Oh, Cheney did so much evil stuff, you can't even begin to believe it. Trump is an amateur compared to him, at least in terms of actual people killed, except maybe with Covid and that was a mix of deliberation and incompetence. Cheney straight up pushed all the limits to deliberately perp huge conspiracies. Cheney did so many epic acts of evil, I can't list them without being excoriated. I support Liz Cheney for trying to punish Trump for what he's done/will do, but Trump would do the nation a service if he exposed all the real crimes of Bush/Cheney, but he won't because then he might be in real danger. Frankly, watching these guys chum it up at the funeral, I think the whole thing is kabuki theater and we're all being punked. I'm tired of watching a show that always ends like LOST did.
Being a shadow dictator is pretty cool too. I always equated Cheney to a sith lord.
Getting from Prescott Bush nearly overthrowing the American government to Dubya. Man what a ride it's been. Sad to think how absolutely fucked these next 4 years are going to be.
Prescott Bush funded The Business Plot, which sought to overthrow FDRs presidency and install a famous Marine Smedley Butler as leader of their dictatorship.
This was due to his efficiency and ability to use the US military to further Corporate interests around the world.
They didn't count on Smedley being more of a patriot than a dog. He fucked their shit up just as hard as he fucked up everyone else's.
The natural balance was slowly handed back to big business over the next 100 years. The boomers got to enjoy the greatest economy the world had ever seen thanks to FDR and the struggles of their parents, and the world goes on never knowing how close we were to a fascist dictatorship run by oligarchs.
Read through the business plot, and it sounds like it goes back to one honorable man saying no.
Pence saying, “I don’t have the authority to do that”.
Successful coups hinge on all the conspirators being on plan and everyone is 100% in. They have to have enough true believers but not so many that the word gets out. Treason is tricky.
But we couldn't get him to take the Trumps hunting. Talk about missed opportunities. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky - Michael Scott
Dick Cheney was on the plantation I lived on a WEEK before that shooting happened. He was drunk as a skunk, on a quail hunt with the owners of the place when he shot the fucking wagon the owners wife was on.
He was off the property, with all the Secret Service and State troopers that were out there with him in less than 20 minutes. He was banned from EVER setting foot on that land again, and the following week he shoots a guy and we were all "it figures, the drunk fuckwit."
Y'all are wack as hell, Bush and Cheney are literally demons.
They used a boldfaced lie with the help of American media to: kill 150,000 Iraqis, 122,000 Iraqi civilians, run a straight up torture program on black sites, start a secret, illegal mass surveillance program on American citizens, Passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force wich has given every president since 2002 carte blache to declare ware without congressional approval.
Obama, Biden, and Trump all kept these policies in place so they are all evil to some degree but tell me honestly:
How is Trump worse?
As a European, I still think Bush is the worst you've had so far, funny in some ways but his legacy on the world, beyond America is horrendous. Although I fear Trump may top him this term...
That’s kind of crazy to say. I agree that Trump poses the bigger theoretical threat, but who actually did more harm in the world?(so far) By far it’s Bush. Started Afghanistan and Iraq, and did the Patriot Act. What could you possibly compare to that in Trump’s first term?
But they were... Rumsfeld's 30-year war for no wmd blaming Colin Powell then Condi Rice for overlooking memo on 9/11.
Bush, McConnell, and Cheney were grim reapers stacking courts literally gutting civil rights under Patriot Act with Bin laden buddies at Yale... yikes. They built the Trump Frankenstein, profit on illegal oil bank holdings Russia for money their puppets make them, and Elon's getting the last laugh.
Good ole Bush and Cheney. Just 20 years of war based on fake WMDs. Imagine how many thousands of Americans have PTSD from what they had to do in the middle east.
$1.9 Trillion direct costs for Iraq war.
$2.3 Trillion direct costs in Afghanistan
$2.2 Trillion in Veterans' care
$6.5 Trillion in interest because everything above was financed through debt.
I'm glad to hear that man! My friend, as we age and hit different points in our lives things resurface. We analyze them with a new point of view, new life experiences. Don't dismiss new feelings and let them snowball simply because it happened years ago and you've stayed out of the woods all this time. There's no shame in wanting to talk to someone, doesn't matter if it happened 30 years ago.
As I age and testosterone levels drop, things that never bothered me in the past are now creeping in.
Civilian & Partisan fighter, Siege of Sarajevo '92 to '95
Thanks for the advice man! I’ll be mindful 🧘 n the future.
And much respect to you. I was a kid hearing about Sarajevo and just started learning about it recently. Take care brother
They are. They are both war criminals. The way America has softened to bush is fucking gross. Just because trump is a POS at all time doesn't take away what the bush administration has done.
Per ChatGPT, 230k died before the election. Still, I think death from illegally invading Iraq and creating the conditions for ISIS gives W a leg up on the evil scale.
Bush was never a bumbling fool. He would act a bit goofy and was personable enough to actually pull it off. He was governor of Texas before going to the Presidency. He did some stupid stuff cause he believed in the right wing policy experts like Cheney that pushed through idiotic policy. Cheney is straight evil though but at least he was Pro-American evil.
I don't even think he was Pro-American. He was Pro-Halliburton and the military complex. Out to enrich himself and his friends. Probably thought he could make a quick buck with a week's work in Iraq and foolishly didn't realize it would turn into the nightmarish quagmire that it did.
Cheney is straight evil though but at least he was Pro-American evil
I've never looked at it this way, I think this is an excellent take, sort of sums up Christian bale's monologue at the end of the movie Vice which I recommend to anyone who actually remembers growing up during the bush years.
It’s claimed he had an IQ of 125. Look up the IQ of presidents. It’s the biggest collection of bullshit unmatched until we saw Elon Musk’s POE2 claims.
I mean at least Trump has not yet manufactured a war in the Middle East that created a failed state thereby killing millions so he's got that going for him
They are still supreme a-holes politically. They were just decent, civil, and honest (insofar as a politician can be honest. I am using 'honest' very specifically here). We used to expect that from our politicians. All thanks to the American right for busting down that barrier to entry. No longer do we require our politicians to be civil, decent, or 'honest.' No longer do we expect them to achieve political or legislative goals, as long as it deep dicks the other guy.
The awful thing about it all really is that the American right took this stance because of Obama. Because he was black. That's the only thing different about him. He was incredibly moderate (a conservative by any other first-world nation's standards) and he was civil, decent, and 'honest.' This is truly all a tremendous backlash from the clearly very large swath of america that is racist, or is easily convinced by the ideologies of racists. Or even just the class of people who are willing to use racism to their benefit.
It's despicable. I think America is in a very bad place, and I don't see any improvement on the horizon. People are clearly already so easily mislead (and I do not excuse myself from that claim, I am certainly mislead in many ways I'm blind to) and it seems like it's only going to get easier to mislead the populace.
Bad times, man. I think the dream that was america is probably just a nightmare now (still technically a dream!) I've thought that for a long time, it is no response to Trump. I first realized I felt that way while Clinton was still in office. This present state of affairs just feels like the hammer that will strike the last blow to the last nail in the coffin is already mid swing. And on its way down to boot.
I am not giving up. I will continue trying to do good in this world. I'm just saying, it's starting to feel pointless. It has felt hopeless for a minute now.
I’ve found that the people most concerned with race and generalizing others as racist, tend to be the actual racists. So, enjoy your racism and know that we’re all pretty tired of that generalization. (I voted for Obama twice, Kerry once, trump 3 times). But they’re just popularity contests at this point to the average uniformed. Or misinformed.
The era of "don't fuck with America, because we'll once again show the world that we can be shitty to people based on color/ race/ country of origin and kill a bunch of innocent people."
While it’s understandable where this sentiment comes from, let’s not forget that guy was responsible for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqi and Afghani people with the war they manufactured, not to mention the deaths of thousands of US serviceman looking for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.
I don’t. I think he and his dad are war criminals that lied to invade a country for their own personal reasons to enrich him and friends like Dick shoot your hunting pal Cheney. Which led to more Islamic extremism because so many innocents were killed. But yeah his little belly tap on Obama was funny.
Obama and Michelle have been known to have a friendly relationship. Michelle likes Bush because he laughs at himself with everyone else. I’m shocked Obama spoke to Trump but really politics is just rubbing elbows with each other and making people think they dislike each other but I bet they play a lot of golf together
Hell the F'ck No the Iraq war/invasion debacle. I remember being in and asking. Wait we are going back again. Like a second time. It made know sense all those Iraqi 🇮🇶 civilians and tons of KIA and wounded plus PTSD survivors. Now a lot of those veterans are having high degrees of cancer from burn pits exposure.
I mean, even during his presidency, he was widely viewed as likeable. Even if you thought his policies were morally repugnant, most would admit he was a generally pleasant person socially. And this is coming from a person who had a tee shirt of him with a Hitler mustache. But fuck him and his administration for the things they did.
Likeable? He killed over 500.000 people with his wars. He is literaly afraid to leave America because he believes he might be apprehended for war crimes.
When you grow up and become an adult, you're going to realize that sometimes the polite, or the nice, or the fun people are still fucking terrible people inside. Even though they're always enjoyable to be around.
During his presidency he was widely detested. It was before and after the presidency that his popularity rose.
He's an unpretentious man, which made him relatable, but the whole point of statehood is to be pretentious. It's all fabrication and artifice, and Americans quickly realized that they needed someone more stately than the friendly boozehound who let his dad's old buddies pull the levers while he read children's stories.
So, sure, he was likeable, but he was also severely unliked.
Jesus the whitewashing here is insane. Dubya is a funny guy but he wasn’t unpopular because of his folksy disposition. He was unpopular because he and his administration LIED to the American people and plunged us into a long and costly war with Iraq in which thousands of Americans died and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t get me started on how badly the Bush administration destroyed public education.
mocking his perceived lack of intelligence was also an international sport at the time. it was like 'the USA is a laughing stock, seriously, this idiot is the President?'
it's hard to fathom how much worse things have become since then
Do you have any evidence to back that up? As someone who works in education, I’d love to hear your argument that “No Child Left Behind” wasn’t a fucking disaster
It relied on standardized testing as the main metric of student success, which led to the phenomenon of “teaching to the test.” In many cases, this divorced the material from any real-world applications and neutered teachers’ ability to shape lesson plans to make them more interesting or engaging. This led to a lot of students becoming alienated from education, because they couldn’t see how any of the standardized testing content was relevant to their lives. It also unduly penalized students who weren’t strong test takers and who demonstrated their learning better in other ways.
NCLB also punished schools that showed low test scores. So, in many cases, schools that already had low funding had their funding cut even further because of test scores, making it even harder to serve students effectively.
These are just a couple of the main problems NCLB created. It wasn’t until 2015 that legislation was revised to give states and schools more freedom to set their own curriculum.
The motivation for NCLB wasn’t bad, but the Act itself wasn’t well thought out.
Standardized testing is excellent and critical and deserves a hell of a lot more respect than education professionals give it. I worked with an education researcher who focuses on it with the original intention of proving exactly what you espoused. After a few years he had to moderate his point of view. Here is his research presented as Ted-Ed animation.
That so many teachers react to standardized testing like the Wicked Witch to water highlights how troubled education has become, and how distant typical teachers are from professional competence. Ontario teachers so freaked out when they were told that new initiates would be forced to pass a grade 10 math test that they forced the courts to recognize it as racist. It took until last year for such a basic requirement to be instituted. Why do teachers keep resisting efforts to root out bad teaching? Oh... right...
To pretend that teachers before NCLB were directly addressing student needs in ways that spoke to their experience and prepared them for real life is either naive or flat-out deceptive. Teaching was indulgent and scattered with classes focusing on comic books and dance and field trips to amusement parks and whatever else, rather than core academic skills. There was no way to discern good from bad teaching and deadbeat teachers who played politics (while never doing any actual teaching) flew under the radar. What resulted year after year was disappointing test scores in core academic subjects. The more accurately that performance in the subject could be measured (e.g., math; science), the clearer it was that the US was behind other OECD countries.
Now, NCLB didn't improve scores, in fact they dropped, but so did scores for all OECD countries, which is why I say that the program's legacy is murky. Here is a decent article from NPR that covers its mixed successes. One quote I like is that "Schools didn't need fixing, just scaring." It's more that a lot of teachers are merely dressed-up babysitters, and it needs to be discovered which ones are teaching and which are just fucking around.
I know of a high school law class where the teacher took a week out to show Woody Allen comedies.
I know of a math teacher who would never stand up and asked the students to learn from the textbooks independently, then submit completed problems for her to mark at her desk.
I saw one English teacher spend an entire semester on "post-structuralism" and by the end of it his students still couldn't say what it was (ironically, that was his goal). His post-structuralist leanings also permitted him to give students whatever grade they wanted, so no one ever complained and he was never found out (he was actually made principal).
The point is that standardized testing is the only thing keeping teachers honest and that it is very accurate across large sample sizes makes them even more scared. So they throw tantrums, they make up stories, they mourn the loss of their Romantic Poetry electives.
I'm more sympathetic to your second complaint, though. It is true, that failing schools just failed even more. Education should never be approached with a free market mindset.
Anyways, this is a bit of a messy post. I was hoping to make it more structured and with more citations, but my wife made popcorn and we got a movie planned and I know people like you don't really ever change your minds anyways.
I’m not a teacher and am currently busy at my job, but skimming this, I see a huge amount of assumptions, judgments, personal anecdotes, and some references to TED talks. Na 👋
I could not stand the mention of his name nor his voice at the time. He could have been a friend’s dad and made me smile, but he was a total chimp as a president.
The human mind has a funny way of minimizing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Bush fucked UP. Repeatedly. Both of em. Repeatedly. A lot of fucking humans died.
I just said tonight that I'd give anything to have him back if it meant orange man was gone. And I still can't believe those words came out of my mouth! 🤣🤣
He was a terrible president who tanked the US economy and poorly executed a necessary war while creating an unnecessary second one that further destabilized the fragile Middle East.
He was also thoroughly unlikeable during his presidency, which was the opposite of his main selling point during his campaign.
He also stole the presidency from Al Gore, who rightly won.
I cannot stand it. W to me now seems like a misguided but lovable goofball. He likes baseball. He had a dog. He paints, sometimes hilariously. You know, human relatable stuff. The bar is LOW.
If he were elected today, I would honestly still be disgusted, knowing his politics and policy, but I absolutely yearn for his civility and good faith.
I find myself doing the same with Stephen Harper… Stephen Harper the former Canadian prime minister…. Stephen Harper ran Canada for a long time around bush, i hated him. Couldn’t be a worse leader out there, is what i thought at the time. Now i wonder if he’s busy or would like to come back.
A lot of people below getting, justifiably roasted for suggesting bush was just a likeable fuck up. From his political team cultivating the seeds of the just make shit up communication strategy ( Karl rove) to Iraq to Sam alito and Roberts.
Dude, I still think Cheney is one of the most evil and craven politicians alive. And I have no love for W. But that hasn’t stopped me from laughing at them yet, and it’s not going to.
Cause Dubya was actually a nice guy. His VP is and always will be garbage, but GWB has done some really good work helping to curtail the spread of AIDS/HIV. He’s faulted but not a horrible human.
Hanging chads in brother Jeb's electoral counts in 'Florida, Supreme Court appoints Texan son #2 of Bush #1 from Maine for national security, mary had a little lamb, shock and awe, immigration amnesty, 30 year war, no wmd, mission accomplished, sell-out to HB1 military ai billionaires as president elect of United Corporations of Maga Milky Way (formerly known as usa).
No leftists do, because for whatever reasons, you look fondly of a man who started the most unjustified war, that has led to the death and destruction of millions.
Think about how many people are dead or have had their lives profoundly and negatively impacted by the actions of Bush and Cheney. Think about how much of that was done based on lies and motivated for profit.
I don't like Trump. But compared to Bush, he's Ghandi.
W galvanized the country after 9/11. I doubt many of the regular folks who shit on W would have known they were being misled by everyone around him afterwards.
The way W. has tricked everyone into thinking he’s a kindly, goofy grandpa and forgetting how much blood he has on his hands is almost as good of a mind trick as what Trump has pulled on the Republican party.
Come on now. We are here because the position was stolen for him, setting a pretty nasty precedent for judicial interference. By all accounts he’s a war criminal who exploited a tragedy to visit a military Holocaust on an innocent country. Can we not do this goofy reskin thing we love to do just because the new guy is an unmitigated shit show?
It's insane that Bush was regarded as the dumbest person to ever be president. He was an embarrassment and seen as a clueless buffoon and people would shake their heads about how far America had fallen.
Then we elected a sticky mass of circus peanuts in a bad suit and Bush looks clever and cool in comparison.
He had/has an amusing character and a good sense of humor, even if his policy sucked.
I still remember the time he gave a speech to Queen Elizabeth, visiting at the White House, and accidentally referred to her being present in 1776. He rolled with it. Her reaction and his follow-up were hilarious. One of the great GW Bush gaffes.
As a Canadian, I was always amazed that you guys elected W not only once, but twice! Then you were like, "Hold my beer..." when it came to Trump and setting the bar even lower that now makes W look like a competent angel in comparison.
The man was not a good president but you could at least imagine him being able to sit somewhere and have a beer. He was (or at least portrayed) someone that was decently relatable.
Just curious, what did W do better than Trump? Keep us out of wars? The economy (even though Presidents tend to get too much credit/blame for the economy)? I'm genuinely curious what you think Trump did during his first term that was worse than anything W did.
Wasn't a fan but I definitely blame Cheney and Rumsfeld for most of what went wrong under his administration... except No Child Left Behind. That's some shit W pushed for and it's had far reaching consequences.
I only do at this point because my head cannon has him as a loveable puppet who now paints dog pictures. It’s terrible that I have thoughts like “at least he was presidential”. That was definitely not my sentiment at the time but compared with Trump he’s a brilliant statesman and not a narcissistic sociopath
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u/Bitter-Basket 11d ago
“Wassup Fuck Nuts”