What is wrong with George Bush?

Maybe the French?

Their peacekeeping efforts are top-notch.

Just look at the Congo. 🙂

Face it guys, as Americans we’ll always be looked at either the bad guy’s or the country who causes all the world’s problems.

I say who cares. I don’t care what anyone thinks about my country.

It’s pointless to even worry about what others think.

I’m happy with the life I’ve been afforded so far, and even more so with the country I feel privileged to have been born and raised in.

Again I say who cares?

Certainly not me.

Originally posted by mixtec
Unfortunately Americans are far from embarrassed about the president. And in true Republican form, the majority of people can only shower praises for how the president and US govt is handleing the situation. Were the US adminastration capable of admitting fault, they would be backing down on trying to control everything in Iraq and let other countrys go in and start rebuilding and investing. So really the Iraqi people are suffering from lack of basic services and US soldiers are being killed all because noone will admit that Bush and the majority of the US government is bungleing the situation. And lets face it, Bush is another Reagan. Hes got the US government on autopilot and lives off this Republican image of vain self importance. The fact that he went on a one month vacation to his own ranch about a month after entering office pretty much says it all.

Does Bush have a 100% approval rating? No? Then I guess all Americans aren’t behind him, are they? And let me think…we have a bunch of people in Iraq. They could be rebuilding the infrastructure. Instead, they have to go hunting for a bunch of asshats who I guess want to keep Iraq in the stone age. No wonder nothing gets done. The people supposed to be helping the citizens are instead having to sort through them and find the few bad apples who spoiled everything for everybody. But no, the fault could never lie on anyone other than an American.

Just who would you propose we let go in there and help rebuild?

Originally posted by Dutchy
Yes, how stupid of me, thank you for showing me the light. It was the inadequacy of mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton personally could have avoided the hole tragedy.

Absolutely correct. Clinton could have directly avoided 9/11 by taking Bin Laden into custody when he was offered up by the Sudanese and I think the UAE. But no, he was busy with “other things.” It is amusing that a President who had no issues getting us involved in countless places we should never have gone (Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans) then balked at the chance to reign in a leading terrorist figure.

Originally posted by some anti-American Hurricane Isobel. The eastern seaboard braces itself for Isobel’s arrival and several states are ready to declare a state of emergency. Where is Fearless Leader? Gone up to Camp David a day early to ride out the storm. However, he will, and I quote “Be monitoring the situation carefully….” He seems to avoid being in crisis situations. I would NOT be comforted by having a leader who refuses to face any of the dangers faced by his people.

The whole point of knowing the hurricane was coming, was to GET OUT OF THE WAY. You’d prefer if your leader stood in front of some avoidable natural disaster and let himself and his administration possibly get killed? That is totally asinine. If it is alright for quite a few of the potential hurritargets to evacuate, then by all means the political administration should also have the same right. If not I would have definitely questioned their intelligence. Standing around waiting for something bad to happen is just plain stupid, for either a citizen or the President. If this is what you guys are having to pull from your collective posteriors, you need to look into a new line of work and quit your job as Bush Bashers.

Originally posted by the same anti-American as above The war in Iraq is over, I know it is because President Bush told us so a few months ago. Yet US troops are still dying in what can no longer be called petty numbers. But that’s not the point I’m getting at. Since the ending of the war Bush has not visited Iraq because it is too dangerous. Not too dangerous for the troops or for other members of his Government, not too dangerous for Tony Blair. If you are prepared to put your troops in harms way you should be prepared to visit them.

I do believe there are far more people in the Gulf who would love a chance at Bush’s head than at Blair’s. Walking into an area you know there is a potential threat to prove some macho point is also stupid. I’m not faulting Blair for going, but I am not faulting Bush for not going either. Besides, the minute he sets foot in Baghdad, all the Bush-haters out there will undoubtedly cry foul and claim he is in some way lording over his new conquest. Yes, the actual war against Iraq is over. Why? The regime is out of power. Now, as we try to begin rebuilding the infrastructure and helping to get the democratic process started, some irritated individuals decide to impede our progress. I say we get out now and leave them in the state they’re in (pardon the pun). Transfer power completely tomorrow, and go home. That should satisfy everyone around the world complaining about our occupation of Iraq. Of that’s right, no it won’t. Because then all the hypocrites will undoubtedly start blabbering out of the other side of their uneducated mouths that we left Iraq in shambles. You can’t have it both ways, no matter how much you think you can.

“Not too dangerous for the troops?” What is wrong with you? That’s our JOB. The President is there to lead, we are there to execute the mission. And we do it without hesitation, and without regard to the feelings of other world leaders. When we are given a job to do, it will be done. Whether you like it or not, that is our job. Go ahead and fault Bush for not visiting us on the front lines. But if I am in a high threat area, I personalyl don’t want my Commander In Chief dropping by for a visit. I want him to stay the hell home and let me do my job without any outside interference.

You seem to consider Iraq as still being an active war zone, and fault Bush for not visiting the troops, so lets go with that for a minute. By your logic Churchill wasn’t a good leader because he didn’t visit the British troops on the front lines in Germany. What ship was Thatcher on when the Argentinians were perfecting their Exocet technique? And I am sure that the minute Bush started travelling around the world to visit the troops, all sorts of people would have something to say along the lines of “well now he’s back to warmongering and ignoring the problems faced by the American people.” US troops are still dying in Iraq because of terrorism. We face that threat all over the world. But you don’t see us hiding out and crying to foreign leaders for reparation payments for our dead, no matter how justified said payments may be in those cases currently in the media spotlight. We are going out and doing something about it. That seems to be the problem here. Nobody likes the fact that whenever we see a problem we decide to do something about it, without polling every leader and citizen throughout the world. You have a right to your opinions. But I have a right to mine as well.

Here’s the difference between Americans and most other people in the world. Most everyone else wants to sit back and bitch about the world’s problems, but complain when someone suggests doing anything about them, and speak out agressively against someone who actually takes initiative and does something about them. We actively pursue solutions, and then get ridiculed for solving problems without consulting the people who were content to merely complain about them.

For that matter, I am in full support of an EU-based military arm as well. Then we can leave strictly European problems to the EU’s military arm. That frees us from our Balkan commitment as well. Isn’t that what you people really want? Is it to just see us stay on our side of the world and be quiet, or is it to do something productive and look good yourselves?

Unfortunately Americans are far from embarrassed about the president. And in true Republican form, the majority of people can only shower praises for how the president and US govt is handleing the situation. Were the US adminastration capable of admitting fault, they would be backing down on trying to control everything in Iraq and let other countrys go in and start rebuilding and investing. So really the Iraqi people are suffering from lack of basic services and US soldiers are being killed all because noone will admit that Bush and the majority of the US government is bungleing the situation. And lets face it, Bush is another Reagan. Hes got the US government on autopilot and lives off this Republican image of vain self importance. The fact that he went on a one month vacation to his own ranch about a month after entering office pretty much says it all.

Look all politicians are bad right now!

I mean, they all are bad! name one leading politician who is actually doing any good… and the real tradgedy is the EU. Although Mr.Bush is a terrible president, and yes its true he has gone to camp david for the storm where he can be comfortable holding on to his blanket!

He has a lollipop stick holding his ears apart.;) 😉 Anna

Well the Netherlands did have one interesting politician, Pym Fortyne.

But they shot him dead. Perhaps he was just to interesting for the Netherlands???

Originally posted by Tempest
Kev, old boy, why discuss the American president? Isnt this subject best left to politcally correct of Europe whose own politicians are really to boring to be discussed, or are so full of syrupy PC wind that nobody really cares?

George Dubya is at least straight up in his approach, compared to the usual European sympathic double talk style of politcs.

I mean its easy to say bad things about Bush because, in general he’s a lot more honest than many others. For example, he’s dyslexic, and not afraid to admit it.

Look at Clinton. Sure, what a nice guy.
But while Clinton was busy receiving blow j-bs under the Oval Office desk, Osama was busy plotting his next move. Now do you want someone nice, or do want someone not afraid to get involved?

Yes, how stupid of me, thank you for showing me the light. It was the inadequacy of mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton personally could have avoided the hole tragedy.

A politician in The Netherlands once said that if the politics are dull a country is happy, he has a point there I would think.

And BTW I’m dyslexic and also not afraid to admit it, but the comparison ends there I’m afraid. Ah well I have a lot to learn, he is president of the most powerful nation in the world and I’m a mere mortal.

We’re winning this war

Mark Steyn on the remarkable achievements of the Bush administration, and his enemies’ remarkable refusal to give him credit New Hampshire

The emergency dispatcher wasn’t quite sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?’ ‘People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky….’

‘The mental cruelty began with the funny way he said, “I do.”’

On a day like 11 September 2001, time is both accelerated and suspended. On the top floors of the World Trade Center, office workers who moments earlier had been scheduling lunch appointments and making plans for the weekend had a few seconds to determine the manner of their death — to stay and be burned alive, or to take one last gulp of fresh air as they plunged to the plaza below. For almost everybody else, time is halted: when you’re caught up in the middle of a terrible day, you don’t know that that’s what it is — a day. By 11 o’clock on that Tuesday morning, with the second tower collapsed and the Pentagon on fire and rumours of more missing planes and the White House evacuated, none of us knew how much more was to come. I don’t think you could find many Americans who went to bed that night expecting to get through the next two years without another major terrorist attack on US soil.

Yet here we are.

That in itself is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the lack of credit that the Bush administration gets for it.

There are basically two lines on Bush these days. At home, the media and the Democrats argue that Americans are somehow reeling under a terrorist onslaught. As the New York Times’s elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd put it last week, ‘We wanted to get rid of Osama and Saddam and the Taleban and al-Qa’eda. We didn’t. They’re replicating and coming at us like cockroaches.’

Really? Osama is replicating? That’s news to me. Considering that the original hasn’t been seen in a year and three quarters, it looks more like he’s plicated. I said in these pages 15 months ago that he’s dead, he’s bin Laden to rest, he’s pushing up daisy-cutters, and I’m sticking with that.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the tinfoil-hat brigade has gone mainstream. Of course America hasn’t been attacked again. That’s because 9/11 was a neocon conspiracy to give Washington a pretext to grab Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s, er, rubble. The conspirazoids now include the Rt Hon Michael Meacher, MP, a man who until a few weeks ago was one of Her Majesty’s ministers of state, a fellow who sat at the Cabinet table with Tony Blair and discussed troop deployments. But now, with time on his hands, he’s frolicking merrily on the wilder shores of the Internet. In the Guardian on Saturday, he demanded to know whether US air-security operations had ‘been deliberately stood down on 11 September’ in order to facilitate the attack. Who would do such a thing? Why, Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and the other sinister graduates of the Project for a New American Century.

Meacher is late to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I’ve had a gazillion emails a day about this for almost two years. Condi Rice apparently warned all kinds of people not to fly on 11 September. If that’s true, it seems odd that Don Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the conspiracy, didn’t warn himself not to go to the Pentagon that morning. You’d think, being in on the plot, he’d warn himself not to be sitting at his desk as the plane sliced through the building. If Michael Meacher had had advance warning that a plane was going to slam into the Department of the Environment that day, would he have had the cojones to be sitting there dictating a memo to Miss Jones as the nose cone ploughed into the photocopier? Or maybe that’s just how well planned the conspiracy was: Rumsfeld knew the plane would hit the other side of the Pentagon well away from his office, so, if he coolly went to work as usual, he’d throw even expert conspiracy-sniffers like Meacher off the scent. Or maybe there was no Pentagon plane at all; it was a pure invention of the administration, as that French bestseller argued. Or maybe the Pentagon itself is just a thought-form generated by the microchip implanted in Meacher’s brain when he sat next to **** Cheney at a G7 buffet lunch. Or maybe….

Looking back at the columns I wrote in the first days after 9/11, I’m pleasantly surprised by how perceptive they were on the self-loathing of the West, the uselessness of the Cold War alliances, the duplicitousness of America’s ‘moderate’ Arab ‘friends’, etc. But I seriously underestimated the degree to which much of Europe would be unhinged by 11 September. If it’s a choice between Meacher or the Continentals who’ve turned down US requests for troop contributions because they want Iraq to go belly up so that Bush gets defeated in 2004 and some wimp Democrat gets elected who’ll treat them with the respect they deserve, I’ll take the latter. Chirac’s decayed cynicism is marginally less unmoored from reality.

But, as the descent into madness of Mr Meacher illustrates, there’s no longer any agreement on what reality is. Last Sunday, the Observer ran a story headlined ‘Bush Seeks An Exit Strategy As War Threatens His Career’: ‘The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans’ growing hostility to the casualties and chaos …approval ratings plummeting …another Vietnam …sons and daughters dying daily …bogged down….’

Did Bush seek an exit strategy? Did he make a dramatic U-turn? Au contraire. ‘We have carried the fight to the enemy,’ he said. ‘The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.’

Are America’s sons and daughters dying daily in guerrilla attacks? No. As I write, no American serviceman has died in Iraq for nine days. Whatever that is, it’s not Vietnam.

Are Bush’s approval ratings plummeting? Gallup has him at 59 per cent. In any case, he always takes August off and his numbers always slip as noisy Democrats run around filling the vacuum. Then September arrives, he comes back to work and they rise again. It’s now an established seasonal variation.

The story of the summer is that the American people refused to be panicked by the media, the Democrats and the Europeans. Indeed, the awesome divide between the postmodern sophists and everybody else is the real legacy of 11 September. As the day itself recedes into the past, the splinter it opened up in the settled international order gets wider and wider to the point where 9/11 is a fault line through reality itself. Depending on which side you stand, success is failure, victory is disaster. The other day Caroline Hawley, the BBC’s gal in Baghdad, declared, ‘Saddam must be gloating in his hiding place over the irony that the United States, which toppled him in the name of fighting terror, has now had to concede that Iraq has become a “battlefield” in the war on terror — a magnet for Muslim militants who want to wage war on America.’

America has ‘now had to concede’? Where’s she been the last three months? As Bush himself said, apropos Saudi and Syrian terrorists minded to take a vacation in the Sunni Triangle, ‘Bring ’em on.’ I mentioned some weeks back my compatriot David Warren’s assertion that in Iraq Washington had carefully hung up its ‘flypaper’, an image that has since caught on and is rather more accurate than Miss Hawley’s. But hers will do: would you rather ‘Muslim militants’ attempted to blow up civilians in Boston and Dallas or instead tried to take on the world’s best-armed soldiers in Tikrit and Ramadi? It’s not a tough call.

And does Miss Hawley really think Saddam is ‘gloating’ right now? His dynastic ambitions died with his sons, he’s kipping at the back of his second cousin’s donkey stall, and he’d kill for a new box of Quality Street but George Galloway’s nowhere in sight.

Miss Hawley has mistakenly assumed that Saddam thinks as she and Harold Pinter and Jacques Chirac do: that it’s all about America. When something blows up in Iraq and it can be passed off as a ‘setback’ for Bush, Miss Hawley has a good gloat. But it’s not much consolation to Saddam: he’s thinking of his gold toilet, and no matter how furiously Miss Hawley spins things he’s not going to be sitting on that ever again. They’ve sounded the last flush at the Presidential Palace. Likewise, for Mullah Omar.

Speaking of whom, now there was a magnet for Muslim militants. He sublet his entire country as a terrorist training camp. Where does the aspiring jihadi go now? But, as we all know, Afghanistan is another Bush flopperoo. According to Newsweek, it’s ‘sinking deeper into poverty’. Meanwhile, preliminary IMF estimates indicate the Afghan economy grew 28 per cent last year.

Here’s another interesting fact: in Syria, Boy Assad, head of the sole surviving Baathist regime, recently announced that his country would no longer be a one-party state. Apparently, he was worried that much of the business class would up sticks and move across the border to Iraq. It seems the place isn’t a magnet just for terrorists.

If 9/11 liberated the Bush administration to put into action its scheme to take over the world, then it also liberated the Western elites to embrace finally and wholeheartedly anti-Americanism as the New Unifying Theory of Everything. It didn’t have to be like that: the intellectual class could have sided with the women of Afghanistan or the political prisoners of Iraq. But the advantage of sour oppositionism is that whatever happens there’s always something to sneer at. If Osama pops up, see, he got away. If he doesn’t pop up, how do you know he didn’t get away? If he turns up dead, whoa, now you’ve made him a martyr, a thousand more will bloom in his dust.

I think we should look at the late bin Laden in his own terms. In the last decade, he and al-Qa’eda have bombed American interests a little over every two years:

February 1993: the first attack on the World Trade Center; November 1995: the car bomb at a building where US military advisors work in Riyadh; June 1996: the explosion at the Khobar military base; August 1998: the African embassy attacks; October 2000: the suicide bombing of the USS Cole; September 2001: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Don’t ask me what the long-term strategy behind these biennial attacks is supposed to be. But, from oh, say, November, it becomes harder with each passing week for the doom-mongers to argue that the lack of activity is consistent with bin Laden’s modus operandi. To be sure, I still read the in-depth reports by experts who say he’s alive and well and living on the Northwest Frontier. But, if he doesn’t show himself, then inevitably those ‘experts’ begin to sound like the fellows who claim to know the whereabouts of Lord Lucan or the truth about the Loch Ness Monster. It’s all very scientific, I’m sure, but sooner or later Lucan and Nessie have to do a bit of work and put in an appearance themselves.

Instead, Osama makes audio cassettes, and he licenses his subordinates to make audio cassettes, and they issue bloodcurdling threats against everyone from the Great Satan to hapless bystanders like Ireland and Canada, and none of those threats comes to pass. They’re all turban and no jihad. They were at it again the other day: ‘We announce there will be new attacks inside and outside [the US] which would make America forget the attacks of 11 September,’ said an al-Qa’eda spokesman.

Maybe he’s right, and by the time you read this Chicago and Atlanta will be ablaze. Or maybe it will be like all the other empty threats. Even in the Hindu Kush at the all-U-can-eat scorpion buffet, you can’t dine out on 9/11 for ever. This is a long war — but for America, with victories at home, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere, it’s been a pretty good start.
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Kev, old boy, why discuss the American president? Isnt this subject best left to politcally correct of Europe whose own politicians are really to boring to be discussed, or are so full of syrupy PC wind that nobody really cares?

George Dubya is at least straight up in his approach, compared to the usual European sympathic double talk style of politcs.

I mean its easy to say bad things about Bush because, in general he’s a lot more honest than many others. For example, he’s dyslexic, and not afraid to admit it.

Look at Clinton. Sure, what a nice guy.
But while Clinton was busy receiving blow j-bs under the Oval Office desk, Osama was busy plotting his next move. Now do you want someone nice, or do want someone not afraid to get involved?

What bothers me most is that so many Americans remain totally unembarrased to have Georgey boy as their representative to the world. At least Italians have the decency to go red if anyone mentions Berlusconi.

Originally posted by Zippo
G.W.Bush is the living proof that ANYONE can become the president of the United States!
Regards

Not anyone, there is a natural selection process 😀 Once parents need to survive the American society long enough to let you born as an American citizen 😎

What is wrong with the Bush?

He is still breathing

Jee Kev , with this one you’d better to get your shield ready ! 🙂