Democrat voters fondly recall presidency of George W. Bush

The Dems hobby of shooting off their own feet certainly survived 2016.

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Reagan era:

Update the guitar and very slightly tweak the lyrics and it could’ve been written yesterday

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So I take it that you aren’t Vietnamese, Cambodian or Laotian?

Nixon murdered millions.

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They’re liberal to conservative.

There’s no dishonesty in their name; liberalism has always been a centre-right ideology. It’s the party of capitalism, one small step to the left of the aristocratic conservatives.

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I didn’t like his policies. I didn’t like his wars. I certainly didn’t appreciate the Great Recession.

But under Bush, I never once thought I was going to die in a nuclear holocaust while rotting in an internment camp for not being the right kind of white. The chance of this happening is too far from 0% under Trump.

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Which highlights the key new feature of the current administration.

Under Trump, the treatment that was previously reserved for poor/foreign/non-white people is now being extended to all non-fascists.

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For a sitting president it’s probably fair to conflate “favorable view of person” with “approval of person’s presidency”.

For an ex-president, no. Look at Jimmy Carter, for example - lots of people like him, think he’s a good person, admire his charity work, but also think he was a shit president. He gets +20 in favorability polls but views of his presidency haven’t gotten all that much better over the years.

I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that Democrats who currently express a favorable view of GWB “fondly recall” his presidency.

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Any other reprehensible shitbags wanna step up and rehabilitate their image by making the right noises about Giant Douche?

Come on folks, you’ve nothing to lose! It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

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Except they’re not always that honest… our conservative party is the ‘Liberal’ Party.

They’re ostensibly for individual liberty but if that was ever true it hasn’t been for a long time. It’s all about neoliberalism and cultural conservatism.

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They began as Gladstonian Liberals [1] with a strong anti-communist and pro-British imperialism streak.

The linguistic similarity between liberal and libertarian isn’t just a coincidence. For both traditions, one of the foundational principles was the “liberty” to make profit without being limited by things like pay and safety minimums for workers.

But, yeah; the liberal wing of the party has been in freefall ever since Keating beat Peacock. Howard was a racist Tory to begin with, and dragged the party further right in response to One Nation. Turnbull is a liberal, but he’s a weak and gutless one who is capitulating to the conservative wing of the party.

Meanwhile, Bernardi’s schism are beginning as theocrats but will probably end up going fash. I’m watching for them to try and absorb the Hansonites and other anti-immigrant parties.

[1] Bob Menzies’ brother was named Frank Gladstone Menzies, BTW.

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The massive outpouring of nostalgia for Reagan belongs in the same category as remembering Bush fondly.

Time blurs the details. Folks forget the day to day struggles. The fog of the past tends to give way to nostalgia for “a simpler better time” and they think about that time they went on a date and had a nice evening back in the 90s, and Friends was on, and gosh, Bush was just a yokel, right? Ha ha, good times. They forget about the daily horror of war and watching our money go up in flames.

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Yeah, but not everyone falls for that cognitive bias, and even many of those folks are saying this worn-out baseball glove tightly gripping a turd is the worst Prez yet.

Either of the Bushes.

Spoilered due to images of dead people.

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George W. Bush was a complete and total disaster as a president, but he’s still a better person than Trump. Like, looking at Bush, you can be sure that he can conceive of a world that doesn’t entirely revolve around himself, that he actually has beliefs and ideas beyond the immediate satisfaction of his ego, that you could actually have a functional conversation with him.

Put short, I can imagine that in some different context – no 9/11, no Cheney and the various neocons in his inner circle – Bush could have been an acceptable president. Trump? Not in a billion years.

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Not really. Libertarianism was far-left until the name was stolen by classical liberals who were unhappy about social liberalism.

Seventeen years (1857) after Proudhon first called himself an anarchist (1840), anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque was the first person to describe himself as a libertarian.

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I suspect he’s easily steered.

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Well, you could try.

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I don’t think there is an easy way to measure this. For that matter, how much of the general population actually knows Bush or somebody close to him? Our entire view of him (or any political figure/celebrity) is based on what we see in the media, something that can be carefully managed. We just don’t know, and unless there are a lot of tell-all biographies from people in his inner circle that corroborate each other, we probably never will know. Anyway, whether Bush is a better person than Trump is irrelevant.

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Bush era:


Feels like it could have been written tomorrow.

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Just remember that “liberal” in USA means something different than in the rest of the world. Liberals are to the right and supposed to be for free market and a small state. To the left you have socialists and social democrats, but those words have been more or less banned in the US political landscape.

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