4 thoughts on “Crybaby Bush”

  1. P.S. Hey, Birthday Boy!!!

    H A P P Y B I R TH D A Y TODAY, 9/10, from me and, I feel I can safely say, including all your other blogging friends and family!!!

    Wishing you the best of everything in this coming year. Most especially, good health, the blessings of family and friends, and wisdom that increases with each passing year. May you age like a fine wine, Doug!

  2. Yeah, Doug, you’re right. Bush has plenty of REASONS to cry and mourn, but that doesn’t mean he allows himself to FEEL true remorse over decisions he has made.

    Bush always struck me as one of those guys who has trouble admitting to EVER making mistakes. As I think about it more, I seem to recall a reporter asking Bush once whether he regrets making any mistakes in his job. And Bush replied, “Yeah, some appointments to office…But ones you probably never heard of.” I thought that was a real dodgy answer, typical of people who have to appear in public as “perfect” all the time. The weight of that would be crushing, and it’s no wonder Bush used to drink so heavily.

    I have more respect for those who can ‘fess up and say, “Yeah, that was a mistake.” Whereas being defensive…You just can’t fool all the people, all of the time. I think Ronald Reagan instinctively knew that, and had such a good public relations way about him, that you couldn’t help liking the GUY, even if you hated his policies, like “trickle down” economics. (I was no Reagan fan of his Presidency.)

    Yeah, I do agree with your comments, Doug! As for lying, I think Bush probably lies to himself a lot. That’s very typical of alcoholics. You know, just because a person stops drinking, and declares to have “found God,” doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot of unfinished business, to attend to the personality problems that caused the compulsive excessive drinking in the first place.

    And “finding God” is only the first step on a spiritual path. Being a “born again Christian,” as Bush claims to be, calls for “fruit of the Spirit” from mature Christians, or it means NOTHING, as 1 Corinthians 13 states so eloquently in the Bible, when speaking of love. GENUINE Christianity calls for continual examination of one’s conscience, and repentance – which is an active verb, not a thought process. It doesn’t mean “Sorry; Until the next time I do it again.” And it calls for restitution, restoring justice to those whom we have wronged. That’s not just Christian talk. AA speaks of the same thing in their 12 Step Program.

  3. Wow! Good stuff. I hadn’t thought about the effect a 1000-mile fence would have on wildlife.

    You’re absolutely correct that Bush has plenty of reasons to cry, but I honestly think he never cries over anything. He doesn’t care about the American people (except for the wealthiest 1%) or Democracy or any of the things that he claims matter to him. I also don’t believe that he believes. He wears his faith on his sleeve when he says things like he weeps on God’s shoulder. That’s nothing more than him playing to his political base, as always. Everything the man says is a lie. Everything. And now today we’re being told that Petraeus will recommend “staying the course.” What a surprise.

    If Bush truly did feel the weight of his office, and the pain of his failures, in 2004 he would have done what LBJ did when he didn’t run for re-election in 1968. LBJ essentially conceded that Vietnam was unwinnable after the Tet Offensive. Bush is going to stay the course until he’s out of office, and Iraq becomes somebody else’s problem.

  4. I beg to differ with you, Doug! Here’s how I’m lookin’ at it. We can draw some real parallels between the failed Viet Nam war and this fiasco of our occupation of Iraq…and even Afghanistan, where the Taliban is slowly but surely starting to come back to life.

    Let’s look at the Viet Nam era first: Much of the Viet Nam war is tied in with former President Lyndon Johnson, who escalated Presidet Kennedy’s “advisors” and covert actions in that region, to putting lots of boots on the ground in Viet Nam. The U.S. instituted a draft.

    Okay, so we don’t remember those years fondly, and we link the Viet Nam war very strongly with Lyndon Johnson. However, what else have historians written about Johnson? Well, because of Johnson, we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That gave the federal government the right to end segregation, to put it in a nutshell. This was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended literacy tests and poll taxes, – both of which screened out a lot of African Americans from voting. Johnson had a great deal to do with getting these 2 Acts passed.

    Now: what are historians gonna say, years from now, about the George W. Bush presidency? Besides sending our troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, I mean, where many have given their lives, and the American goal of democracy for those 2 is not assured in either country. We never found Osama bin Laden, and some say it’s at least in part because we shifted a lot of manpower and our technology out of hunting the caves in Afghanistan and along the Pakistani border, to a new theater of action: Iraq. The American people were sold on this idea (well, some of them) to invade Iraq, in order to find and destroy Saddam Hussein’s famous weapons of mass destruction. We knew he had ’em…at least at one time…because the U.S. military had the receipts for SELLING some of them to Saddam, in earlier years when we hated Iran more than Iraq. If the Iraqis had any usable weapons of mass destruction left, they certainly would’ve hauled them out when we invaded their country and marched into Bagdad. Pretty crummy intellilgence? Yeah, sure! Was it a case similar to a lousy scientist looking for data to support his pre-conceived theory he WANTS to prove, rather than taking a neutral approach in learning scientific facts? I suspect so.

    I think Bush was at the top of a chain of command of people feeding him what he wanted to hear, politically, with the exception of a few, such as Colin Powell…who became marginalized pretty quickly, and of course later discreetly bowed out of office.

    So that’s the scenario we have for Bush’s Presidency, regarding international affairs that happened on his watch. Now what about domestic affairs on his watch? Let’s not even bother going into details about Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans, and how the federal government has handled that disaster. Lemme see…Bush created our Homeland Security department. It wasn’t much use during the hurricane we knew was approaching New Orleans. And from what I’ve read just recently, Homeland Security’s effectiveness in even reaching the new department’s own criteria, its own goals it set for itself, has been somewhat less than half.

    So, yeah, I’ll bet Bush DOES cry every day. He got a balanced budget to start with, and now we have a huge federal deficit again. We have triggered more instability in the Middle East, more Muslims hate us, and those who already did hate us, now hate us more than ever. We have experienced the nightmare of severing one head – hanging Saddam Hussein – only to watch 3 more heads spring out and grow back, more menacing than ever.

    I think that Iraq is a magnet right now for Muslim rage at the U.S., an easy and nearby outlet for it, that draws attention away from concocting more terrorist plans in the U.S.A. I live an hour north of the Mexican border. I read our local news, and I know how any determined person who wants to enter the U.S., whether terrorist or a Mexican looking to earn money, is gonna do it. A border “fence” will do more to stop wildlife migration than it will people, who dig tunnels, and sometimes travel through the sewer tunnels in Nogales to head north to Tucson, Phoenix, and maybe disperse elsewhere from there.

    I think Bush cries because he was handed a balanced budget,
    and naively thought that our take-over of Iraqi oil fields would fiinance that war (Now, who wouldda thought militant Iraqis would sabotage them, so the U.S. couldn’t get its hands on their oil??? Duh!!!). I think he cries because he was also handed the sympathy and goodwill of world opinion after 9/11, which was a tremendous blessing, but he made decisions which squandered it all away, and began to split the opinion of the American public, as well. If you don’t think we’re all THAT split, just think what would happen if Congress re-instituted a draft!!! And I think he cries because, unlike Lyndon Johnson, he’s probably going to go out of office without any legacy of significant domestic achievements, such as Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    If I were President Bush, – yeah, sadly, for all these reasons, and the American and Iraqi lives lost, I too would feel very much on the edge of tears each and every day. The “woulda, coulda, shoulda” would haunt me for the rest of my life.

     

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