In the end, I would have picked Al Gore, sure maybe there wouldn't be tax cuts, but there wouldn't have been a war from lies, or guantanamo, or rendition, or torture, or US citizens being held without right of Habeus Corpus.
I'm consistently amazed at how every bad thing in the world can be traced back to George Bush. It's like the man is Keyser Söze. I didn't like him, didn't vote for him the first time, but have become one of his biggest supporters simply out of sheer contarian revulsion at the nonsense that constant spews forth about how American became Nazi Germany two seconds after Bush was sworn in, right before he gunned down the Supreme Court and replaced them with his Skulls and Bones buddies, rolled the Constitution into a cigar, and slept with every married woman in America.
The "lies" that the Bush Administration told were the exact same "lies" that Algore and Slick Willy had been pushing for a couple of years prior, trying to sell their own war. They were the same "lies" that most Western intelligence agencies believed. And they were lies made more credible by the post Cold War gutting of intelligence services, and the resulting lack of people (and data) in/from the field. Rendition and torture preceed Bush by decades and were fairly heavily used by the Clinton adminstration. Members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the current administration's use of coercive interogation techniques, and raised no objections until it was politically expedient. Habeus corpus has been suspended several times during war, and one of the primary legal basis of the current administration's legal stance is the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton. And Bush didn't stand by and twiddle his thumbs while three quarters of a million Rwandans were hacked to death, although, trying to be multilateral with the UN in Dafur, Bush still might get there. Yet somehow, Bush is unique in the annals of inept Presidents.
Personally, I think his main fault is that he tried to work Washington like he worked the Texas legislature, and do a lot of bi-partisan win/win kinda stuff - Washington sees that as a sign of weakness, and it's all over...
You're darn right. Compromise is for suckers in the modern political arena. And by trying to split the middle Bush pissed off the loud squeaky ends, and they never let him (or anyone else) forget that he wasn't good enough. It doesn't matter that he made the best out of a crappy situation (handed a country with a recently burst bubble economy, enemies that don't respect you might or your will, a gutted military, and a nation so deeply divided that to this day half of them don't believe you were legitmately elected. Oh yeah, and one of the worse terrorist attacks on your home soil in 50 years. Piece of cake right? He wasn't perfect, or idealogically pure, or a true believer, so he's worthless. Yeah, it's so very amazing that we don't have better choices, because who wouldn't want to be publically maligned, slandered, have every decision and word endlessly analyzed and judged by every yahoo with an internet connection, give up their privacy, and put their person and family in mortal danger for a job with those kind of perks?
