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Iceman
Joined: 14 Sep 2002
Posts: 1077
Location: Mesa Arizona
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 Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 3:50 pm Post subject: |
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| Ducimus wrote: | | Quote: |
You may have noticed that there's one thing I don't complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, "They suck". But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from, American Parent's, American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, American Universities, and they're elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do, folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
If you have selfish igorant citizens, your going to get selfish ignorant leaders; and Term limits aren't going to do you any good, cause you'll just get a new bunch of selfish ignorant americans. So maybe, maybe, something else around here sucks.
Like, the public. Yeah, the public, sucks, frick hope! Because If everything is really the fault of these politicians, where are the bright people of concience? Where are all the bright, honest, intelligent Americans who are ready to step in, save the nation, and lead the way? We don't have people like that in this country. Everyone's at the mall, scratching his ass, picking his nose, taking his credit card out of his fanny pack and buying a pair of sneakers with lights in them.
-- George Carlin
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LMAO..  I love George....tells it like it is..thank you for this quote.Made my day.  |
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August
Joined: 16 Apr 2005
Posts: 1296
Location: Rhode Island
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:07 am Post subject: |
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| Just for the record i do not own a fanny pack nor have i ever owned a fanny pack (or lighted sneakers either). |
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The Avon Lady
Joined: 18 May 2005
Posts: 3267
Location: Jerusalem, Israel
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| Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:27 am Post subject: |
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| The Avon Lady wrote: | | Bottom line: US intel stinks. Still does, BTW. |
Is it safe?
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Ducimus
Joined: 26 May 2005
Posts: 831
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Wildcat
Joined: 10 Jan 2002
Posts: 438
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| Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 6:59 pm Post subject: |
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I have to say that while I supported Bush in both elections, and I still support him, I feel he's doing a poor job. However I do think he's doing a better job than any of the alternatives would have done, especially given the very real threats out there (Al Qaeda, extremist muslims en masse, etc etc). Action was needed. Action was taken. I cannot expect that Al Gore or John Kerry would have done a good job in this time and situation.
The war in Iraq has been handled absolutely terribly since 2004.
I don't have a clue how the country will do after Bush is gone. I think Bush was thrust into a very strange scenario and the world will of course be forever different because of the things that happened in 2001.
He's really between a rock and a hard place. |
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Ducimus
Joined: 26 May 2005
Posts: 831
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| Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | However I do think he's doing a better job than any of the alternatives would have done |
I'm not a john kerry supporter, but my unbiased opinion (cause im sick of both parties), is that, we will never really know for sure if any of the alternatives would have done any worse. (or done any better, depending on your point of view. ) And yes, orginally i voted for bush in the first election. Bush Sr had my respect, Bush Jr seemed to be a no brainer. How wrong i was.
Anyway my point is, we can guess all we want, but we'll never really know for sure how any of the alternatives would have done. The bush election wasnt a an election of picking the best man for the job, but picking the one who would screw things up the least given our choices of candidates. |
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JBClark
Joined: 30 Apr 2005
Posts: 279
Location: North Carolina, USA
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| Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 11:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Beery wrote: | | The Avon Lady wrote: | | 62 million insane Americans did not vote for this coward.... |
No, they voted for the moron over the coward, which is forgivable, BUT they also voted for the moron over ALL THE REST OF THE PEOPLE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, including write-ins. Meaning that they voted for a moron backed by a bunch of wacko right wing nutcases rather than ANYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY. That is the insanity, and the unforgivable bit. People in this country are fooled every four years into placing a vote for a Democrat or a Republican, as if those were the only choices, but this is a democracy, not a two-party state, and given the choice between a moron and a coward, the smart choice is ANYONE ELSE. |
Holy cow, what a minefield: this thread.
So far, what Beery just said is the only thing I can totally agree with (not the first part, I don't think Bush is a moron and I don't think Kerry is a coward, but everything after that.) Speaking only of presidential races now, the last time I voted for a major party candidate was '88, for GHW Bush; I was not as savvy then and his opponent was Mondale, what else was I to do?
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the way we elect our representatives is seriously flawed. I think that the gerrymandering that has always been a scourge of our system has gotten totally out of control. To the point that in the last presidential election in 2004, I voted for my brother. He was on no ballot, I wrote him in. I realized that since I was living in NC, a state that was guaranteed to go for Bush, my vote would have no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the national election. I will admit that I hoped Bush would win, not because I liked him but more for the reason the Avon Lady spoke of: Bush appeared to me to be the lesser of two weevils, I mean evils, no I mean weasels; whatever.
Someone earlier alluded to the old saw: "The electorate gets what it deserves." I could not agree more. I place whatever blame is warranted here on people who don't pay attention. On people who don't vote. On people who vote without thinking. On people who vote for whoever their favorite TV personality tells them to vote for. On lemmings.
In '92 I voted for Perot, but believe me, if I had thought the man had a snowball's chance of winning, I would have voted for GHWB again. Perot is a flake, probably a decent fellow but too flaky to be president of the USA. I voted for him to scare the established politicos, and it worked. That was the best vote I have ever cast. Perot got 19% of the popular vote and the establishment was terrified, at least for a while. It was fun to watch him testifying before the joint House-Senate Government Reform Committee saying things like (paraphrasing): 'Senator, I don't think you are a crook, but you act like one, you sound like one, and the way you act makes most voters think you are a crook.' It was fun watching Rostenkowski squirm. [And then of course, Rostenkowski went to jail for stealing folding chairs. Ha!]
In 2000, I was living in Florida. I wanted Bush to beat Gore but a friend convinced me that no election ever came down to one vote so I went for Harry Brown. It gets better. I always vote absentee since I travel for a living and have no way of knowing where I will be on the Tuesday after the first Monday. I got to watch the overnight returns on CNN Asia from a bar in Sumatra (13 hours time difference) all day. At one point, they were calling the race for Bush by 53 votes. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to come home. My ex-pat Brit friends gave me a lot of grief that day (and if you remember, Missouri elected a dead man to the senate that day also.) I could always quiet my British friends though by asking for their latest copy of the Times of London (the most prestigeous newspaper in the world!!??) and pointing to the bottom of the page, where there was a cartoon strip describing what was to be on "Friends" this week. That always shut them up.
The rest of this thread is interesting but I think people put too much faith in the actual power of a president. While he certainly is the most powerful single person in the world, his most effective tool is rhetoric. People talk about Reagan's deficit spending but forget that the president can only propose a budget by courtesy. The House is the body empowered to write a budget, and the house was controlled by Regan's opposition in those years. I just got off the phone with my boss and best friend, my old college roomate, the communist bastard. He said that Clinton gave us a budget surplus and Bush turned it into a huge deficit. Never mind that Clinton ruled in the days of the tech boom and just before he left office, the Asian economy went into the shitter. Neither of these gentlemen had the power to cause these events. This is not to say that I excuse the fiscal behavior of the current administration, indeed I think it almost criminal. The closest analogy I can think of is that this administration is spending money like a druken sailor, a subject I am unfortunately familiar with.
Since I hate to offer criticism without proposing a solution, here is mine:
If the objection is that the government no longer reflects the will of the people, I am inclined to agree. I think the government (particularly the Congress, but the administration too) is corrupt. I think the engine of that corruption is: first, the tax code that allows politicos to grant favors in exchange for contributions; and second, the campaign finance laws. My solution is to rewrite the tax code to be simple enough to fit on 20 or 30 pages (a flat tax with no deductions but an exemption for income up to perhaps 1.5 to 2 times the poverty line, and then a flat rate on anything over that.) Prohibit candidates from taking contributions from anyone who is not legally allowed to vote for them. No contributions from corporations or clubs or organizations, just individual voters registered in their districts. Let them accept any amount of money from legitimate voters as long as they publish their contributers names before the check clears.
To the original question, Is Bush the worst president? I don't know but I doubt it. Time will tell. I was born in Ike's administration though I only remember him by the fact that his funeral canceled Saturday morning cartoons. I remember my parents getting nervous in October '62 and then Kennedy getting shot in November '63. Nixon is the first I remember well. I think he was the best foreign policy president in my lifetime and perhaps the worst in domestic policy. I think Carter was basically a joke but he is the ex-president I would most like to go fishing with. I loved Reagan but he was not without his faults either. Clinton was the best speaker I have ever heard (and as I said earlier, a president's best tool is rhetoric) but I believe he should be spending the rest of his life in federal prison. Not for sexual misconduct but rather for the way he treated Billy Dale. Ford may have been the wisest, even while he was stumbling down the airplane steps and saying that Poland was not in the Eastern Bloc.
I think the job is too big for anyone to survive four years, much less eight, without making a lot of mistakes. In real life, I respect people who make mistakes and learn from them. I'm not sure that we allow our politicians to admit to mistakes these days. It seems that politics is more like a wolf pack than ever. As soon as the Alpha shows even a sign of weakness, his rivals are on his jugular and the rest of the pack just waits to see who will win.
I place much of the blame for the venal behavior of our representatives on our own lazy, self-centered, ignorant abrogation of our responsibilities. Read Gibbon. We are pretty close to the fall.
Cheers,
JBC |
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