Wait, really?

[Dave]

Originally Posted by t-homo

Fuck. Yes. 3 comments and a political debate ensues.

aint it grand. how long you think before someone mentions the so called "surplus"?

[Homeslice]

Originally Posted by Apoc

Ya, cuz bush never spent trillions on a senseless war in Iraq, to put Obama in a situation where even more money has to be wasted to keep afloat?

shmike is probably using a technicality, like "it wasn't trillions it was billions", or "Congress was cool with it too"

[goof2]

Originally Posted by Apoc

Thats fucked up as a society. Im talking about your economy.

Yeah, I guess Bush made banks lend and people borrow money they couldn't afford. Then he went to Wall Street and made them buy, sell, trade, and insure those overvalued loans people couldn't afford in the first place. He also overvalued and then tanked the real estate market which is where many of these loans were secured. In his spare time he made sure industry wasn't allowed to drill for more oil, build more oil refineries, build new nuclear power plants, build more coal power plants, or generally make any more power at all. For all the vacation people bitch about him taking he sure got shit done!

[derf]

Last week, the Census Bureau released a statistical report on the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. The numbers were brutal. On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose.
Adding insult to injury, the umpteenth insider look at Bush administration’s dysfunction was unveiled last week as well, courtesy of an obscure second-term speechwriter named Matt Latimer. (Next up: Bush’s White House chef tells all!) Latimer’s memoir, excerpted in GQ, offers grist for Bush-whackers of both parties. For liberals, there’s Dubya the incurious frat boy, flubbing policy details and cracking wise about Hillary Clinton’s posterior. For conservatives eager to prove that the most unpopular president in 50 years was never really one of them, there’s Bush the crypto-liberal, who dismisses the conservative movement and boasts that he personally “redefined the Republican Party.”
The census report is yet another nail in the coffin of Bush’s reputation; Latimer’s tell-all seems more like a thumbtack. Both are reminders that it’s hard to imagine his presidency being remembered as anything but a failure, by liberals and conservatives alike.
But if Bush is destined to go down as a failed president, come what may, he looks increasingly like an unusual sort of failure.
America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.
Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch.
This leaves him in an unusual position where the judgments of future generations are concerned. On foreign policy, Bush looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson — but only if Johnson, after years of unsuccessful escalation, had bequeathed Richard Nixon a new strategy that enabled U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam with their honor largely intact. On economic matters, he resembles Herbert Hoover — but only if Hoover, after presiding over the stock market crash of 1929, had engineered an economic response that nipped the Great Depression in the bud.
It’s true that Bush didn’t personally formulate the surge, or craft the bailout. But he was, well, the decider, and if he takes the blame — rightly — for what Donald Rumsfeld wrought, then he should get credit for Gen. David Petraeus’s successes in Iraq, and for blessing the sweeping decisions that Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke made in last September’s desperate weeks.
And if we give Bush credit on these fronts, it’s worth reassessing one of the major critiques of his presidency — that it was fatally insulated, by ideology and personality, from both the wisdom of the Washington elite and the desires of the broader public.
In reality, many of the Bush-era ventures that look worst in hindsight were either popular with the public at the time or blessed by the elite consensus. Voters liked the budget-busting tax cuts and entitlement expansions. The Iraq war’s cheering section included prominent Democrats and scores of liberal pundits. And save for a few prescient souls, everybody — right and left, on Wall Street and Main Street — was happy to board the real-estate express and ride it off an economic cliff.
Bush-era bipartisanship did produce some defensible legislation (No Child Left Behind, for instance). But more often, it produced travesties like the failed attempt at “comprehensive” immigration reform, lobbyist feeding frenzies like the 2005 energy bill, and boondoggles like the Department of Homeland Security.
By contrast, Bush’s best initiatives often lacked a constituency outside the White House: His AIDS-in-Africa program; his insistence, vindicated by subsequent scientific breakthroughs, on seeking alternatives to embryo-destroying research; his failed second-term proposals for Social Security and tax reform.
And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him.
This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow. But the next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one.

[squidward]

Originally Posted by Apoc

Thats fucked up as a society. Im talking about your economy.

Clary, you dirty Canuck.

Bush didn't fuck up our economy and society single-handedly, he was just a part of the problem that began long before he took office. Now it's Obama's turn to continue leading us down this lovely beach to the sea of destruction.

Back on topic, I mostly just lurk without participating in the conversation, but I have noticed the moderation issues that you have mentioned.

[marko138]

Derf, fuck you. The return key is your friend.

[tommymac]

Originally Posted by marko138

Derf, fuck you. The return key is your friend.

You better go moderate his ass

[marko138]

Originally Posted by tommymac

You better go moderate his ass

He keeps this shit up and I will.

[Rider]

Originally Posted by marko138

Derf, fuck you. The return key is your friend.

No shit, I'm not reading that mess.

[Amber Lamps]

Originally Posted by tommymac

You better go moderate his ass

To the point the there is over moderation here at TWFix. I honestly don't think that there is. Seriously. I would have been banned for life on most other boards by now and indeed several mods and other forum members have advocated that exact position several times in the past and during this present situation. I actually believe that I deserve to be banned. The only reason I haven't is because of the forbearance of Trip, Rae and possibly one or two others. The thing I think is the main
"problem " if you will, is that they do so little in the way of moderation normally that when do they do act it seems "excessive " by comparison. I was banned from Gixxernation for telling a mod that he can't spell, which is totally true BTW. If anything, I consider this board to under-supervised if anything. Just an opinion of course.