Amet Reloads: Bill Maher & George Carlin on Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher in 2001

George Carlin & Nobody

Source: Amet Reloads: Bill Maher & George Carlin on Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher in 2001

Not clear the date of this show, but it sounds like the early days of the George W. Bush Administration in 2001, when our long national nightmare was just beginning, to paraphrase former President Gerald Ford. You would think after being appointed President of the United States and losing the popular vote and arguably Florida as well that would have given the election to Al Gore and not being very popular when assuming office in January, 2001 and having a divided Senate and a House with bare Republican majority, that President Bush just might try to govern as a uniter. And not try to force his right-wing agenda that the country didn’t support on the country.

But you gotta give President Bush credit for one thing and that’s where his credit runs out. He told the country what he believed and what he would do and then he did exactly that. He really is one of the most honest president’s we’ve ever had. Which is sort of like being the tallest man in Japan. So what! But its true. That whole cliché that elections matter. That is so true with G.W. Bush. The country knew what they were getting when they voted for him, other than that little trillion-dollar debacle called the Iraq War. And they voted for him anyway. I don’t blame President Bush for being who he was. I blame the Democratic Party who both times had a candidate better than Bush, but barely lost to him twice. For not running good campaigns and taking Bush seriously.

It is one thing to be a bad president and good luck finding a worst one than G.W. Bush where you look at the State of The Union when he took office and where it was when he left. But that person still has to get the job first and beat the opposition. I blame Al Gore, for not winning his home state Tennessee and not winning Florida in a walk with the senior vote and coming off as rude with superficial voters in the debates. For not taking advantage of the most popular politician in the country who just happened to be his boss in President Clinton and using him to take apart the Bush Campaign. I blame John Kerry, for again not taking President Bush seriously enough as a politician. And not taking the swift boat debacle seriously and wasting a whole summer not moving past that. But more importantly, I blame fifty-million or so American voters. Who didn’t have the decency to be awake, sober and on their medication when they went into the voting booths in 2000. And voting for the wrong person.

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Politics and Prose: James Mann on President George W. Bush

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

Just to state out first George W. Bush is the worst U.S. President in my entire thirty-nine-years on Earth. And that includes Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush’s father, who is G.W.’s father of course and Barack Obama. And all of these president’s aren’t looking very good right now and all had plenty of issues. The differences being that other than G.W. the other president’s by in large successfully dealt with the issues that came up under their presidencies.

You can’t say that about G.W. if you look at the economy, national debt, deficit, banking system, two wars oversees and I could probably go on. American president’s are judged by the situation of the country when they came to office and the situation of the country when they leave office. And other than not getting hit again inside of the United States after 9/11, which of course he deserves credit for as Commander-in-Chief, its hard to find an area of the country where it was better off in 2009 when President Bush left office and 2001 when he came into office. And even 9/11 a big fact is we got hit in the first place in America because of intelligence failures.

Now to try to sound somewhat positive about President Bush and even factual. I give him credit for giving the Republican Party alternatives to how to look at poverty in America which he actually took seriously and providing a vision for how government can help low-income people when it comes to poverty and education. By empowering state and local government’s, as well as non-profits in the private sector to help Americans in poverty. But also help people in poverty around the world. That so-called Reform Conservatives people like Representative Paul Ryan and his brother Jeb Bush are pushing today. Which is something that Republicans desperately need to do in order to connect with Americans who aren’t wealthy.

Another thing about President Bush. Imagine had President Bush’s foreign and national security policy been what he ran on in 2000. A humble foreign policy where we are engaged around the world with out allies, but not trying to govern the world ourselves. 9/11 happens and we invade Afghanistan which is what she should’ve done to knockout that terrorist state that was harboring terrorists who were responsible for 9/11. But we don’t go to Iraq at least by ourselves and certainly not on the evidence that we had. Because Collin Powell is chief national security and foreign policy adviser. Instead of Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or Condi Rice as Secretary of State. Collin Powell becomes G.W.’s Henry Kissinger.

The last thing I would say about George W. is that he’s not stupid. Which probably puts me in a tiny minority inside of the Democratic Party. But he’s not stupid, but unqualified to be President of the United States which can be said about probably ninety-percent of the country. Had G.W. continued as Governor of Texas, maybe he goes down as a great Governor and runs for President in 2004 or 2008 as an experienced Governor of a huge successful state. Takes a couple of years off before running for president and learns about foreign policy and national security and becomes the Ronald Reagan of his generation. But we’ll never know.

Politics and Prose: James Mann- George W. Bush

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New York Times: Ross Douthat- ‘The Obama Era, Brought to You by the Iraq War’

Source:New York Times– “An antiwar protest in Washington in 2007. The war divided the left but ultimately energized it.Credit…Jim Bourg/Reuters” Also from the New York Times.

Source:The Daily Times

“WHEN prominent people in Washington spend an anniversary apologizing for being catastrophically, unforgivably wrong about a decade-old decision, you might expect that the decision in question had delivered their party to disaster or defeat. But last week’s many Iraq war mea culpas were rich in irony: one by one, prominent liberals lined up to apologize for supporting a war that’s responsible for liberalism’s current political and cultural ascendance.
History is too contingent to say that had there been no Iraq invasion in 2003, there would be no Democratic majority in 2012. (It’s easy enough to imagine counterfactuals that might have put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.) But the Democratic majority that we do have is a majority that the Iraq war created: its energy and strategies, its leadership and policy goals, and even its cultural advantages were forged in the backlash against George W. Bush’s Middle East policies.

All those now-apologetic liberals who supported the war in 2003 are a big part of this story, because without their hawkishness there would have been no antiwar rebellion on the left — no Michael Moore and Howard Dean, no Daily Kos and all its “netroots” imitators. ”

From the New York Times

OK, so I agree with Ross Douthat that the Iraq War has been good for the Democratic Party.

Political history lesson of the day: in 2003 the Republican Party had The White House with President George W. Bush and his administration, as well as a Republican Congress (House and Senate) with small majorities, but large enough for them to put through most of their economic agenda through, at least during that Congress.

With a divided Democratic opposition that really only had the Senate filibuster as a weapon they could use against the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans. And any communications strategy and message that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, and the Democratic National Committee could put together against the Republican Party.

In 2004, President Bush is elected, with a small majority, but enough to get him reelected. House Republicans add a few seats to their thin majority. Senate Republicans go from 51 to 55 seats in the Senate. President Bush is at around 50% approval in late 2004 and going into 2005. This all looks like the Republican Party is not only the majority party, but it’s going to be that way for a while.

As the old political saying goes (or one that I just made up) a governing party and majority is only as good as it’s ability to govern and lead. You had a divided Republican Party on Social Security reform in early 2005, with House and Senate Democrats having no political reasons to work with Congressional Republicans on SS reform and that dies in the House and Senate by the summer of 2005. Hurricane Katrina happens in the late summer of 2005 and the disaster and the Bush Administration showing almost no ability to deal with that disaster and cleanup happens as well.

Going into the summer of 2005, I don’t think anyone was predicting that House and Senate Democrats had any real shot at either winning back the House or Senate in 2006, but the debacle in the Iraq War, and hurricane Katrina, President Bush’s low 30s approval rating by late 2005, as well as the corruption that was going on with House Republicans that year and into 2006, started this feeling in the country, especially with Democrats and Independents, that united government wasn’t working and Republican Party needed a check in Washington.

So yes, the War in Iraq has been good politically for the Democratic Party, especially when you look at where they were in 2003 and where they were less 4 years later. But the country has paid a helluva a price for it economically and militarily that I believe most Americans would love to go back to pre-Iraq War and thinking there’s no real good reason to ever invade Iraq, at least at this point.

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