So here’s the part where I say a bunch of shit upfront so that we have proper context going into the rest of the article and we don’t get bogged down in stressful convos about what certain things mean.
George W. Bush was not a good president. He wasn’t even an average President. Like most Republicans, he was singularly focused on helping the wealthy at the expense of everyone. He got thousands of our troops killed fighting a war against an enemy that wasn’t even in the place we initially started the war and lined oil execs pockets in the process. He tanked an economy that had been operating with a budget surplus. He holds a bunch of views too numerous and too offensive to recount that adversely affected the lives of millions of Americans in ways that we are still dealing with today. Please don’t think I’m some sort of George W. Bush apologist. I know and understand all that was bad about Dubya, and I would never wish another Bush presidency on anyone.
…Alright…everyone got the context? Okay. Good.
So while George W. Bush was a failure on several different fronts, one thing that I do think is that he gave a shit about what it meant to be President. His response to 9/11 is commendable and in some ways inspiring. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say Bush is a good person, but the Presidency makes assholes of anyone who is there. I think he was a decent person, basically. I think he did care if he was sending young men to their deaths, even if he kept on doing it. I believe he did love America and have something approximating a vision for what it could be instead of what it was.
And when Dubya sent a message calling for unity amid the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday morning, I think he meant it. I think he saw that partisan in-fighting and states bowing to pressure from the federal government, and thought maybe, just maybe, he could inspire us for a moment, so we could maybe forget how polarized shit is and realize that we are all humans, and that there are people dying, and that in trying times, we need to band together and help out our fellow man.
President Twitta Fingaz took those calls for unity and promptly told George W. Bush to fuck off, and then started an epic Twitter meltdown about how awesome he was. (In this bastard timeline, we just call this a normal ass Sunday.)
I mean, it’s not shocking, is it? The only way Trump can continue to exist is if America is as polarized as possible. That’s why you see Trump praising armed protesters storming state capital buildings with assault weapons. Trump is desperate to try to end this “news cycle” (“news cycle” meaning that 2000 Americans a day are still dying and coronavirus cases are still going up and Trump still has no compulsion to actually do anything to stop the spread), and he knows the only way he can is by changing the conversation.
It must be stated, again, that most available, credible polling suggests that people are just fine with businesses staying closed to prevent the spread of the disease. But when people turn on the news and see people protesting, even if it’s just a small group of armed nutjobs, it has the power to make people think his movement is way bigger than it actually is, particular with Republicans.
Calls for unity hurt Trump’s ability to divide and conquer.
So now we have a scenario where the President who was widely considered to be a dumbass, has to call for unity because a President who is actually a dumbass is so focused on getting the economy up and running that he can’t be bothered to think about the incalculable amount of death he will probably cause. And moreover, from a cynical point of view, he’s potentially causing all that death in red states, the thing he needs to win an election.
Time grants those who are willing a lot of prospective. I was in middle school and high school during Bush’s presidency, and I can remember palpably despising the man even before I understood politics. I remember being very scared that he would re-institute the draft and send me to war. I remember laughing at Will Ferrell’s impression of him.
But as time has gone on, I think what I’ve realized is George W. Bush was just your average, run-of-the-mill bad President. I’ve said before that I don’t understand why anyone would want to be President, and that being a President is not easy (nor should it be), and I am realizing more than ever why not just anybody should be President.
But if intelligence can’t be a baseline for being a President, at least compassion should be. At least an understanding of what the Presidency is, how it works and what it means should be. A President maybe doesn’t have to have a brain, but that should have something that kinda sorta resembles a soul. Or a heart. For whatever metaphysical concepts those are.
I think Bush does have those. I think his call for unity comes from a good place, even in spite of the bad things he’s done, and he’s done a lot.
Trump telling a colleague to get bent because in his calculation the amount of people who die is worth it if it helps him win an election, while writing delusional tweets about how he’s defeated a virus that’s killing thousands of people a day and has left families unable to even bury their dead and have funerals?
That’s vile and fucking evil, man. There’s no two ways about it.
TL;DR version; Donald Trump has made George W. Bush seem sane, compassionate and competent. Chew on that for a little while.
We’ve sunk so far in less than four years. At this point Trump is basically rabid, attacking anything that crosses his limited field of vision or that makes a sound in his presence. President Cujo is incapable of any sort of rational behavior — a normal human would have welcomed Bush’s statement and echoed it, hoping to build on what’s left of the former president’s popularity. President Hydrophobia is biting the hand that’s trying to feed him, completely oblivious to any repercussions. It’s no coincidence that these bizarre frenzies happen on Sundays when Old Yeller is largely unmonitored by anybody who could possibly convince him to stop.
Old Yeller. That’s good shit right there, if I do say so myself. All y’all remember who coined it.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, mostly in agreement with you. I think Bush did care about being president and I think he wanted to be seen as a good president (he wasn’t). I find it HIGHLY amusing that Bush put out this chicken shit video where he wouldn’t call anyone out about anything specific – it basically amounts to, “let’s care for each other!” and Trump immediately flipped out. When you see, “what if we try to be good people” as a direct attack on you…um….
I get a little irritated in these conversations about Bush (not directed at you) – like, we can compare Bush to Trump without giving Bush a pass on being a war criminal. Bush has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people (millions?) on his hands and we should never forget it. But Bush didn’t commit the crimes Trump and his people have, try to totally dismantle the functionality of the government, and always tried to present himself as a president of everyone. Now, I think that Trump is the logical extension of Bush – Bush was not as brave about blatantly committing crimes to make his friends rich – but Trump does that shit out in the open now. Trump is trying to be the warmonger Bush was but lacks the competence and keeps choosing the wrong enemies so he can’t get the whole world to enter a war for him.
If we had Bush today, and applied his 9/11 reaction to COVID, I think this is what we’d see: Americans viewing it as an act of patriotism to social distance (and states surrendering their rights to allow a federal police state to enforce it), Americans willingly handing over their privacy for testing and tracing, and some bones being thrown to keep small businesses afloat that will have consequences several years from now (like a tax break that expires and fucks them in the long run, or something). I think Bush would be getting his rally around the flag bump, sure, and I genuinely think he’d understand that if he wanted to win reelection, he’d have to get this virus under control and take care of people. He’d likely have set that up in a way that fucked us little guys in the long run, but he wouldn’t be baiting his own fucking voters to die.
Bush good? Hell no. As bad as Trump? Also no. I think Bush would at least have tried to handle this, would have listened to experts, and would just fucking for one second get on TV and show that he was sad for people’s suffering.
I’m in total agreement with you. Like, it’s staggering to me that “If Bush was evil, at least he was competently evil” is even a thing I have to think about at this point, but I find myself thinking it all the time.
Even if you take a completely cynical viewpoint and say all Bush would care about is getting re-elected, I still don’t think he’d fuck this up as bad as Trump. At minimum he’d be able to *pretend* to give a shit about people dying. Every time Trump mentions the death toll, he’s like “Okay, sure, thousands of people have died, but if only 70,000, oops I mean 100,000 people die, that means I’m doing a good job, and not only am I doing a good job, I’m doing the best job that anyone could do under the circumstances”.
It’s fucking mind-boggling that Dubya’s entire legacy is being re-written as “ahh, he killed thousands and doomed us all with economic policies and his constantly playing to evangelicals, but meh, he wasn’t *that* bad” just because Trump is such an evil shitbag that it puts literally everything that came before us in an entirely different context.
For fuck’s sake, even *Ronald Reagan* would be better at this, if for no other reason than he wouldn’t want more white people to die.
Yeah exactly – he’d at least pretend. I think Trump believes he has a cult who will do anything for him (he’s right), a bunch of powerful people who will commit any crimes to get him elected (he’s right), and that he can get away with shit (he’s usually right). Bush didn’t have those things and so he at least had to attempt to answer to the voters sometimes.
Like, Bush would at least not want people to die because it would hurt him electorally.
I think, shockingly, this conversation often lacks nuance. We can compare Bush and Trump without letting one of them off the hook for their crimes. They are both terrible. Saying Bush would handle this more competently doesn’t mean he wasn’t waging illegitimate wars nad killing brown people to make his friends rich. It just means he might have at least cared about not killing Americans – which is more than we can say for Trump.
Yup. Like, AT LEAST Bush would’ve cared that Americans were dying. AT LEAST. At best he has the bare minimum required empathy that would’ve made American citizens dying under his watch hurt him a little bit, and at worse he would have enough advisers he trusted and listened to that he’d be able to cobble together something that resembled empathy.
The bar has been lowered so far that it’s no longer even a bar, it’s a line drawn in chalk on the side walk, and Trump can’t even clear that.
Or even if he was a secret psychopath with no empathy, he knew that other people were sad and he is supposed to care about that haha.
He didn’t really care that much about Katrina.
It’s hard to think of any president that could possibly handle this worse. Bush was dumb, but he knew that he needed people who were smarter than him to tell him what to do. Therefore, Cheney. No way Cheney would have let this shit happen on his watch. Emperor Palpatine would’ve have had every scientist in the US and most of the world working to build the Death Star … err, I mean coming up with a vaccine … on the taxpayer dime to be sold at premium prices to line corporate pockets.
Trump is too stupid to even work that out that line of reasoning. Cheney would’ve been marketing vaccines (through cronies, natch, and stowing cash in offshore accounts) by Jan. 15. That’s the difference between a career criminal and an bungling, imbecilic amateur.
But not only is Trump that stupid, but no one in his inner circle of “best people” managed to work out that particular grift. I mean, it was RIGHT THERE.
I think the most staggering thing about Trump is just how bad he is at being a con artist. Like, you’d think you’d have to be at least average at being a grifter to amass the wealth and the power he has, but NOPE, not him!
It also doesn’t help that Trump routinely fires people who are even somewhat competent. I’m honestly surprised Mike Pence has lasted this long in this office. Fauci’s continued employment has to be the result of everyone not named Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump pleading with him that it would be a bad political move to fire him.
When you hire a bunch of shitty con artist to advise the head con artist, then it’s no wonder there’s money left on the table. For fuck’s sake, I don’t think I’d hate Trump as much if he just managed to sufficiently evil to make himself money. But he can’t even steal money from taxpayers correctly!
Honesst question – can the president fire the VP? I know he could take him off the reelection ticket but I dunno, is that a position the president can just fire?
The Constitution says that a vice president can be removed in the same ways the President can be removed, which is basically impeachment. So technically no, but you just know they’d find a way if they could.
I mean if Trump decided he wanted Pence gone, Congress would impeach him I guess.
To those of us with a functioning cortex, we see a terrible con man doing a terrible job of being a con man. Yet, he has about 100 million people believing his medical advice over physicians. If he told them the sun rose in the west today, they’d think for half a second, say “yup, that checks out”, and believe it because it fell from his pudgy lips. So while a lot of us see him for what he is, there are enough of our fellow citizens – all with voting rights – who bought in, even against their own self-interest.
Yeah I have been saying this for months now – Trump’s administration could have turned this into a total Republican win. He could have shut down the borders early (AND HE WOULD HAVE BEEN RIGHT TO DO IT!). He could have activated the DPA and made some potential contractors EXTREMELY rich – and we could be selling all of it to the rest of the world. I think Bush (Cheney) would have done these things. They would recognize you want to be in charge of this crisis.
(edit – Fuck, he could have mandated the government pour money into hospitals and insurance companies to deal with this – the fact that hospitals are in financial straits because of this can’t possibly make a lot of his buddies very happy).
And all these moderate types who aren’t so sure about Trump, or those like, Republican never-Trumpers? They’d get starry eyed about how great America is in the face of this crisis and line up behind him.
Instead we are in a situation where he’s encouraging his supports to kill their grandparents.
I don’t ask much from my wannabe-dictators and con artists, but I at least ask that they do a good job at being wannabe-dictators and con artists!
Trump literally only used the DPA to try to piss off companies he doesn’t like. He used it with GM and felt like he was punishing them, and I’m sure no one explained that GM was going to sell those ventilators and make substantial money from them.
Money stares this man in the face and he just blinks at it without knowing what it really is.
It adds insult to the injury for sure.
Now you’ve got me thinking about how much I would love to see Trump arguing over his record with Cheney. I would pay real money to watch that.
I think you are mostly correct on how Bush would have handled it but you left out he would have found a way to give money to oil/gas companies by now, Cheney would have made sure that Halliburton got the contract to handle PPE’s, and we probably would have attacked Iran by now. I don’t think Bush was as bad as Trump but I don’t think Bush was our president, I think Cheney was and he was almost as bad as Trump, just quieter. The fucker doesn’t even have a working heart anymore and he still lives? That is some 2nd level evil right there.
Oh sure! The giveaways would always prioritize their favorites first.
At the very least, Cheney would’ve done his illegal deals with just enough patriotism smeared on top that if you looked at the with squinted eyes, you might believe he was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
*mostly remembers bush as the president that was nearly murdered by a pretzel*
but im in europe..we mostly just laughed about his screw ups and went back to largely ignoring what america was doing back then (or..i did anyway..i wasnt really paying attention back then)
anyhoo…now hes not the president he dont seem so bad..
course the current prez may be skewing my perception some…
It is the actions and belief systems of those Trump supporters who are doubling down on that support during the daily Presidential Appalling Activity that scare me.
I think I need to listen to Thom Hartmann today, he usually talks about these little things he writes on his show the same day.
https://buzzflash.com/articles/which-president-has-done-more-harm-and-damage-to-america-george-w-bush-or-donald-trump
…could be I’m off base but to me it seems like the two men are a pretty good illustration of the extent to which privilege is not a transferrable currency
…neither would have got within a mile of the White House if they hadn’t been their father’s son & both have provided plenty of evidence that they aren’t the sharpest tool in the box even on their best day
…but Bush grew up steeped in a political context while the toddler-in-chief grew up in one that revolved around being a parasitic entity primarily interested in trying to leech funds out of the state while engaged in the kind of criminal behaviour that is pretty much the antithesis of public service
…& wasn’t even shrewd enough to grasp that the shortcuts aren’t the actual ballgame even in the grift…because he may actually not grasp either that they’re shortcuts or what the actual path looks like
…Bush knew how to play his position because he fundamentally understood the position
…Donald “total authority/total immunity/total exoneration” Trump doesn’t have the first clue how any of this shit works to the point that no one can even fucking explain it to him in a way he can remember from one sentence to the next
…the idea of someone with his disdain for any semblance of an agenda that isn’t straightforwardly a self-serving disaster combined with even a Bush Jr level of competence…let alone staffing…with Mitch on deck in the Senate…that shit is flat out terrifying to me to be perfectly honest?
You are totally correct. Jr’s agenda was to finish the shit that daddy started. Trumps agenda is to make himself rich and stroke his ego. They both are evil, just one is a little less flagrant about it. The only good things I can say about Bush is he tried to act presidential (something we all miss about now) and he didn’t talk trash about Obama (though Cheney sure did) after he left office.
Yes. The Bushes are an old political family. W and Jeb were raised to be politicians. W is pretty dumb, Jeb is smarter, but both have been in the game practically from birth. They know how it’s played.
Trump is a cheap thug. Even before his mind started deteriorating, he didn’t understand anything beyond lying, cheating, blackmail, and arm twisting. He doesn’t understand why anyone would use subtlety at all, or why they’d even WANT to. He can’t cover his tracks because he doesn’t understand how, or again, why he even should.
W managed to fumble his way through the presidency because he was able to fake it ’til he made it, or at least fake it until he ran out the clock, because that’s how he was raised. Trump doesn’t have the benefit of a political upbringing plus he’s appallingly stupid (even pre-dementia), coupled with a staggering level of arrogance. That’s why he lost his father’s fortune.
I was in my early 20’s when Bush was elected. At the time he was in office, I considered him a bumbling fool who fell upwards due to daddy’s accomplishments. The picture of ineptitude born of privilege, with a desperate need for daddy’s approval born of low self esteem. I never really saw him as evil (Cheney was evil), just gullible and easily led. He drank the kool-aid and behaved accordingly.
He was good at saying shit to rally Americans around the flag though, and that message was more of the same. Lacking in real substance, because he lacks real substance, but inspiring to the rank and file nonetheless. I hope Trump continues to lose his shit over it. Really makes the point for getting his ass out.
“I’m a uniter, not a divider.”
Remember that shit?