How to Tick off the Democrats in America?

[Guest MonkeySee]

You know what would really Tick off the Democrats? This will never happen, but it would really piss off the Democrats. Bush resigns now and Dick Cheney becomes President. Dick then appoints Condoleeza Rice as vice-president. Cheney then resigns two weeks later and Condoleeza Rice, a republican, becomes the first Black Woman President.

[Guest GaySacGuy]

Bush's EGO would never let that happen. He wants every second of the spotlights that he can get. He has a bunch of people working full time just to try and make his legacy better.

[KhorTose]

He is planning to spend 500 million on a presidental library, and one of the jobs of the permanent staff will be to put the best spin on many of his incredibly stupid decisions. The Huffington post had a great article on the stupidity of this overpriced monument to failure.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huff...ra_b_35003.html

[Bob]

He is planning to spend 500 million on a presidental library, and one of the jobs of the permanent staff will be to put the best spin on many of his incredibly stupid decisions.

 

Bush and a library? Precious.....and reminds me of the newstory:

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tragic fire on Monday destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. Both of his books have been lost.

 

Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president was devastated, as he had not finished coloring the second one.

 

 

 

[Guest MonkeySee]

Bush's EGO would never let that happen. He wants every second of the spotlights that he can get. He has a bunch of people working full time just to try and make his legacy better.

He is going to need more than a bunch of people in order to make his legacy better. Bush is probably the worst President in my lifetime.

[KhorTose]

Bush and a library? Precious.....and reminds me of the newstory:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tragic fire on Monday destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. Both of his books have been lost.

Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president was devastated, as he had not finished coloring the second one.

 

Thanks for the morning laugh. Here are some other Bush jokes I've heard lately.

 

It's finally come out why George W. is pushing childhood literacy.

He wants America's children to be better off than he is.

 

A British doctor, a German doctor and an American doctor were chatting.

The British doctor said, "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man put it in another and have him looking for work in six weeks."

Then the German doctor bragged, "That''s nothing, we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another and have him looking for work in four weeks."

The American doctor, not to be outdone, says, "You guys are way behind. We took a man with no brain out of Texas, put him in the White House, and almost immediately afterwards half the country was looking for work."

 

 

 

 

[Guest Steve1903]

The people will decide what the Bush legacy is. No amount of money, or anything else for that matter, will change that. I only hope Blair gets a mention in the same sentences Bush does.

[Guest xiandarkthorne]

Shouldn't that have been "I only hope Blair gets the same sentence as Bush does"?

[Guest Steve1903]

well done xian. liked that.

[Guest xiandarkthorne]

Hi Steve,

Glad you liked the re-phrasing. I confess, however, that I actually like Blair for many other non-Irag related matters. And I also pity Gordon Brown for having to take over at such a crucial moment. More confessions...I don't know about our American friends here, but I also think George SR was a pretty ok guy, though Billy still gets my vote for best recent prezzy.

[Guest fountainhall]

He is going to need more than a bunch of people in order to make his legacy better. Bush is probably the worst President in my lifetime.

 

I could not agree more. As for legacy, I hope you are right. But no doubt the Bush family are already spending a fortune on spin doctors in the knowledge that 30 - 40 years from now, no-one will remember much about Bush Jnr. - nor will they care.

 

Remember Nixon? He was forced to resign office reviled throughout America as a liar, cheat, warmonger and Presidential disaster. Contrast that now with the prevailing view that, whilst he had his failings, he was a wise statesman who ended the war in Vietnam and opened the door to China. Times have really changed. I don't expect to be around 30 years from now. I just hope those who are will keep the memory of the Bush disaster alive so that history is not distorted.

[Guest GaySacGuy]

I could not agree more. As for legacy, I hope you are right. But no doubt the Bush family are already spending a fortune on spin doctors in the knowledge that 30 - 40 years from now, no-one will remember much about Bush Jnr. - nor will they care.

 

Remember Nixon? He was forced to resign office reviled throughout America as a liar, cheat, warmonger and Presidential disaster. Contrast that now with the prevailing view that, whilst he had his failings, he was a wise statesman who ended the war in Vietnam and opened the door to China. Times have really changed. I don't expect to be around 30 years from now. I just hope those who are will keep the memory of the Bush disaster alive so that history is not distorted.

 

 

Nixon was a crook, and did a lot of political dirty tricks....But, he didn't destroy the economy of the world through deregulation, start a war by presenting false facts, take away civil rights of all Americans, nor generally screw over most of the American Public. Bush will not have a good legacy in 40 years....if it is good, it will take much much longer!!

[Guest Steve1903]

No xian, cant agree with you on Blair. Proved to be just another lying, corrupt, scumbag.

[Guest fountainhall]

No xian, cant agree with you on Blair. Proved to be just another lying, corrupt, scumbag.

 

I agree mostly with Xian. Blair had very high ratings in Britain in his first years as Prime Minister. What no one could understand was his love affair with Bush. Socialists and arch-conservatists do not usually make good bedfellows. Then as the tell-all books came out, one British ambassador wrote that his instruction from Blair was "to get up Bush's ass and stay there"! So there you have it. Blair was a closet gay

[Guest xiandarkthorne]

No xian, cant agree with you on Blair. Proved to be just another lying, corrupt, scumbag.

 

Concerning our Tony, I'm not saying that he didn't have his moments. After all, it was during his regime that PC got out of control to the extent where Brits can't throw their house garbage into public bins (is that still true?) and three-letter words like 'fat' and 'old' were considered worse epithets than those with an additional letter, but I sorta liked the way he carried himself even when there was egg dripping off his face. About the lying and corruption....I have never met a politician who didn't or wasn't. So I am afraid I can't fault dear Tony for that if I want to be fair.

 

As for rehabilitating Mr Bush Jr's image, I don't think anyone has enough money or talent at spin to convince the Middle East that he was a good president. And over there, they have very long memories, if I am not mistaken. It's a pity that the GB name will now and for as long as the oil doesn't run out, be associated with him and his lethal bumbling when I think his father did so many good things.

[Guest fountainhall]

And over there, they have very long memories, if I am not mistaken.

 

No doubt the Saudi Royal family will continue to regard the Bush clan in high regard and contribute both in cash and spin. Remember the day after Bush Jnr. grounded all aircraft in the US, three 747's were mysteriously permitted to take off from US soil - passengers unknown and destinations unknown? Almost everyone knows they were Saudis en route to Saudi Arabia. Why? Ask Bush Jnr.

[KhorTose]

No doubt the Saudi Royal family will continue to regard the Bush clan in high regard and contribute both in cash and spin. Remember the day after Bush Jnr. grounded all aircraft in the US, three 747's were mysteriously permitted to take off from US soil - passengers unknown and destinations unknown? Almost everyone knows they were Saudis en route to Saudi Arabia. Why? Ask Bush Jnr.

It is a shame that we can't ask Bush Jr. a lot of questions, not just this one. Where is our judicial system when we need it? This man has consistently lied to the American people and brought down the US economically and in the eyes of the world. He has also sanctioned torture, denied Americans their civil rights, started an unjust war, and detained people without a trail or due process. There is no crime he can be charged with?????

[Guest GaySacGuy]

Maybe we need to farm out the justice for Bush and Cheney, and turn them over to the war crimes likes of the Hauge (sp??)

[Guest fountainhall]

Had the US not been at war on two fronts, I suspect the Democrats would have taken the impeachment route after taking control of the Congress in 2006. That would have been lip-smacking payback time for Ken Starr's prudery.

[Guest fountainhall]

There is an extremely good article by Jonathan Freedland in today's Guardian newspaper from London. I make no apology for quoting much of it verbatim.

 

It starts by talking about Christmas being a time when we should put troubles behind us. It goes on:

 

"George Bush will leave office in a matter of weeks and British troops will leave Iraq a few months later. The first, defining phase of the conflict that began on 9/11 - the war of Bush, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden - is about to slip from the present to the past tense. Bush and Blair will be gone, with only Bin Laden still in post. The urge to move on is palpable.

 

"You can sense it in the valedictory interviews Bush and Dick Cheney are conducting on their way out. They're looking to the verdict of history now, Cheney telling the Washington Times last week: 'I myself am personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road.' The once raging arguments of the current era are about to fade, the lead US protagonists heading off to their respective ranches in the west, the rights and wrongs of their decisions in office to be weighed not in the hot arena of politics, but in the cool seminar rooms of the academy."

 

But then the author reminds us that we cannot hope to avoid the errors of the past 8 years unless there is a full accounting. The nub of the article then follows:

 

"Less than a fortnight ago, in the news graveyard of a Friday afternoon, the armed services committee of the US Senate released a bipartisan report - with none other than John McCain as its co-author - into the American use of torture against those held in the war on terror. It dismissed entirely the notion that the horrors of Abu Ghraib could be put down to 'a few bad apples'. Instead it laid bare, in forensic detail, the trail of memos and instructions that led directly to the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

 

"The report was the fruit of 18 months of work, involving some 70 interviews. Most of it is classified, but even the 29-page published summary makes horrifying reading. It shows how the most senior figures in the Bush administration discussed, and sought legal fig leaves for, practices that plainly amounted to torture. They were techniques devised in a training programme known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape or SERE, that aimed to teach elite American soldiers how to endure torture should they fall into the hands of pitiless enemies. The SERE techniques were partly modelled on the brutal methods used by the Chinese against US prisoners during the Korean war. Yet Rumsfeld ruled that these same techniques should be 'reverse engineered', so that Americans would learn not how to endure them - but how to inflict them. Which they then did, at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and beyond.

 

"The Senate report cites the memorandums requesting permission to use 'stress positions, exploitation of detainee fears (such as fear of dogs), removal of clothing, hooding, deprivation of light and sound, and the so-called wet towel treatment or the waterboard'. We read of Mohamed al Kahtani - against whom all charges were dropped earlier this year - who was 'deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks'. Approval for this kind of torture, hidden under the euphemism of 'enhanced interrogation', was sought from and granted at the highest level.

 

"And that doesn't mean Rumsfeld. The report's first conclusion is that, on '7 February 2002, President George W Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban detainees'. The result, it says, is that Bush 'opened the door' to the use of a raft of techniques that the US had once branded barbaric and beyond the realm of human decency.

 

"For this Bush should surely be held to account. And yet there is no sign that he will, and precious little agitation that he should. A still smiling Cheney denies the Bush administration did anything wrong. Note this breathtaking exchange with Fox News at the weekend. He was asked: 'If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?' Cheney's answer: 'General proposition, I'd say yes.'

 

"It takes a few seconds for the full horror of that remark to sink in. And then you remember where you last heard something like it. It was the now immortalised interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon. The disgraced ex-president was asked whether there were certain situations where the president can do something illegal, if he deems it in the national interest. Nixon's reply: 'Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.'

 

"It is no coincidence that Cheney began his career in the Nixon White House. He has the same Nixonian disregard for the US constitution, the same belief that executive power is absolute and unlimited - that those who wield it are above the law, domestic and international. It is the logic of dictatorship.

 

"But Nixon was forced from office, his vision of an unrestrained presidency rejected. If Bush and Cheney are allowed to retire quietly, America will have failed to reassert that bedrock principle of the republic: the rule of law.

 

"This is why there must be a reckoning. Bush will do all he can to avoid it: and it is wholly possible that one of his last acts as president will be to cover himself, his vice-president and all his henchmen with a blanket pardon. Even if that does not happen, Barack Obama is unlikely to want to spend precious capital pursuing his predecessor for war crimes.

 

"But other prosecutors elsewhere in the world should weigh their responsibilities. In the end, it was a lone Spanish magistrate, not a Chilean court, who ensured the arrest of Augusto Pinochet. A pleasing, if uncharitable, thought this Christmas, is that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush will hesitate before making plans to travel abroad in 2009. Or indeed at any time - ever again."