybe that's why most U.S. presidents tend to act shitty and set bad examples? They just don't want to get killed.

[Kjorteo]

Bacardi4206 wrote:

thealmightynarf wrote:

I can't think of any president who's remembered particularly poorly... and there are many much more deserving of it than Bush. In fact, some of our worst presidents are remembered quite fondly (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson off the top of my head).

Did you just say Lincon was a bad president? You were thinking of somebody else right unless you were southern? Lincon freed the slaves, he faught for good reasons and did a good job and set a good example for the rest of the world. Like any president that tries to do good and set good examples. They all for some reason tend to get shot. Like JFK.

Maybe that's why most U.S. presidents tend to act shitty and set bad examples? They just don't want to get killed.

The problem with evaluating older Presidents is that the dissonance in values of the day makes things they did seem more out of place today. Thomas Jefferson proposed severe beatings as a punishment for homosexuality. That's either draconic and horrible when seen today or downright progressive when seen in the context of his own time, when the usual punishment was death. He also owned slaves, but treated them incredibly well compared to many others in his day. It's all relative. Thus, it's easy to ignore the spirit of what Lincoln did as far as freeing the slaves and holding the country together and simply nitpick because of how he treated the Native Americans or something. Granted, suspending Habeas Corpus was a drastic measure in any context, but he was tasked with responding to what would become the American Civil War, so, you know....

[CanadianJeff]

Can't we all just cheer that the nation wrecker is finally out of office.

And yes that's going to forever be my memory of Bush. As a nation "wrecker"

[Axeman]

This whole wave of Obama-love is starting to take the script of a bad Eddie Murphy movie. Evil Bush, replaced by Saint Obama, incorruptable, vilified in office because of the poor economy he inherited....what's the climax?