Your perception of Bush compared to 2001/2002?

[Astronuc]

Three things turned the public off: Eight years of Clinton! (Gore was his Vice President), Gore was too stiff and didn't seem to connect with people, and Gore got lumped in with Bush as a politician riding on his daddy's coat tails (this was only somewhat true with Gore - while he benefited from being Al Gore, Jr, he'd personally accomplished more in his life than Bush had).

Too bad that. Gore lacked charisma for sure. He should have chosen his words more carefully and worked on his presentation.

While I believe he would have been better than Bush, I still have to wonder about hold overs from Clinton's administration. On the other hand, I believe Gore was planning a fresh group.

Clinton was about average in job performance, but his personal habits were embarrassing.

I agree on his personal habits - he strayed way to far. His foreign policy was poor (and Richard Holbrooke ), and parts of his domestic policy, e.g. energy were not that great.

 

[Smurf]

Frankly that scares the crap of me!


You might not understand that but I hope it answers your question to at least some degree.

You're probably better understood than you think.

 

[Skyhunter]

Bush only cut taxes on income for the very wealthy, sales taxes are going up where I live, the government is getting more involved--not less, private industry within the nation is struggling to compete with cheap labor elsewhere, and the list goes on.

Actually it was across the board cuts and politically very astute.

I didn't participate, but I remember reading that the rebate checks came with a propaganda message.

 

[SOS2008]

That's simply not true. http://www.ctj.org/html/gwb0602.htm

We've had discussions of Bush's tax cuts before, and I thought you had participated? Those discussions are always about why the tax cuts benefit the wealthy more than the poor.

Your link entitled "Year-by-Year Analysis of the Bush Tax Cuts Shows Growing Tilt to the Very Rich" and the way you phrase it: "the tax cuts benefit the wealthy more than the poor" is basically what I said, just worded a little more accurately. As usual semantics derails the point being made, that taxes on income are not an issue where Bush/the GOP shines.

 

[russ_watters]

Your link entitled "Year-by-Year Analysis of the Bush Tax Cuts Shows Growing Tilt to the Very Rich" and the way you phrase it: "the tax cuts benefit the wealthy more than the poor" is basically what I said, just worded a little more accurately. As usual semantics derails the point being made, that taxes on income are not an issue where Bush/the GOP shines.

In such a discussion, precision of wording is extremely important. Statments like yours are how misunderstandings happen and perceptions (apro pos for the thread) change over time. If your loose wording is allowed to stand, the next time the topic comes up, people may actually believe that the way you worded it was factually accurate because they remember it and don't remember a challenge.

The discussions about Katrina are another perfect example of this: the perceptions about what exactly happened changed in days and we had people saying all sorts of factually inaccurate things. Such errors/misperceptions are self-sustaining and have to be corrected before they overrun the truth.

 

[Art]

The discussions about Katrina are another perfect example of this: the perceptions about what exactly happened changed in days and we had people saying all sorts of factually inaccurate things. Such errors/misperceptions are self-sustaining and have to be corrected before they overrun the truth.

Yes I know what you mean I have had to correct 3 of your posts for factual errors in the past couple of days.

Russ don't you ever get bored being the unofficial apologist for the GOP? Seriously is it like a religion thing where the party faithful must show blind faith or they're cast into the wilderness? Can you direct me to a single post by you wherein you criticize the Bush administration? Do you really believe they are that perfect that you can find no fault at all?

I'm sure deep down you don't believe a lot of the propaganda you peddle so why not try to adopt a more even-handed approach once in a while. I'm sure you will find moderation will breed moderation.

 

[DM]

I think the bigger question here, which clearly fits with how we perceive Mr Bush, is how the American society commited the biggest gaffe in the century? How were they influenced? Why was their trust put in the Bush administration?

 

[russ_watters]

Art, you're getting awfully close to the line. Our patience is not without limits.

 

[Astronuc]

Russ don't you ever get bored being the unofficial apologist for the GOP?

That's a wee bit personal don't you think?

I however agree with Russ. Wrong information clouds the picture - and I don't believe anybody here at PF has been there in NO. We see pictures in the media, but don't know the whole story.

I heard from my sister, a doctor in Houston who has been treating people from NO. She mentioned that there is a lot of wrong information out there, and the rest of the country may be getting the wrong story.

 

[NateTG]

Don't care for his politics. Can't stand his speeches. Sickened by his opportunism.

That said, 9-11 was primarily a psychological crisis. IMHO, the reaction has been much more damaging that the attack, and it's not at all clear to me that Bush was particularly effective (aside from PR), or, for that matter, that there was a whole lot for him to do other than to be seen, since other people seem to have handled the situation very well in general.

Really, it seems like the big differences between Katrina and 9-11 is that this should clearly have been anticipated as a problem, and that there is no bogey-man for Bush to blame this time around.

 

[Astronuc]

Clearly there was a breakdown in the government - local, state, federal, and it will take some time to sort it out.

A friend on another forum, who participates in emergency response, pointed out that there is a protocol - local, state and federal - and it appears that things broke down locally.

Perhaps the state and Feds were waiting - rightly or wrongly.

The lines of communication were severely dysfunctional.

The matter about the levees is a whole other matter, and that also needs to be understood.

And insulting participants in the discussion adds nothing to the understanding, but certainly hurts people unnecessarily. Each is entitled to his or her opinions, as partisan as they might be, and as much as one might disagree with another.

I am critical of the Bush administration and I have good reason to be.

 

[Smurf]

In Russ' defence, many were saying similar things about (what's his name?) the brazilian who was shot in london that Russ is now saying about the Hurricane.

 

[Astronuc]

In Russ' defence, many were saying similar things about (what's his name?) the brazilian who was shot in london that Russ is now saying about the Hurricane.

Jean Charles de Menezes (7 January 1978 – 22 July 2005) was a Brazilian electrician living in Tulse Hill in south London, England. Mistaken for one of the suspects in the previous day's failed attacks, Menezes was shot and killed by unnamed Metropolitan Police officers at Stockwell tube station on the London Underground. Menezes had no explosives, had not been behaving in a suspicious manner, and was later found to be unconnected with the attempted bombings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Menezes

 

[Art]

Art, you're getting awfully close to the line. Our patience is not without limits.

I'm not intending to cause offence Russ. My point is that you do appear to always spin the GOP point of view no matter what and that if you were to be more critical of the Bush administration when they deserve it you would probably find that the anti-Bush folk here would also become less inclined to paint things quite so black and white. I'm sure you would consider me to be anti-Bush and in general rightly so however I have been known to praise him in posts on this forum when he deserved it.

 

[russ_watters]

In Russ' defence, many were saying similar things about (what's his name?) the brazilian who was shot in london that Russ is now saying about the Hurricane.

? I'm not sure what you mean? There are some clear statements being made about the event that are factually wrong. Still others are misleading (whether intentional or not is irrelevant). Maybe I'll make a compliation thread, but here's just one example (name purposely omitted):

...we can airlift aid to a disaster half-way around the world in 2 days and it takes 5 days for aid to reach people in a disaster in our own country that had advance notice.

The wording is somewhat soft ("reach people" is a little vague), but the implication is that no aid whatsoever got to the people of NO for 5 days. That's a statement that has been made a number of times on this forum since then (often with the comparison to the Tsunami). It is factually incorrect - is is a trivially obvious fact that there aid reached NO before the hurricane hit: that's what was going on in the Superdome! It is also a fact that FEMA had people and supplies positioned outside the city (to avoid the flooding) before the hurricane hit. It is also a fact that the Coast Guard (a federal agency) prepositioned units near the affected area before the storm hit. It is also a fact that the National Guard was on scene before the storm hit (550 in the Superdome alone).

Now, with what I said about precision of wording, do not read something into that that I didn't say: I did not say that the response (federal, state, or local) was adequte, because I don't believe it was. But when people say there was no response for 5 days, they are factually wrong.

edit: I just responded to another one in another thread where someone implied strongly (but didn't come right out and say it) that there was no prepositioning of equipment by FEMA for this storm.

 

[Art]

Has anyone seen a timeline of this disaster from a credible source? I've looked but can't find one. It would be good to see it laid out hour by hour as to who did what and when as there are so many conflicting reports floating around it is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

[Astronuc]

Has anyone seen a timeline of this disaster from a credible source? I've looked but can't find one.

Has anyone found a credible source?

 

[Art]

Has anyone found a credible source?

Exactly... At the moment you can find equally valid sources that say there are still 1000's of folk starving whilst others claim everybody has been eating chocolate sundaes and sleeping in featherdown beds since day 1 (well almost )

 

[TRCSF]

Has anyone seen a timeline of this disaster from a credible source? I've looked but can't find one. It would be good to see it laid out hour by hour as to who did what and when as there are so many conflicting reports floating around it is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yeah, there's a lot of spin going on. A lot of flat out lies. I don't think there's one comprehensive source for all events, given that there's so much that happened.

Much of the misinformation seems to be centered around Governor Blanco. Much is being said that she never asked for federal aid, or did so days after the hurricane. Apparently there was a mistaken Washington Post article, that has since been corrected.

Gov. Blanco requested federal assistance on Sunday, Aug. 28th.

If there's a specific question about when a specific event happened, I'll be happy to look it up.

 

[Informal Logic]

Excerpts from Newsweeks Sept. 12, 2005 issue "The Lost City - What Went Wrong..."

A few rescuers were ready, but precious few. On Monday morning, as the storm slammed into the Gulf Coast, Col. Tim Tarchick of the 920th Rescue Wing, Air Force Reserve Command, got on the phone to call every agency he could think of to ask permission to take his three rescue helicopters into the disaster zone as soon as the storm abated. The response was noncommittal. FEMA, the federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters, told Tarchick that it wasn't authorized to task military units. That had to come from the Defense Department. Tarchick wasn't able to cut through the red tape until 4 p.m. Tuesday—more than 24 hours after the storm had passed. His crews plucked hundreds of people off rooftops, but when they delivered them to an assigned landing zone, there was "total chaos. No food, no water, no bathrooms, no nothing." There was "no structure, no organization, no command center," Tarchick told NEWSWEEK.
----------------------------
What went wrong? Just about everything. How the system failed is a tangled story, but the basic narrative is becoming clearer: hesitancy, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of leadership from city hall to the White House and epically bad luck combined to create a morass. In the early aftermath, fingers pointed in all directions. The president was to blame; no, the looters. No, the bureaucrats. No, the local politicians. It was FEMA's fault—unless it was the Department of Homeland Security's. Or the Pentagon's. Certainly the government failed, and the catastrophe exposed, for all the world to see, raw racial divisions.

Bush's many critics will say that the president was disengaged, on vacation, distracted by Iraq and insensitive to the needs of poor black people. The White House blames the magnitude of the storm itself, patchy information on the ground and a confused chain of command, according to a senior Bush aide who requests anonymity in order to speak freely about internal administration discussions. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Bush is fighting a war, and he is sometimes slow to react, and he may have been lulled by early reports that New Orleans had been spared the worst of the storm. These are all legitimate excuses. Still, we expect more from a president.
-----------------------------
For years, the Army Corps of Engineers has asked for more money for New Orleans and not received it. The Bush administration, strapped by the war in Iraq and eager to hold down spending and cut taxes, actually reduced funding for bolstering the city's levees.
-----------------------------
On Wednesday night, Mayor Nagin ordered 1,500 policemen—virtually the entire city force—to stop trying to rescue people from attics and rooftops, and to turn instead to stopping the looting.
-----------------------------
Nagin himself had problems of his own. He had opened up the Superdome to thousands of people—but nobody seemed to have had a plan to care for them or to get them out of there. There were promises of buses that never came. Some 500 National Guardsmen showed up to keep order, but the nervous young soldiers waved their weapons about.
-----------------------------
Washington, too, was slow to react to the crisis. The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was reluctant for the military to take a lead role in disaster relief, a job traditionally performed by FEMA and by the National Guard, which is commanded by state governors. President Bush could have "federalized" the National Guard in an instant. That's what his father, President George H.W. Bush, did after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Back then, the Justice Department sent Robert Mueller, a jut-jawed ex-Marine (who is now FBI director), to take charge, showing, in effect, that the cavalry had arrived. FEMA's current head, Michael Brown, has appeared over his head and even a little clueless in news interviews. He is far from the sort of take-charge presence New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani conveyed after 9/11.

...after Katrina, a strange paralysis set in. For days, Bush's top advisers argued over legal niceties about who was in charge, according to three White House officials who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

While Washington debated, the situation in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast deteriorated. ...Saturday, Bush pledged to return to the region on Monday—and to deploy 7,000 additional active-duty troops under the Pentagon's control. But for many, the help was arriving too late.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179587/site/newsweek/

As far as the blame game goes, this includes Bush and the Whitehouse, so he cannot take a higher moral ground than anyone else. And to this point it is inappropriate for him to head any investigation IMO: "Bush to oversee probe into what went wrong" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9228086/

In all fairness to all, information is lacking, and inaccuracies have been reported even from some reliable sources. For example, per the article above: "Rumors flew. There were alligators swimming in the ghetto. And sharks from the flooded aquarium downtown." But I doubt it will cause the end of the world, and we will have all the facts soon enough.

 

[Astronuc]

I just heard a press conference in which Bush apparently plans to head an investigation into what went wrong with the disaster response. Hmmmm - I don't know. I would like to believe he will get to the bottom of it, but can he be impartial?

Meanwhile we are now up to Tropical Storm Nate, with Maria veering to the North Atlantic and Tropical Depression 16 about 180 MILES... 290 KM. . . SE of Cape Canaveral, FL. Watch out if this one gets into the Gulf.

 

[TRCSF]

I just heard a press conference in which Bush apparently plans to head an investigation into what went wrong with the disaster response. Hmmmm - I don't know. I would like to believe he will get to the bottom of it, but can he be impartial?

Meanwhile we are now up to Tropical Storm Nate, with Maria veering to the North Atlantic and Tropical Depression 16 about 180 MILES... 290 KM. . . SE of Cape Canaveral, FL. Watch out if this one gets into the Gulf.

Well, I'm sure he asked himself if he did everything he could and he said yes.

End of story.

 

[Art]

Well, I'm sure he asked himself if he did everything he could and he said yes.

End of story.

So after telling everybody else to back of - that now is not the time to look back - he has used the space gained to manouvere so that although he is one of the leading characters being accused, he will head the inquiry?

He obviously learned something from his years of association with Saddam.

If he gets away with this the US will be the laughing stock of the world. Truth, Justice and the American way You have got to be kidding...

Not that given the current regimes history I'm surprised. That is why I said on the other thread that an independant judicial inquiry should be set up to investigate this.

 

[russ_watters]

Exactly... At the moment you can find equally valid sources that say there are still 1000's of folk starving whilst others claim everybody has been eating chocolate sundaes and sleeping in featherdown beds since day 1 (well almost )

Actually, Art, what is happening is that people are falling into anecdotal evidence extrapolation trap: if a person says they haven't eaten in 5 days, people extrapolate that that means there has been no aid to anyone. But one person (or 1000 people) saying they are starving does not contradict the fact that there was aid there before the hurricane.

 

[Smurf]

? I'm not sure what you mean? There are some clear statements being made about the event that are factually wrong. Still others are misleading (whether intentional or not is irrelevant). Maybe I'll make a compliation thread, but here's just one example (name purposely omitted):

Yes, which is exactly what all the liberals were saying about the media around De Menzes. It was a response to Art's comment.

 

[Art]

Actually, Art, what is happening is that people are falling into anecdotal evidence extrapolation trap: if a person says they haven't eaten in 5 days, people extrapolate that that means there has been no aid to anyone. But one person (or 1000 people) saying they are starving does not contradict the fact that there was aid there before the hurricane.

Perhaps the christian fundamentalists thought the old trick with the 5 loaves and 5 fishes would solve the problem?
As to the details of who is to blame, well hopefully an independent inquiry will sort that out but even with a cursory look at the disaster it is obvious to (almost) everybody that there were serious deficiencies in the response of the relief agencies.

 

[Informal Logic]

Returning to the topic of the OP, the kindest thing I can say is I have never been impressed with the man. The only thing that has changed is his ratings. Even so, he has still pushed through pet legislation like CAFTA so unfortunately it has not been enough to make a complete lame duck of him. I suspect this is because those who oppose him are picking their battles, such as Supreme Court appointments. In reference to future military aggression, I hope the low ratings and lack of world support will keep the Bush regime in check.

Bush would do well to return to the traditional Republican platform. At the minimum he must try to avoid more blunders, and try to keep the administration spin from being so obvious (e.g., the insurgents are in their last throes).

 

[TRCSF]

Actually, Art, what is happening is that people are falling into anecdotal evidence extrapolation trap: if a person says they haven't eaten in 5 days, people extrapolate that that means there has been no aid to anyone. But one person (or 1000 people) saying they are starving does not contradict the fact that there was aid there before the hurricane.

Yes. And if tens of thousands of people are trapped in the Superdome and NO Convention Center, and they're not gettting food and water and babies and the elderly are dying because of it, then it is to early to point fingers, and besides it's the mayor's fault, and besides it didn't really happen anyways.

 

[TRCSF]

Oh my. I saw a dead body on TV in New Orleans. All bloated and floating in the water.

Could there be two or three dead people in New Orleans? No, I don't want to extrapolate.

 

[TRCSF]

Oh, hey. I just saw a house on TV. It was in New Orleans and flood water was up to the raptors. Do you think there might be a whole row of houses in New Orleans that have been flooded?

Nah, probably my crazy liberal sensibilities that are deluding me into thinking this is a disaster.

 

[TRCSF]

Golly gee willikers. There's an evacuee in the Astrodome who's lost her family, her house, her job, and all of her posessions.

Thank god there's only one.

 

[TRCSF]

Holy mackerel.

Somebody got sick of typhoid.

Well thank god nobody really got hurt.

 

[TRCSF]

Oh, the humanity.

Trent Lott lost his house.

Thank got the President plans to rebuild it.

It's going to be fantastic!

 

[pattylou]

Holy mackerel.

Somebody got sick of typhoid.

Well thank god nobody really got hurt.

Did you really see typhoid? I'd think GI disease emergence would be a headline.

(GI = gastrointestinal, not general infantry)

 

[TRCSF]

Did you really see typhoid? I'd think GI disease emergence would be a headline.

(GI = gastrointestinal, not general infantry)

Excuse me. I meant Cholera. Five confirmed deaths.