might as well post this .. but .. try to be nice ok..

[frenchy]

well just my 2 cents here .. i think we're all entitled to our opinions .. but facts are facts and nobody is entitled to their own facts if they're not facts .. you can like a politician or dislike him .. sometimes you might like him for what you think he stands for only to have been duped .. its happened before and it will happen again .. when john kennedy ran for president he was addressin a fund raiser by the league of women voters and he started off by askin how many of you here would like your son to grow up to be president ?? and they all raised their hands .. then he asked how many of you would like your son to grow up and be a politician and only one woman in the back raised her hand .. he looked at her and said your son madam has about the best chance .. basicly what he was sayin was politicians are not all that well respected .. revered somewhere between a lawyer and a skunk if i had to give em some kind of rating .. and this was back in 1960 .. its not like they've come up a few notches since then is it ?? so now i'll ask a simple question .. what did george bush do to garner the respect of anyone here in this group ?? no name callin .. just the cold hard facts .. what did his presidency accomplish that you could honestly say good job george ?? and i'm not pickin just one president .. we can go all the way back to fdr if you want .. but for now lets start with g.w and we'll go from there ..but lets try to stick to the facts and no name callin ok.. lets try and do this the civilized way .. 

[blithe spirit]

I think he was an Iraqi journalist....I found a clip

[blithe spirit]

I been thinking about it...not a darn thing I can thing of to garner any respect from me...but I'll work on it some more.

I think he probably married well... but that was before he became president.

[Karin M Fichtner]

I think being POTUS is just about the hardest job in the world, and I don't know why anyone would want it. I don't think any of us can really know how hard it is. GWB was the first president to have to deal with an atrocity like 9/11. I'm not sure any of the other presidents would've handled that any better. As I recall it, we, as a nation, were pretty interested in kicking someone's ass after we saw those innocent lives lost. I try not to judge anyone unless I've walked a mile in his/her shoes. In this case....whatever you do....about half of the country will disagree with you. Lincoln may be famous now, but he was hated by a helluva lot of people when he was in office. My big problem with GWB was that I felt he was not prepared for the job. But then.....who of us could've been ready to handle 9/11? It's easy to be a Monday Morning Quarterback. Try the job on for size for....oh, let's say a year.....and see how many of us like your job performance. Someone a lot smarter than me once said, "Judge not, lest you be judged".

[frenchy]

well i kinda agree with most of whats been said .. i can see there really ain't much to toot a horn about g.w.'s presidency .. which was pretty much how i figured it would go .. karin i agree about the lincoln thing .. that is so true .. but to be honest i don't think they'll ever be able to spin anything bush did to make him look anything at all like lincoln .. as far as why i despised him so much was the iraq war .. i agree that we wanted our pound of flesh after 9/11 and i never disagreed about us goin into afganastan to get bin ladin .. but if anyone followed the events that led up to the iraq war bush and chenney both tried to tie iraq to alquida ( there were none ) and there were so many red flags .. hans blix the un weapons inspector pleaded with bush to tell him where these weapons of mass destruction were so he could do his job but please don't invade ..bush never told him where they were .. joe wilson the ambasador asked where the wmd's were and also said if they had the weapons i think i would know .. i'm here full time and thats my job .. they never told him either so he wrote an op ed for i think it was the wall street journal sayin how he thought it would be so wrong to invade and chenney had his wife a cia operative outed and they blamed it on scooter libby . of course this all took some time to unfold but the end result was damm the torpedos full speed ahead we're gonna invade iraq .. and i could see it commin and i warned anyone who would listen .. you watch and see we'll be in iraq and it will look like we won in 15 minutes .. and then comes the hard part .. the occupation .. and they'll pick off a soldier or three a day till we leave .. and who knows how many iraqi's we killed .. and now that its all said and done what do we have to show for it all?? 4000 dead americans and probably triple that amount that will never be the same . over a trillion dollars in debt and the number will continue to grow till the last of the iraq war vets have all died .. so who even knows what the final figure will be ?? and the iraqi's hate us even more .. we never won the hearts and minds of the iraq people . and why would we ?? how could we ?? we probably killed about 100 thousand of em .. people don't forget so easy when you kill their whole family .. and no wmd's to show for it .. who woulda thunk it ?? saddamm was tellin the truth and bush was lyin . nahh i don't think history will ever turn bush into anything even close to lincoln .. and i'm not even sayin much about his economic policies .. clinton left him with a surplus that would have been good for the next 4 years if he just stayed the course and he squandered it in 15 minutes with his tax cuts .. so far the best thing that anyone can say about him is shadow with his fish story .. 

[AmerikinWmn]

You pretty much captured it, frenchy. I think by invading Iraq for imaginary WMD's we inflamed an already simmering middle eastern culture that didn't like us to begin with. We'll deal with that for the rest of time from what I can tell.

I tried to think of one thing good he did and came up with zip, although I wasn't aware of the ocean thing so I have to give him that. As for his response on 9/11, don't all presidents manage to gather their wits when faced with something like that? Harry Truman didn't seem like some balls out dude until he bombed Japan (not that I'm agreeing with that harsh of a response, read too much about the whys of that decision). 

[Shadowman]

Hey, I had to hunt for hours to find that. He held off on that until his oil buddies assured him there was nothing for them to drill for there.

I am not certain that Truman new exactly what an atomic bomb was or did. But it has now made it easier to date (not in the romantic sense) anything on the planet, radiated and pre-radiated. ;-)

[Karin M Fichtner]

Oh, please don't misunderstand, French.......there was no intention of comparing GWB with Lincoln at all!! No way! I just meant no president is popular with everybody. I agree with you 100% about Iraq. My (then) daughter-in-law and I had a rather heated argument about it just before she deployed for Iraq. My son had just left for Iraq a week earlier, and I told her if I lost my son in a war I didn't believe in or support.....I would not forgive GWB, and would scream bloody murder over it. She was all gung-ho, and was very upset with me. We agreed to disagree......but the night they bombed Baghdad, and I knew my son was flying up there in a sky that was lit up with bombs and anti-aircraft guns, trying to shoot him down.......well, words fail me. I didn't raise such a remarkable young man just to lose him to a cause I didn't believe in.

[Wayne Goodwin]

No one has mentioned the peanut farmer Carter or the Crook Nixon ...

[frenchy]

no we ain't gotten to them yet .. but we will ..i'm just tryin to give everyone a chance to say somethin good that g.w. did as president .. so far we got a fish story from shadow ..and thats about it ..

and no misunderstandin took karin .. you and me are good .. i knew what you meant .. and i agree with you .. history sometimes has a way of softenin some things as time goes on .. i'm not so sure in g.w.'s case tho .. like i said i never thought it was wrong to go to afganistan to get bin ladin . but just to get bin ladin and then to leave .. it never made any sense to me at all tho that we sent 5000 troops to afganistan to get bin ladin where he really was and 150,000 troops to iraq where he never was .. it seemed to me like it was a big shell game .. like bush didn't really wanna get bin ladin .. because of the ties his family had with his family ?? or he just wanted to drag the whole thing out ?? get to play in the war room ? if they knew bin ladin was in pakistan i woulda parked 150,000 troops on the border and told them you have 10 days to bring bin ladin out .. if not then we'll take it that you either can't find him or don't want to find him in either case then we'll find him .. we won't fire on anyone unless we're fired on but if we are we will return fire and you'll wish you had just brought bin ladin out like we asked when we're done .. once we get bin ladin we will return to our country . no occupation .. no nothin .. get bin ladin .. end of mission .. 

[Karin M Fichtner]

We couldn't have done that, French.  Pakistan is our "friend".....remember?  We can't ruffle their feathers. Heck, we're sending them millions of our hard-earned dollars!  That's what happens when  you hide out a wanted man who killed 3000 innocent people......they give you money! 

[frenchy]

well karin maybe we shouldn't have given them so much money and said we're not gonna be friends anymore cause the cost is too damm expensive .. we can't afford your friendship .. with friends like that .. who needs enemies .. don't get me wrong i'm not for bein a complete asshole .. but every now and then we have to just say fuck it .. look we know you're hidin that bastard and we ain't gonna stand for it .. so make up your mind .. what side of the fence you wanna be on .. cause we're gonna get that bastard with or without your help .. but trust us on this .. if its without your help you'll be soooo wishin you had helped by the time we get him .. 

[Karin M Fichtner]

I am with you all the way!!