It’s probably just that Terry Crews is a pretty damn likeable guy.
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I have no nostalgia for Bush. By contrast to Trump I can at least feel I may have been wrong that Bush was an extreme low point.
But that is just by the fact we kept digging for new low points.
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Jesus Christ. It feels like 18 years.
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Yeah, this. W. was a terrible president – I think he would have gone down in history as a mediocre one-termer whose administration was plagued by corporate scandals, if not for 9/11 – who caused untold damage by the bungled war in Afghanistan and the illegal invasion of Iraq, followed by a completely botched occupation. But as a person Bush seems to have been flawed but not all-around awful, unlike Trump. His work on combating AIDS in Africa has been mentioned, and he (and other Bushes, apparently) doesn’t seem to be racist or xenophobic, the way so much Republicans are these days.
Compare this to Trump, whose administration is a complete shambles of incompetence, corruption and bigotry, and who is a thoroughly repulsive parody of a venal businessman as a person. Nobody is going to feel better about Trump afterwards, or think that he wasn’t that bad.
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what about LBJ? seems he only avoided losing in the middle of a war by not running…
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I think that US Presidents get a pass as people can always say, “Well, he didn’t turn the world in to a nuclear fireball, so there is that.”
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Trump makes Bush look good.
Bush made his father look good.
His father made Reagan look good.
Reagan made Ford look good.
Ford almost rehabilitated Nixon. Almost.
Nixon made Eisenhower into a saint.
Eisenhower made people think less about how Hoover fucked them over.
And so it goes.
Still, Trump even makes Hoover look like a compassionate economic genius.
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Uh, wut. I’ll only admit his humanitarian work since leaving office has been a good thing. I can’t think of much of anything redeemable about his illegitimate presidency, though.
At least Nixon actually did some real good for the country.
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means,
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Shrub gets a pass from me. I think he did great things with the AIDS crisis in Africa and he was never accused of grabbing meow-meow. At the core I think he was an okay guy, just not a good leader. The Iraq war is unforgivable though. If it wasn’t for that, he might be remembered fondly by many.
Edited to add: He recently adopted a dog from a shelter which gets a thumbs-up from me, as well. Meanwhile Trump doesn’t even have a dog, which is a good thing because he would probably kick it.
By some sure, but Bush was still a dangerous idiot. The person really taking the reigns during his presidency was Cheney, and we all know what a garbage person he was. He did after all shoot someone in the face and then had his victim apologize publicly to him.
Cheney: A VP With Unprecedented Power
Relevant paragraph from said article:
Cheney created a new doctrine in which the president was accountable to no one in his decisions as commander in chief," Gellman said. “What was new and innovative here, and quite radical, was the notion that the president’s interpretation could not be challenged, that because the executive is a separate branch, courts and Congress could not tell the president, in any way, how to exercise his powers as commander in chief.”
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He also doesn’t seem like a hardcore misogynist to me. I’m sure he’s got some “product of his time” views that I’d find awful, but I’ve heard him talk about women in public in ways that make he think he sees his wife and daughters as human beings.
Of course all of this makes me want to paraphrase (or possibly directly quote?) Chris Rock: What do you want, a cookie? You aren’t supposed to be racist, you low-expectation-having motherfucker.
Yeah, lots of people go through various stages of trial and error in their lives before they really find themselves and their calling. George W. Bush was an artists all along, he just needed to figure that out. It’s just that he’s probably the only person is history who was so fucking privileged that one of his hiccups on the road to finding himself was being President of the United States of America.
Sometimes I do like to keep Trump in perspective in certain ways. I had mayor Rob Ford, and people would talk about him like he was the worst mayor of all time, but during his tenure Montreal went through four mayors because of a corruption probe. Like the mayor was arrested, then they replaced him with someone who was arrested, and then again, and then again. These guys were taking bribes (like cash-in-bags bribes) from organized crime to award construction contracts. Ford was embarrassing and corrupt, but the actual damage he did wasn’t that severe.
Still, even if we are trying to be as fair as possible to Trump his record is really, really bad. He’s already had his hurricane Katrina, and somehow bungled the Puerto Rico recovery even worse than the feds bungles the New Orleans one. Now he’s sabre rattling. If he starts the Iran war then it’s going to be a slam dunk, no possible argument he’s worse than Bush by all measurements.
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Is Rob Ford dead? Has someone made a thread about that? /Obligs
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You just basically called him Nero. Wow.
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…and now I won’t ever be able to think of him without that!
Yep, that was Shrub in 2004 vs Kerry.
I always feel like western civilization is an exercise in rehabilitating violence (especially state or socially driven violence). And what a better example than in the rehabilitation of Bush 2. There’s no way to get around the horrible things he or other Presidents have done. They try to excuse like how Aquinas tried to absolve crusaders of their sins of rape and murder but equally they fail to grasp that evil is always going to be evil when it comes to the victims of the acts themselves (at least those who survive and continue to tell the tales as they remember them).
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"…the future sainthood of Donald J Trump"
(That’s some major league ass kissing licking.)
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You can tell, because he has left the continent since leaving office.
What’s that? He hasn’t? Hmmmm, wonder why…
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