For the first time in the history of this blog, George Bush is not the President of the United States.
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For the first time in the history of this blog, George Bush is not the President of the United States.
John Quiggin 
It’s been a long, long, long eight years.
Happy Days indeed
– I know that Obama can’t be perfect and will be more conservative than I and many others would like, but he must surely represent a great and postive change.
Yep. And during those eight long years he didn’t sit on the Red Button once.
Perhaps the world did misunderestimate him after all.
The air smells better already. Obama can’t posibly live up to all expectations, nor can he possibly be worse than Bush. Stopping the torture of prisoners by “defenders of freedom” would be a good start.
Bush remained clueless to the end. He still doesn’t understand why he failed economically, militarily, politically and socially. Flying over New Orleans in 2005 starring down blankly at the damage will be the enduring image of his presidency. He ran the most powerful office on earth as an old boys club for friends. He was the misoverestimated man.
Funny how the Israelis stopped bombing Gaza.
Just hope we can undo the damage. It wasnt just Bush. It was two decades of frightful economic policy. Bush administration and Howard government here were just the cataclysmic outcome of those policies taken to their nth degree.
yes indeed, you have to appreciate the good days when they come, no bush and a black president, hallelujah
obama will disappoint most though, and carry most of the venom for the tragedy that will be america over the next five years which will not be fair
He used his war powers to proclaim a blockade, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, spent money without congressional authorization, and imprisoned 18,000 suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial.
If Lincoln was walking out of office today, you would still be spitting. GWB is no Lincoln, but he is no Carter either. He did what he had to do, OBL is in a cave, Saddam is in hell and we have another set of problems.
A week before 9/11 OBL said in a interview that “American was a weak horse” ie, it would not fight back. ask yourself a qustion, why did he think that?
So Sean, do you think that OBL only says what he actually thinks?
It’s good to see the dwindling ranks of Bush-lovers can still find new reservoirs of bile to spray about. Where are the once-numerous admirers of Anthony Eden and Richard Nixon now, eh?
I’m sure Caligula, Nero and Honorius had their fan club in their day, too, delighted with the spectacles of horses being elevated to high office and cheering Rome’s incineration as a long-overdue public health measure. Come to think of it, on the scale of criminal no-hoperdom they were small-time compared to W.
“GWB is no Lincoln, but he is no Carter either.” Or even a Harding or Nixon. Maybe a Pierce.
Hal#10 Well come to think of it I can think of more than a few donkeys Bush elevated to high office – or were they hyenas?.
Alanna – hyenas, no doubt of it. Donkeys in the US context signify members of the Democratic Party, few of whom received honours from the W administration.
I attempted to write a post in response to Sean Morris’s claim (@ #8) that by repeatedly lying to the world and by launching bloody destructive wars against parties innocent of the crime of September 11 which will end up costing the world trillions of dollars and at east hundreds of thousands of deaths, President W
However, my post vanished.
So instead I posted it as a comment to an article on my blog. The article is, BTW, “Science Show too quick to close discussion of World Trade Center collapses”.
And now we have Barack Obama, a Bush III. Except the media keeps reminding us he’s black, so maybe the colour of his skin will make some minor difference as to how many people suffer the wrath of the American empire. One can only hope.
The outlook isn’t good. Obama’s presidential credentials are worse than Bush’s.
debating bush is a bit of a sideshow anyway, cheney was the brains and dynamic, and biden is an establishment power figure,
i think biden will continue the cheney tradition of having excessive power as a vp
by the way sean, your ideas about OBL are laughable,
how did OBL manage to make sure that there was no air defence?
how did OBL manage to time it for a day when a huge airborne war game was taking place so that air traffic controllers didnt know what was real?
how did OBL collapse tower 7 without a plane?
ho did OBL manage to get FBI investigations into possible attacks squashed repeatedly?
how did OBL manage to make sure that no meaningful investigation occured after Bush did everything he could to make sure an investigation never even happened in the first place?
“Obama’s presidential credentials are worse than Bush’s”
And there was I thinking the sole credential was that more people voted for you than the other fellow… Hang on there, Bush’s credentials don’t bear too much scrutiny on that count. Are you perhaps aware of some other prerequisite for the office, SATP?
Just out of interest a recent news flash – that the recesssion is starting to bite in Japan and Mazda is slashing its management salaries 10%. Could this be a sign that its really over? The Japanese were always in front in management skills werent they? I can think of quite a few other organisations that should be doing the very same thing right now.
Barack Obama said that, despite his mistakes, Bush was a good man. I would love to ask what he meant by that.
Did he feel that Bush had good intentions when committing evil?
Did he feel that a few hundred thousand dead in Iraq was a lesser evil to some other scenario?
Did he feel that Bush’s good deeds (whatever they were) balanced out the bad?
Was he just being polite and if so, would it not have been more truthful to stay silent?
My ‘delusion detectors’ have been vibrating since Obama made that statement. Am I being paranoid?
Oh and Chinalco is cutting wages by 15% and senior management salaries up to 50% this year and is aiming not to lay of any staff. (is BHP taking note of this?)
Keep it coming.
smiths (@ #17) raises some very good questions which even most of the the supposedly alternative newsmedia, let alone the corporate newsmedia refuse to ask.
Many of these issues have been discussed on the Online Opinion forum “9/11 Truth” which, at 455 posts is the longest discussion thus far on OLO. If the US Government’s explanation of 9/11 had any merit, I believe I would have found that out by now.
As a consequence, I have arrived at the firm conviction that the people who deserved to be incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay all of those years were not Mamdouh Habib, David Hicks, etc, but rather, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Meyers, Rice and a number of other senior figures in the Bush administration.
smiths @ 17 re OBL
It’s easy smiths, OBL did none of those things.
Propagating foolish 9/11 conspiracy theories puts you on the same level as people who think that AGW is a socialist conspiracy to undermine capitalism.
Hal9000, nowhere have I deviated from my belief that getting votes is what makes a president.
Just that for much of the past 8 years I have been hearing that Bush is unqualified to be president. Qualifications/ability are not required, only votes.
Likewise, past record need not be an indication of how a president will handle the job, or how his presidency will go.
However, based on his past record, Obama’s presidency will be a real mess. Time will tell if he grows up any now that the buck stops with him.
My statement was that (prior to ascending the throne) Bush’s past record (such as it was) when put alongside that of Obama, indicates Obama won’t be near the president Bush was.
All has little to do with how Obama will turn out. Just that the early indicators aren’t good.
“Obama won’t be near the president Bush was.”
praise Jesus for that! 🙂
Yeah, good questions smiths – I am sure Obama will be launching an urgent investigation.
NOT.
Sadly, the Dems probably wont even investigate who really sent those anthrax letters to their own anti-Patriot-Act senators.
Or why the US media kept saying Bush “kept the USA free from further terrorist attacks after 9/11”, totally ignoring those anthrax attacks.
I guess the sad fact is that even if Obama did launch such investigations, they would kill him.
Still, we can hardly demand the USA investigates its war crimes when we have yet to deal with our own…
‘Or even a Harding or Nixon. Maybe a Pierce.’
lols
Nanks#25 U are funny! The early indicators are fantastic, absolutely fantastic (except for the two sheets of bullet proof glass he had to sit between to give his inaugural speech) BUT the next step is that the well funded media dirt digging machine will start etc etc and he will be accused of everything frokm stealing a candy bar when he was a kid, to being a friend of terrorists, to being too pro black people, too pro muslims, etc and Murdoch will give him (and us) but one week of peace and grace and goodwill and there will be the lying, cheating and distorting of anything at all even the fact that his new dog poos on the whitehouse lawn and bla bla bla. The only thing that might prevent this is that they will be too busy trying to salvage the mess of the businesses they run. But start, it will, as it always has in the US.
Who on earth was Pierce (I had to look him up) and I guess that sums up Bush’s legacy well in one word. The Pierce legacy.
SG @20:
There’s no point in Obama running down GWB no matter what he thinks. Politics in general, but US politics in particular, run in a kind of verbal fairlyland where a lot of things are not said. The Yanks regard the Presidency in something like the way we used to regard royalty 50+ years ago and ex-presidents are a little like the Queen Mother. Right now, Obama would be better off setting fire to his own hair than criticising Bush whatever he thinks. He will need the support of past and even current Bush supporters to get his programs off the ground, so getting them offside is a crazy way to start. And remaining silent isn’t an option either, it would be taken the same way, or might even appear worse.
You and I can say what we like.
Bush made for some great Doonesbury cartoons, in the early days of Bush’s reign of error. Apart from that, the dismantling of various rights of man (and woman of course), attacking a country of contained threat while woefully underestimating the military strength required to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan, the war on chronic pain patients using prescription narcotics – meanwhile Afghanistan went back to massive opium production – and their doctors, and deregulating capital markets during a credit boom, are a sad list of accomplishments. The undeclared war on sciency stuff has not been a bright lantern to hold if “enlightment” values are the province of the Bush-ites.
When it comes to local day-to-day operations though, I have no strong opinion one way or the other as to whether the Bush administration was competent and beneficial to Americans at large, or not. The almost complete destruction of the American economy doesn’t offer much in the way of encouragement for a benign view however…
Whether Obama walks as good as he talks, well we’ll see. I think he will do all right though.
George W. Bush is no longer President. John Howard has been long gone as Prime Minister.
Wait a minute. Who will be blamed for all the world’s ills now that they are gone?
I agree that Bush was not a good president. But I doubt very much if Al Gore or John Kerry would have done any better. Gore is too unstable and melodramatic, and Kerry is an ineffectual flake.
Indeed, if the Democrats had found better presidential candidates Bush never would have got anywhere close to winning the White House.
If you look at the presidential election results for the last five elections they go as follows:
1992 landslide Democratic win
1996 landslide Democratic win
2000 narrow Republican win
2004 narrow Republican win
2008 big Democratic win
The reality is that the Democrats became the natural party of Presidential office a while ago (particularly after California flipped from Republican to safe Democrat state). The only occasions when the Republicans have had a chance is when the Democrats have put up poor candidates (Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004).
In 2004 Bush had the lowest approval rating of any president to be re-elected. He only managed to get another term because Kerry was such a weak candidate.
In reality, the Dems gave Bush two terms due to really poor candidates.
Ben (@ #23) I will treat your post as if it were not intended to be ironic.
Why can’t people ask questions such as those smiths (@ #17) asked without being automatically labelled a ‘conspiracy theorists’
How do you think it was possible for 19 hijackers directed from caves in Afghanistan to defeat the world’s most formidable air defence system in the way they did on 11 September 2001?
You certainly won’t find the answers in the 9/11 Commission Report.
John, many would argue that Bush junior denegraded the ‘office’ and Obama has to restore the institution back to its former glory.
dagget @ 33:
Let me turn that around, how do you think it wasn’t possible?
Last time I checked, flying passenger planes into buildings on purpose isn’t exacly a common occurence.
How can anyone ever defend against every possible “movie theatre” plot that could potentially happen?
Simple. You can’t.
Just curious Nick K what election did GW Bush and the Republicans win with out massive cheating and lies,he stacked the court so he could not lose when the Florida rort was sent to it.
And he fiddled with the laws so Kerry was subject to the greatest litany of lies many have ever seen,Faux News did there bit as well.
I think you can say the Bush crowd stole the 2 they one it would have made a 3rd world dictator proud
Ben,
What you don’t seem to understand is that there were systems in place designed to deal precisely with the kind of emergency that occurred on 11 September 2001 and they should have prevented all four hijacked planes form reaching their targets, particularly the Pentagon, the most heavily defended building on the planet.
According to Vietnam war fighter pilot Colonel Robert Bowman and many other authoritative experts there was adequate time for all four aircraft to have been intercepted and, if necessary, shot down as routinely happens when any large aircraft deviates from its planned flight path. I refer you to the YouTube broadcast of Robert Bowman “I call it treason”. Perhaps you could tell us where you think Robert Bowman is wrong.
The reason that this did not happen was that Cheney and Rumsfeld deliberately paralysed the US air defence system on that day.
Ben – I know not why you bother with these credulous morons?
Maybe they should go and visit a brain specialist.
Jim @ 30, thanks for that explanation. I think I am a little wiser but it illustrates how people will be critical of Obama while not understanding the underlying issues.
Please avoid insults directed at other posters.
At the same time, if anyone wants to discuss 9/11 truther conspiracy theories, I’d prefer that they did so at the OLO link above (minor snark: OLO also goes for the theory that AGW is a soc!alist conspiracy so you can get a twofer).
@ jquiggin
Assuming you are referring to my barb, fair enough. Though technically I didn’t name anyone.
However, in the spirit of civility, to anyone who though my barb was aimed at them, “no offence”.
it certainly was a devastating attack theo,
given that neither of the links go anywhere
what i find so fascinating about these assessments is the assumed knowledge,
Gore is too unstable and melodramatic…
Kerry is an ineffectual flake…
do you know the guys in question, or did the big money elite media tell you that,
doesnt anyone else find obama’s meteoric rise just a bit too incredible,
the smooth consensus style, the making of decisions in concert with mcCain, the clinton team… we need a new word cos this aint democracy,
and you dont get a sniff of the position obama is in unless you are one hundred percent bought and ready to maintain that elite in power,
anyone think obama will take on the banks? reform the fed system or the auditing firms or the tax havens? wind don global american military involvement? fat chance
how do you think a nation that only produces weapons is going to lift itself out of the bankrupt hole its in
a lot of people 12 months ago were calling it improbable, maybe they need to follow through with that thought
and a final note, anyone who cannot consider alternatives to any official version of a story in this day and age is a useless automaton
Fair enough, smiths.
You can call me an ‘useless automaton’ if I can call you a ‘credulous moron’. 🙂
Typed an extra “. 2nd time lucky.
Conspiracy=credulous and the brain specialist.
OK, that’s enough. I’m deleting anything further on 9/11, and automoderating anyone who tries to evade this ban JQ
The full list of American Presidents since the end of World War II offers a better (and more honest) perspective on the relative presidential successes of the major parties:
1948 – Truman, Democratic (wafer thin; remember the “Dewey Wins” headline)
1952 – Eisenhower, Republican (comfortable)
1956 – Eisenhower, Republican (comfortable)
1960 – Kennedy, Democratic (wafer thin)
1964 – Johnson, Democratic (landslide over Goldwater)
1968 – Nixon, Republican (comfortable)
1972 – Nixon, Republican (Landslide)
1976 – Carter, Democratic (comfortable)
1980 – Reagan, Republican (landslide)
1984 – Reagan, Republican (landslide)
1988 – Bush, Democratic (comfortable)
1992 – Clinton, Democratic (comfortable)
1996 – Clinton, Democratic (comfortable)
2000 – Bush, Republican (nail biter – The five Republican members of the Supreme Court shat on their oaths, renounced their citizenship, decamped to the Kingdom of Republicania and annointed King George I)
2000 – Bush, Republican (comfortable)
So in the 60 years since 1948, Republican Presidents have served 9 terms and the Democratic Presidents have served 6 terms. This hardly makes the Democrats the natural party of Presidential office.
Oops,
That should be
1988 – Bush, Republican (comfortable)
The perils of cut and paste.
Bush 2000 Comfortable (I dont think so).
Anyway he made people uncomfortable in the end. It wasnt a good time that presidency. He presided over a war, and he presided over a divided nation. Im sick to death of the left v right war thats been going on since he got in (if anyone disagreed on anything, just like Howard they were hissed at for being left wingers – the left wing died in communist russia I might add). The funny thing that I saw today was Obama signing something at inauguration and he says “Im a lefty” and then signs with his left hand.
You know, there is a lot for keeping your vote to yourself isnt there? There has been a lot of catcalling and division.
Gianni, I never said that the Democrats have been the natural party of Presidential government for the entire post-war period. I was simply referring to recent history (since the early 1990’s.
Previously, the Republicans had an advantage in Presidential elections because they could normally be expected to win a few big states like California, Florida and Texas.
During the 1990’s California flipped from being a reliably Republican to a safe Democratic state, and Florida became a more competitive state. This pretty much wiped out any advantage the Republicans had in Presidential elections.