I wonder...

[vakkotaur]

Do all, or indeed any, of the people that prattled on about how George W. Bush would somehow manufacture or at least take advantage of an event to assume an extended Presidency or outright dictatorship.... do they now feel as silly as they are?

Yeah, I doubt it too.

Comments

[temperlj.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that was a concern of mine but I'm happy to be wrong

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Why was it a concern of yours? Had any US President ever done any such thing before? And had Bush given any sign that he would be the one to break precedent and attempt this crime -- a crime with, moreover, little chance of success?

[temperlj.livejournal.com]

Because he supports regimes that do. Don't get me wrong I'm a libertarian and will vote for any party I feel like but I felt Bush (and his father's ex-CIA cronies) were particularly underhanded.

And Wow, you hopped on that. your sarcasm was such a reward for being honest.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Because he supports regimes that do.

Oh, you mean like almost every US President from Wilson on? I ask you again, why did you particularly think that Bush was going to do this, when Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush the Elder and Clinton did not?

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Blaming Bush for his father's alleged cronies' acts is more than a little bit of a stretch. As for supporting those who did things like that, the only one I can think of during Bush's term is Pakistan's Musharraf (who Bush told to cut it out) and that lunatic in Venezuela.

There are lots of folks who held this view, and it baffles me - and greatly insults Bush's integrity. Of course, that's par for the course. Obama's declaration of yesterday as a national day of reconciliation rings hollow, because his supporters aren't interested in reconciliation, just their opponents' capitulation.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

In fact, Bush was less willing to support dictators than was any post-Wilson President with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter -- and Carter's highly-selective opposition to right-wing dictators brought us the Nicaragua War and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The funny thing is that the historically-ignorant can, on the one hand, accuse Bush of "supporting dictators," while missing the point that he actively toppled two dictatorships, replacing them with democracies.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Of course, acknowledging that he toppled dictatorships would require that there was some good to come out of the war in Iraq, which their worldview simply cannot allow.

Carter's foreign policy is best summed up as "punish our friends and cozy up to our enemies". That Obama is proposing to follow the same path disturbs me more than anything else in his foreign policy positions.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I think Obama's will be the "Carter II" Presidency, leading to foreign-policy diasters (real ones, not Old Europe whining that we don't love them anymore) and his loss of the Presidency in a landslide in 2012.

[malterre.livejournal.com]

Did people miss the second sentence of my original comment or are you going to hop all over the ass of the *second* commenter just to be fair?

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

What original comment? This is the first comment you've posted to this entry.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Uh, what second sentence?

[malterre.livejournal.com]

BTW this is temper commenting, I just happened to be in my other journal. And everyone is entitled to their opinion and I'm not turning Vakkotaur's journal into a debate journal. There are other places for that

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

In the interests of factual clarification, I'd say the Taliban counted far more as a theocracy than dictatorship.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

No doubt it was only due to their enlightened vigilance that such a catastrophe was prevented. Dubya would have launched a coup, but he feared their disapproval.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Despite their going on about his "historically low" approval rating which would indicate not being too concerned with what they might or might not approve of. While, of course, merrily ignoring the even lower approval ratings of a Congress that had a majority of their preferred party.

[sideband.livejournal.com]

You're using logic to refute the arguments of those who "feel" their way to policy positions. That Simply Will Not Work. Unfortunate as that may be.

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

No, quite a few of us feel rather silly, and are quite relieved to be shown to be wrong in this regard.

[sideband.livejournal.com]

Does this mean I get to say, "I told you so!" now? ::smirk::

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

This time, yes.

[sideband.livejournal.com]

I'm certain their stance has already left their minds, as most of the people who spew such drivel have the memory of a goldfish... It resets every 17 seconds, or whenever it's most convenient for them.

[viergacht.livejournal.com]

I'd rather have a competant president than one I can "call out" so I can appear cool :P

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It was rather poor phrasing perhaps. It's not about appearing cool, but being the neutral or non-partisan observer or such that many merely claim to be. I doubt he's all that eager for a Presidential screw-up, which is pretty much inevitable.

I'd like a competent President too, but I have yet to be convinced. So far I can see that Obama is a very competent speaker. That's a useful attribute, but not that critical, or so I recall many saying during the Reagan administration.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Or at least a competent TelePrompter reader.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

I'm personally quite pleased and hopeful by the centrist turn the man took with his Cabinet picks after the election. Obama in late November was a much more acceptable figure, to me, than Obama in late October.

Going to have to wait and see whether that's more than cosmetic, of course. A President doesn't *have* to listen to his Cabinet.

[brodycatsmouth.livejournal.com]

Hm, I never really commented on this topic.

I shrug off most fearmongering. Bush extending his tenure? Ridiculous. Obama destroying healthcare? Probably won't be that apocalyptic. The world is a sliding scale.

[woody-whistler.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I never worried about Bush creating a dictatorship, even when I disagreed with much of his domestic and foreign policies. Likewise, I have issues with Obama's fiscal plans but I'm not afraid he's some sort of unhinged socialist waiting for the opportunity to seize wealth for redistribution.

It's possible to disagree with one's position without needing to vilify the person which whom we disagree.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Very, very true on your later statement.

On Obama being an unhinged socialist waiting for the opportunity to seize wealth for redistribution: this *was* a significant concern for me in the month or so immediately before the election. It's not so much one now, as evidenced by his behavior *since* the election.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Probably the same percentage that feel silly about calling Obama a communist and closet Muslim...

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Well, while we have the smoking gun that Bush wouldn't work the war to his advantage for another term (in the fact that he's no longer President), the ones that call Obama a communist or a Muslim don't have such a smoking gun. They are wrong, of course, but nothing happened on January 20 to make them change their mind, whereas something *did* happen on January 20 to make people change their mind about Bush finagling a third term.

[bronxelf-ag001.livejournal.com]

As much as I loathe him, I always thought that particular point was way tinfoil hat, and I've called people out on it before.

[aatheus.livejournal.com]

Silly? No. Relieved? Yes. I'm just glad to see the new guy in the chair.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Personally, I never actually said that he would do so - but it would not have surprised me if he had. And I don't feel silly at all.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Given that it's flat-out unconstitutional and would have roused opposition from both political parties, and that no other President has ever done this before -- not even wartime Presidents who have taken much more extreme war measures than Bush ever did, why would you not have been "surprised" if Bush made such an attempt?

[ken-redtail.livejournal.com]

I've known so many who've said that and claimed if he did, they'd "move to Canada," which is exactly like "leaving the fandom." Of course they have their own set of nutters running that show up north for the past several years too, so that's all beyond me.

Doubtless these people will feel some sort of victory that they prevented such a thing. Or something.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I've never really understood the "leaving the country" thing as how can it improve (assuming that someone is leaving as things are in need of improvement) if the folks that see the problem leave and thus do nothing about it. Sure, in genuinely extreme cases (Europe in the mid-late 1930s) there are reasons to bolt. But that is extreme and implying a similarity is, at best, unwarranted hyperbole.