I had a very good laugh today watching Channel 4 News who led with Dubya's final press conference before the handover. Jesus, this guy stays duff right to the end. He said there are "enemies who want to inflict damage on Americans" when his own administration has inflicted more damage on more Americans than any since the US Civil War. He wished Obama good luck - he would have been more honest saying "I got us into a right mess, kid - now let's see you get us out of it".
It was quite hard to disagree with anything George Galloway said (his basic line was that Bush had been a disaster for the developed world and the Middle East). They had a guy from the supposedly 'progressive' Brookings Institute on who wasn't really given a fair hearing but in any case, what he had to say was patent bollocks - saying that Bush will be looked on kindly by historians in the long run. Well, if Obama is actually Mussolini in disguise, that's probably right. But in the real world, the Brookings guy (can't remember his name, sorry) should be ashamed of himself for talking such absolute crap.
My final view on Bush is a bit more nuanced than some on the Left - I don't think he is a complete idiot. On the contrary he's an astute, if limited, politician, who made an agreement with Dick Cheney and with some of the major US corporations - particularly in oil and infrastructure - that he was going to run America in the interests of big business and a few super-wealthy people at the top of the pile. He then proceeded to implement that strategy to perfection over 8 years.
Huge cuts in taxes for the very rich, massive government deficits going towards pork-barrel spending to favour large corporations (particularly a massive increase in the defence and internal security budgets), and also, post 9/11, using the Patriot Acts to pave the way for the future abolition of the US electoral system and the final corporate takeover of America and the establishment of a corporate-fascist state. That's the long-run Republican agenda. It's anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-libertarian and anti-(traditional) conservative. Which explains why Dubya currently has an approval rating of 25%. That 25% is the proportion of the US population who are either benefiting directly from his legislation, or who are so dumb that even after the collapse of the US economy, they still can't see the agenda.
Actually, on the economy, Bush made things worse but the foundations for economic collapse were laid by Reagan and Clinton in the 1980s and 1990s respectively. It was Reagan who began financial liberalisation and Clinton who repealed the Glass-Steagal Act which separated commercial and investment banking. Clinton of course has the excuse that he was just following what had then become the conventional orthodoxy (not a perfect excuse, by any means) - whereas Reagan helped create that orthodoxy. Bush had little in the way of explicit ideological underpinning for any of what he did, which was his strength as a populist politician. But it's also wrecked the Republicans' electoral chances - probably for a long time to come, in the same way that the intellectual incoherence of the Carter presidency killed the Democrats off for a decade.
So I would advise that you ignore any sentimentality which emerges as Bush departs. The guy was not an idiot. But he was a dangerous populist asshole, possibly the worst US president of all time, and we are all much worse off because he was in power for 8 years, and much better off now that he is the hell out of there.
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
12 January 2009
29 April 2007
Beats International - Dubya Be Good To Me
With apologies to Norman Cook...
Footage from last week, at a White House event for Malaria Awareness Day. Not the rebirth of the "robotics" dancing style, as Dubya seems to be trying for.
I would have posted this last week but the 'post to blog' function in Youtube seems to have gone haywire since Google took over Blogger, so I had to paste the html in manually.
Footage from last week, at a White House event for Malaria Awareness Day. Not the rebirth of the "robotics" dancing style, as Dubya seems to be trying for.
I would have posted this last week but the 'post to blog' function in Youtube seems to have gone haywire since Google took over Blogger, so I had to paste the html in manually.
13 March 2007
Getting back to George Bush and Iraq (incorporating blog review #18)
I haven't done as many reviews of other blogs this year as last year and that's largely because the new version of blogger has removed the 'recently edited blogs' list from the bottom right hand corner. This means that I have to use the 'next blog' flag at the top of any blog to go from one blog to the next randomly, and as it is a sad fact that most blogs are not even worth reviewing, it can take ages to get anything useful.
I was lucky today, though, when I happened on Random Comment first time round. In some ways this is like a US version of giroscope... it's a collection of comments on various interesting stuff that's in the news from a sound political perspective. The guy (Aldous Bukowski - that must be a made up name, right?) also throws in a couple of film reviews once in a while.
His post on the State of the Union address from 24th January reminded me about George Bush and after I'd finished vomiting I realised that it's been a very long time since I said anything about Iraq on this blog and I wanted to put that right, so here goes. My last post on Iraq was back in October when I argued that "adaptation means withdrawal" (I just got a googlewhack on this when I was searching for the post - bloody great. I can't remember getting one before. If only I'd had Dave Gorman's idea before he did...) In other words, Bush's announcement that 'military tactics in Iraq will keep changing to deal with insurgents' was, I believed back then, an attempt to start a withdrawal without losing face. When the Democrats won both houses in the US mid-terms in November on a 'George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have f***ed up the occupation in Iraq' ticket, that strengthened my belief that phased withdrawal, along the lines of Vietnam, was only weeks away.
Instead we find that Dubya has increased the troop numbers by 21,500 and there may be an attempt to get a few thousand more on top of that. This seems the most idiotic policy possible. How will a marginal increase in total troop numbers (about 15%) turn a dire situation, with civil war in many parts of the country, around? All this will do is drag the US slightly deeper into a quagmire which is pretty much unresolvable. The Democrats opposed the troops increase but lack the balls necessary to stop the whole operation in its tracks, which is within their power; military spending has to be authorised by the US Congress and they could pull the plug on funding for the war. This would of course be a radical option, but with public approval for Bush's handling of the war running at about 25%, and 60% of Americans wanting troops out within a year, maybe it's time to push the boat out a bit. Sometimes in politics your only enemy is spinelessness rather than witlessness.
The extension of the Iraq policy proves that Bush, while a more than adequate slugger in the heat of an election campaign, is a moron on foreign policy (and indeed domestic policy) who knows he will probably be remembered as one of the worst US presidents of all time and has decided to deliver a big "F*** YOU" to the US electorate, to Congressional Republicans who will have to run for office in the wake of this debacle in 2008, and finally to anyone, in the world, with a brain. Of which there are still a few dozen of us left. Let me know if you're one of them and I'll invite you round for some beers.
I was lucky today, though, when I happened on Random Comment first time round. In some ways this is like a US version of giroscope... it's a collection of comments on various interesting stuff that's in the news from a sound political perspective. The guy (Aldous Bukowski - that must be a made up name, right?) also throws in a couple of film reviews once in a while.
His post on the State of the Union address from 24th January reminded me about George Bush and after I'd finished vomiting I realised that it's been a very long time since I said anything about Iraq on this blog and I wanted to put that right, so here goes. My last post on Iraq was back in October when I argued that "adaptation means withdrawal" (I just got a googlewhack on this when I was searching for the post - bloody great. I can't remember getting one before. If only I'd had Dave Gorman's idea before he did...) In other words, Bush's announcement that 'military tactics in Iraq will keep changing to deal with insurgents' was, I believed back then, an attempt to start a withdrawal without losing face. When the Democrats won both houses in the US mid-terms in November on a 'George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have f***ed up the occupation in Iraq' ticket, that strengthened my belief that phased withdrawal, along the lines of Vietnam, was only weeks away.
Instead we find that Dubya has increased the troop numbers by 21,500 and there may be an attempt to get a few thousand more on top of that. This seems the most idiotic policy possible. How will a marginal increase in total troop numbers (about 15%) turn a dire situation, with civil war in many parts of the country, around? All this will do is drag the US slightly deeper into a quagmire which is pretty much unresolvable. The Democrats opposed the troops increase but lack the balls necessary to stop the whole operation in its tracks, which is within their power; military spending has to be authorised by the US Congress and they could pull the plug on funding for the war. This would of course be a radical option, but with public approval for Bush's handling of the war running at about 25%, and 60% of Americans wanting troops out within a year, maybe it's time to push the boat out a bit. Sometimes in politics your only enemy is spinelessness rather than witlessness.
The extension of the Iraq policy proves that Bush, while a more than adequate slugger in the heat of an election campaign, is a moron on foreign policy (and indeed domestic policy) who knows he will probably be remembered as one of the worst US presidents of all time and has decided to deliver a big "F*** YOU" to the US electorate, to Congressional Republicans who will have to run for office in the wake of this debacle in 2008, and finally to anyone, in the world, with a brain. Of which there are still a few dozen of us left. Let me know if you're one of them and I'll invite you round for some beers.
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