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George W. Bush, if he is anything he IS consistent. He had never succeeded in anything from the Texas Rangers to the disastrous oil ventures (in which the Saudis bailed him out). Although brother Neil did compete with the Silverado savings fiasco W seems to be in a league of his own when it comes to consistent failure.....but what is his greatest faux pas. There have been so many that it is hard to select one as the biggest or worst. Could it be the time that he told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Americans must go to war against a country that members of his own administration said was the weakest country in the region? or could it be when one of his most ardent supporters and one of the biggest contributors to his presidential campaign was accused of "stealing" money from the pension plans of its employees? Yes during the campaign W referred to Ken Lay as "Kenny Boy" but when Ken Lay was indicted all of a sudden Mr. Bush denied that they had a close relationship. Enron Corporation was found to be the principal culprit of the California Energy crisis and Mr. Bush could say close to nothing about the avarice of his old pal "Kenny Boy" But then again maybe that was not the crown jewel of this ethically challenged administration. Maybe it's the decision to cheat during the televised debates with John Kerry in which there were some reporters who actually admitted to seeing a big bulge in the president's back and what seemed to be a very small earphone in his ear. Most people would call this "cheating" but the vast majority of the so called "liberal" media chose not to spend too much time on this topic when we all know that if Clinton had done this it would be headline news. Then again maybe that isn't the crown jewel either, maybe it's the Gannon/Guckert affair, when a reporter without valid credentials has access to the presidential press corps and tosses softball questions to the President. This same reporter was discovered to be a male prostitute. Now I am certain that we all have some skeletons in our closet but doesn't this seem a little unusual for the administration that became the people's choice because of it's exceptionally high "moral" character? No, that's not the crown jewel..or it is? Maybe it when W gave 240,000.00 to Armstrong Williams to promote "No Child Left Behind" in the African-American community. Some of that money could have actually been given to the underfunded program instead of to Mr. Williams. To make matters even worse this administration was caught manufacturing news. Mr. Bush through his surrogates realized that his opponent John Kerry was a bona-fide war hero and waged a very effective campaign to smear Mr. Kerry's wartime accomplishments. Of course Mr. Bush said he had nothing to do with the Swift-Boat organizations. W embarrassed himself and especially Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice when he was in Brasil and he asked the question "Do you have black people here too?" This shows his worldliness. Before becoming president he seldom travelled outside of the U.S. and it showed. W once said "The problem with the French is that they have no idea of what the word "Entrepreneur" means" What a profound statement when you come to the realization that it IS a French word. The crown jewel mess up of the George W. Bush years could be Hurricane Katrina when W had the audacity to say "No one could have known the levees would break" This turned out to be a whopper of LIE. Bush was warned well in advance by the Louisiana governor and by people of his own administration. The African American community of New Orleans was deliberately ignored. Entertainer Kanye West said it best on national television "Bush doesn't care about Black people". One cannot come to any other conclusion than that one when you see that Blacks were put into hazardous vehicles with formaldyhide and the parishes (districts) that received the highest amounts of federal aid were "white" communities far from the areas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Bush even attempts to deny African-Americans and for that matter others for Louisiana to take part in the recontruction. Mr. Bush calls on his vice president's former company Halliburton to do the clean and attempts were made to bring in illegal aliens to do the work and pay them sub-standard wages. Bush tried to do away with the Davis-Beacon act that ensures minimum wage on disaster relief projects. Then again maybe the crown jewel of W's administration was his A.I.D.S policy?Millions of dollars were donated to stop the spread of A.I.D.S as long as his buddies in the pharmaceutal industry were allowed to gain a buck or two. Maybe the real crown jewel is the way the administration punished those evil doers who were practicing GENOCIDE in Sudan. He really fixed them good..................he sold them weapons. Or, maybe perhaps the Bush crown jewel is when he and his partners The American Endowment For Democracy and even the AFL-CIO unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the legitimately elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who has been portrayed in the media as a ruthless dictator. Chavez was elected president four times while Bush was NEVER elected. The New York Times originally reported that 100,000 people gathered to support the overthrow of Chavez. What the Times overlooked and did not mention until much later was that 500,000 had gathered in support of Chavez, proving that Bush can sabotage governments in the United States of America and in Haiti but couldn't do it in the country that is the fourth major supplier of petroleum to the United States. The Iraq war has cost the American taxpayer 300 billion dollars and most of the Iraqis hate us. What about the Downing Street memo? For those of you who may not know what the Downing Street memo was because the U.S. press doesn't report it, or under reports it. Apparently Bush told his partner in crime Tony Blair well in advance that he intended to invade Iraq long before the suspicion of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, so this was an orchestrated illegal undertaking that costs over100,000 Iraqi lives(mostly civilian) and over 2,600 U. S. lives. The New York Times doesn't not want to put this on the front page......maybe because of what happened to Newsweek? I don't know. One cannot leave out the Terri Schiavo case. President Bush got up at 2:00AM to promote legislation that would prolong the life of a patient whose doctors declared her terminally ill. Meanwhile in Minnesota a child went on a murderous Colombine-like killing spree, which Mr. Bush totally ignored in the beginning but finally responded to after public pressure. Mr. Bush presented himself as an opponent of affirmative action and indirectly supported it's demise even thorough Bush himself (and his family, going back 22 generations) was the beneficiary of a legacy set aside program at Yale. In this administration hypocrisy abounds.It is so hard to pick the crown jewel misstep of the Bush administration so far because there are so many. What about forcing former New Jersey Governor and Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitmanto tell New York City residents to go back to work at ground zero. He forced her to say that there were no problems after 9/11? when people today continue to complain about 9/11 related health issues.The president is still criss-crossing the country promoting his Social Security privitazation plan, which is even turning off members of his own party, especially those who are up for re-election.Then of course there is the issue of torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Our soldiers sent photographs to their love ones showing the atrocities that inflamed the Iraq people and the world. There are just so many memorable mess ups by this president and his deputies that is hard to single out one as being the worst. The sad thing is that although he may be a lame duck president he still has another 3 years left in office. When you look at all the damage he has caused so far he STILL has time to cause even more......and what happens after that.....do we get President Frist, President McCain or President Giuliani...different name same policy. It seems hard to believe but we still have people out there (and I include Democrats) who are afraid to admit that the last two presidential elections were bogus. So it's very hard to pick just one mishap as THE crown jewel or greatest hit (as in damage or destroy) of George W. Bush because he has been so consistent.......consistently awful.
" W embarrassed himself and especially Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice when he was in Brasil and he asked the question "Do you have black people here too?"
Baloney.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/brazil.htm
W once said "The problem with the French is that they have no idea of what the word "Entrepreneur"
False.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.htm
There are many other examples of the nonsense of your long screed, but I havent the time to go through all of them word by word.
"The Iraq war has cost the American taxpayer 300 billion dollars and most of the Iraqis hate us."
Lie. Most Iraqis like us.
"What about the Downing Street memo? For those of you who may not know what the Downing Street memo was because the U.S. press doesn't report it, or under reports it."
Critics read more into the the Downing Street memo than what actually was there.
"Robin Niblett, a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being "fixed around" Iraq policy. " 'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy," he says. This view was seconded by the writer Christopher Hitchens. Others have dismissed this criticism, saying the British usage of the term is the same as in the U.S., and that the meaning of "fixed around" in the memo is clear from context.[67] Furthermore, the grammatical conjunction 'but' implies a contradiction which would only be grammatically correct if the phrase 'fixed around' was the American definition.
It has also been pointed by many observers that in the same exact memo, the mention of the possible use of WMD is discussed. Critics argue, this contradicts the purported “smoking gun” of the issue of WMDs being fabricated."
NO SMOKING GUN (Michael Kinsley Slams Downing Street Memo and the Left conspiracy theorists)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/10/AR2005061001705.html
"One cannot leave out the Terri Schiavo case. President Bush got up at 2:00AM to promote legislation that would prolong the life of a patient"
To promote legislation which would giver her appeal access to the federal courts. A right which even murderers sentenced to death have. The people who wanted her dead, didnt want Terri to have that right.
"whose doctors declared her terminally ill."
Barefaced lie. Terri was NOT terminally ill, nor did her doctors declare her so.
"Terri was not dying, was not on life support, and did not have any terminal illness"
http://www.priestsforlife.org/euthanasia/terrisfinalhours.htm
Iraq: Media Manufactured Perception
The experts on how things are going in Iraq are not former State Department officials, former CIA officials who may never have set foot in the country.
The experts are not Senators who have taken junkets or the various other bloviators who populate the green rooms of cable news outlets.
They are the Iraqis themselves.
In a recent poll, more Iraqis, who live in Iraq, say Iraq is headed the right direction than Americans who merely watch TV reports about Iraq or read newspaper reports about Iraq.
Amid the drumbeat of so-called sectarian violence from the Legacy Media, one would think that Iraqis would be to throw in the towel or at least throwdown with each other at a moments notice.
But that is not the case.
Eighty-nine percent of Iraqis think a unity government is important.
Fifty-four percent approve of the unity government with only 25% disapproving. (That is higher than Americans who approve of the current make up of Congress and the Administration.)
Seventy-eight percent of Iraqis oppose partitioning the country along ethnic or religious lines.
The only group supporting partitioning are the Kurds.
And 70% of Iraqis do not know someone who moved because of religious conflict.
So, American watching the Legacy Media report on Iraq think the situation is much worse than the average Iraqi who actually lives in Iraq.
This is the effect of tens or thousands of gross ratings points showing only violence and pessimistic opinions.
But here is where we see the media effect come into play–even in Iraq.
Nationallly, 75% of Iraqis say the security situation in the country is poor.
But, when asked about the security of their own neighborhoods, 60% give the security in their town or neighborhood a passing grade.
This shows the power of the media to conflate a perception–even among those closest too it.
Oh, and 59% of Iraqis watch more than two hours of TV a day.
http://dailydispatch.amermaj.com/2006/08/25/iraq-media-manufactured-perception/
To Anonymous,
I see that you, like so many of your right-wing ethically challenged brethren have a serious problem dealing with the truth. When the truth collides with you selfish greed-driven objectives your resort to misinformation and swift boat tactics. I really laughed when I found that you chose a conservative site to "prove" that George Bush didn't make that statement about blacks being in Brasil. When I looked for you alleged proof I found that the site(www.snopes.com/quotes/brazil.htm) said the statement was "UNDETERMINED"....this has got to be a joke. I was not there, but then again neither were you. "Der Spiegel" to my knowledge has NOT issued a retraction so it is more likely than not the George W. Bush said it.
To Anonymous:
With regard Bush's statement about the French not having a word for entrepreneur "W once said "The problem with the French is that they have no idea of what the word "Entrepreneur" means" I don't know who's worse the conservative website or you. The person who witnessed Bush's statement was not consulted you relied on a known Blair operative instead of the person who witnessed the statement. "Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post was unable to reach Baroness Williams to gain her confirmation of the tale, but he did receive a call from Alastair Campbell, Blair's director of communications and strategy. "I can tell you that the prime minister never heard George Bush say that, and he certainly never told Shirley Williams that President Bush did say it," Campbell told The Post. "If she put this in a speech, it must have been a joke." Your reasoning is assinine. Did anyone ever consult Shirley Williams? duh??? Alastair Campbell didn't witness Bush's statement so why is he used as a source? This is just like me asking your father if he has a headache and having your brother say "No" Wouldn't it make more sense to have your father answer?
Most Iraqis like us?....are you delirious? Iraqis were polled by Gallup, which found that over 80% wanted the Americans TO LEAVE. Maybe you were thinking about another US administration? The collateral damage alone resulted in the deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. The Bush administration destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure and refused to let Iraqis participate in the rebuilding process(that was reserved for Cheney's former company Halliburton, which overcharged the US taxpayer for its services). I'm sure they were just crazy about Abu Ghraib.Yeah, the Iraqis like us just like they like root canals. All of this unwarranted violence was done in "OUR" name yet most Americans abhor this dispicably aggressive behavior.
To Anonymnous:
You, like most Bushies are praying that Republicans remain in control of the house and senate. If we have fair elections and "real" Democrats win George W. might find himself impeached and "The Downing Street Memo" may play a crucial role. Look at what is being said on these websites www.afterdowningstreet.com www.downingstreetmemo.com
The Republican mantra over the last two decades has been "We need smaller government. Let's get the government off of our backs". In the case of Terri Schiavo we find the Bush administration playing the role of big government interfering in the private lives of US citizens. This hypocrisy is even more stunning when you take into account that when George W. Bush was governor of Texas he backed a law that said the hospital, not the family would have final say in determining if an incapacitated patient should live or die. The Miami Herald reports that Jeb Bush was planning to send police to the hospital in order to insert the feeding tube, completely ignoring the dictates of a federal judge. Ten children were killed in Minnesota in a Colombine-like incident....as of March 26, 2005 President Bush has said NOTHING about this. But he can get out of his bed at 2:00AM to put himself into the fray of the Terri Schiavo case. It is obvious that the right wing involvement in the life of Terri Schiavo is to take the heat off of Tom Delay. The most influencial man in congress finds himself knee deep in the big muddy with three accusations of improper conduct. If Tom Delay is able to walk, this will set a precedent. Like minded ultraconservatives will have destroyed the constitution and our democratic form of government. When vice-president Dick Cheney ignored a subpoena by the General Accounting Office I could see that we were moving in that direction. If the U.S. citizenry let's Delay off the hook we are headed for limitless demagogery. Anyone who reads this message and has a firm belief in democracy should be writing their elected officials to let them know that Tom Delay should not be above the law and that Terri Schiavo's husband should be the one who makes the final decision as to if an attempt should be made to extend her life.
To Anonymous
You claim that you don't have the "time" to refute my statements. "Time" has NOTHING to do with it. You just can't do it. I have mentioned about 10 Bush examples of bad judgment and you only have the "time" to refute three ( in a very lame manner). If you use known conservate sites to "prove" your point then I can use known "progressive" sites to prove mine.
To Anonymous,
You were absolutely correct when you said that I had given a mistaken assessment of the Iraq war cost when I put it at 300 billion......well after doing some research I found it was MORE than 300 billion. As of 5:12 PM, September 18, 2006 the cost of the Iraq was was $315,653,854,841*
*www.theostroyreport.blogspot.com