Current Events > Ever missed George W. Bush?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Naw I think most people here were old enough to remember how bad that admin was also.

SSj4Wingzero posted...

I don't know. As bad as Buchanan was, January 6 makes Trump the single individual in the history of America who has done the most damage to the country.

That's true, but the problem is that a lot of that nationalism and nativism is just the GOP with their masks off. The GOP's emphasis on "family values" was really just their way of disenfranchising Black people and promoting segregation by another means. Bush himself might not have overtly bought into white nationalism and nativism, but the GOP has been riding the white nationalism and nativism train since the 1970s - the whole reason the GOP adopted "family values" was as a way to incorporate the Dixiecrat policy platform as per the Southern Strategy, and as such, Bush, even though he wasn't the architect of it, certainly bears responsibility for it to an extent.

Trump was not some takeover of the GOP. Trump is literally what the GOP has been fighting for for *decades* - they have been fighting for a conservative white ethnostate for decades, just by another name.

I don't think that was the entire reason by any means. They adopted "family values" at the beginning of the 80's due to the Evangelical infiltration of the party, which began with the Reagan administration, even though said groups were created in the 1970's.
I don't doubt that racism and anti-cult moral panic were both factors back in the 1970's, but among the less fundamental this had exponentially more to do with their red scare paranoia mentality ran rampant in the GOP since the early 1950's and the growing necessity to, at minimum, give lip service to fundamentalist voters and lobbyists in order to win elections in the 1980's.

I'd also like to point out that their moral panic over gangsta rap didn't begin until the turn of the 90's *probably because gangsta rap didn't exist prior to 1989 or so, in addition to the budding manifestation of anti-black racism in the form of the urban crime moral panic* as it very gradually supplanted their moral panic over heavy metal music (which supplanted their moral panic over rock music; in fact, the idiots in the 80's and 90's even mislabeled metal music as "rock music.") Demonization of metal music seems to have completely disappeared by the late 00's except among the fundies who demonize most forms of secular music (Country and Jazz being the other two big ones) and of course modern Christian worship music (they have been demonizing Country since its beginnings, claiming "all if it is about alcoholism and cheating on your spouse" While they still demonize modern Christian worship music and "Christian Rock", the demonization of Country and Jazz seems to have disappeared with the Silent Generation and eldest Boomers *the ones born from 1945~49*)

Like a brain tumor riddled with aids, sprinkled with a splash of covid and topped off with pneumonia.

Why would I miss a war criminal responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths?

Not to mention all he did to screw up the economy.

The only thing I miss about him is in Robot Chicken. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fieDBw6Qppw

Hyena_Of_Ice posted...

I don't think that was the entire reason by any means. They adopted "family values" at the beginning of the 80's due to the Evangelical infiltration of the party, which began with the Reagan administration, even though said groups were created in the 1970's.
I don't doubt that racism and anti-cult moral panic were both factors back in the 1970's, but among the less fundamental this had exponentially more to do with their red scare paranoia mentality ran rampant in the GOP since the early 1950's and the growing necessity to, at minimum, give lip service to fundamentalist voters and lobbyists in order to win elections in the 1980's.

It wasn't an "evangelical infiltration" of the party - the party deliberately went and catered to southern white segregationist evangelicals. Joseph Coors was a pro-business guy who also happened to be a racist. Paul Weyrich was a racist conservative who happened to be pro-business. Jerry Falwell was a southern evangelical racist preacher who was cool with being pro-business (Falwell protested *AGAINST* Martin Luther King Jr. in the 50s and 60s). The three of them got together and created the "Moral Majority" in the late 1970s. The entire reason the party went to try and recruit evangelicals was in order to improve their public image (being overt segregationists was no longer a popular winning strategy by the 1970s, although it seems to be making a comeback).

The entire "family values" platform of the GOP, up to and including being anti-abortion, was adopted solely to sugarcoat what they really cared about - segregation and pro-wealth policies. If you can paint the Democrats as baby-killers, then you can more easily get people to vote for economic policies that would actually screw themselves over.

Lee Atwater, a Republican political strategist, said it this way when describing Reagan and the GOP's platform.:

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "n-word, n-word, n-word". By 1968, you can't say "n-word"that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow mebecause obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "n-word, n-word". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

In other words, the GOP's entire platform was created and built around sugarcoating segregation. Bush definitely has some blame here.

The only time someone missed Dubya was with flip-flops.

Guy's an idiot but damn if he can't dodge a shoe.

Hyena_Of_Ice posted...

Haaa ha ha ha! Those aren't even his worst ones by a long shot! Esp. the Lewinski scandal!
--His handling of Haitian refugees in Gitmo (his very first presidential scandal)
--Firing Bush Sr's FDA commissioner who opposed advertising prescription drugs, and replacing him with an FDA commissioner who did
--The parts of NAFTA dealing with overseas trade
--Repeal of Glass Steagall (the fact that Congress had a veto-proof majority is completely irrelevant when the president himself voices support for the bill.)
--Passing/Support for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (see above)

That said, yeah, he was still better than Dubya.

FWIW, my age was in the single digits when all of that was done and I never did any sort of dive into what happened those years. None of that is cool, but Clinton is still far from the worst we've had in the last 30 years

Thermador446 posted...

I remember being relieved that I would never have a worse president in my lifetime.

Boy was I wrong

Sorry, this litteraly made me crack up XD

I do not miss him at all.

I kind of miss the days when most Republicans at least acted in good faith and had real policies instead of just spite, but I think we passed that point before GWB took office. I would say the tipping point was probably 1994 when Newt became Speaker of the House.

I went to his house once and he had already left, so in a way I did miss him, yeah.

true story.
okay well technically it was his dads house.

they hate us for our freedom!

W would be a thousand times better for the country than Trump, but no, I can't say I miss him.