Worst thing Bush did in office

Katrina, ftw.

jesus how the fuck are you supposed to choose

What a glorious eight years it's been

Opposes Kyoko Protocol

this would be the international protocol to endorse japanese pop idol kyoko fukada, right?
http://www.kyokofukada.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/kyoko-fukada4.jpg

I'm happy to give my backing to this particular protocol

I think basically imagining (and for the most part implementing) an executive branch with basically limitless power and then consequently flaut both national and international law is the worst thing Bush has done. That's not on the list but really it's the starting point for all the worst things on the list.

impossible choice

I should send the list to Jonah Goldberg and and K-Lo and ask them to tell me which way to vote.

yeah i think it's the constitution in a walk

alex in sf otm. unitary executive doctrine. which is kind of "wipes ass with constitution"

but in terms of time i was most consistently furious during this administration, 94/7, katrina definitely.

Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Melted Icecap in the Snow)

Being asleep on watch during a major attack on your territory, then acting the military hardman & railroading a victory in the next election off the back of it when you should have resigned because you're a fucking incompetent tit is probably the worst thing I can think of "failing to prevent 9/11" is the best fit for that? What a choice, though. He really was the worst US president in my lifetime (NB my lifetime includes Nixon)

"in your lifetime"? He was the worst president in the history of the United States including the future.

over and above the iraq war and all that shit, I think gitmo has been the biggest FUCK YOU to any ideas of justice, legality, human rights, ethics, international law, international co-operation, respect for and from other countries, long-term thinking, sanity, etc etc...

"Don't throw the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper."

i guess this option encompasses a lot of the list so maybe this one but jesus god

i mean in terms of people directly affected it's pretty small, but as a symbol it's a biggie. xp to self.

invasion of iraq

Where is "threw his dog face-first onto a runway in front of traumatized Girl Scouts"?

oh wait, wrong thread

gotta be iraq, i mean... it directly resulted in killing hella pps

cant get much worse than that imo

He had lots of BIPARTISAN help for many of these items, btw

gotta be iraq, i mean... it directly resulted in killing hella pps

cant get much worse than that imo

― ಥ﹏ಥ (cankles), Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:48 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^ legal respect for the constitution can be restored - those people are dead forever

Your definiton of "lots", "many" and "bipartisan" don't appear in the dictionary for some reason.

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/patriotact20012006senatevote.shtml

Inclined to agree that invasion of Iraq was probably the worst on this list and although Dems can be blamed for being spineless on it, Bush was going ahead with this regardless.

agree w/canks and snakes

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

http://www.twincities.com/ci_10951225

>:(

The "stuff" included images of Fallujah residents, children among them, killed by his unit as it swept through neighborhoods that were supposed to have been evacuated.

"We search houses. We see people in there — they're not supposed to be there. They're considered hostile. We just opened fire," he said.

"We saw a little kid in the middle road. There was no stopping the convoy. We ran him over."

McBee's condition worsened in June, after a friend and fellow veteran committed suicide. He checked into a veterans homeless shelter in Leeds, Mass., and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as alcohol dependence. He has suffered migraines, hearing loss, various back and shoulder problems.

Morbs, I am not disputing that at least five of these can be partly laid at the feet of "some" pathetic Democrats.

Inclined to agree that invasion of Iraq was probably the worst on this list and although Dems can be blamed for being spineless on it, Bush was going ahead with this regardless.

Some were direct participants, including out Vice President-elect: Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

I don't see the $700 billion bailout on that list.

out=our

the effects of the 700 billion bailout are yet to be determined

Iraq invasion, for the reasons given by others.

x-post

Great point.

>>Bush was going ahead with this regardless.

That hubris is really the punchline to many of the choices above, Bush believing that he didn't have to answer to American voters, House and Senate, world opinion, ANYBODY basically.

So yeah, unprovoked Iraq invasion tops the list, although I concur that Katrina response was monumentally inept, and gives a good inkling of what "Homeland Security" will do if the next terrorist attack hits, say, an American dam site.

i would like to change my vote to the iraq war--mods please make a lot of it in yr excel spreadsheet when u tabulate results

false claims about WMD, I think, because it then causes Iraq, prisoner abuse, patriot act, etc.

Left out "Stole 2000 election", but I suppose technically that was before he was in office.

yeah i left that out for that reason.

I as an outsider say Iraq invasion.

Where is "threw his dog face-first onto a runway in front of traumatized Girl Scouts"?

oh wait, wrong thread

― Black Seinfeld (HI DERE), Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:45 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

What?

Hard to pick just one

Perhaps implicit in some of these items, but worth stating by itself: rejecting the Geneva Conventions and establishing torture as U.S. policy

I'm going with Guantanamo Bay, because Bush had a very direct hand in every aspect of it (or Cheney more accurately); it totally flaunted international and American norms/values/laws/morals/principles/etc; it was totally calculated and sinister; and it was/is a total fucking debacle.

Kind of encapsulates it all.

Too hard. Guantanamo! No, wait, WMD lies! Wait, no, Katrina! Wait, no, anti-environmentalism! Argh! [Head explodes]

A lot of the items on the list collapse into each other, so I picked "warrantless surveillance" -- it encompasses everything we need to know about the Bush administration's theories on the imperial presidency. The horror stories that we've learned from Jack Goldsmith and James Comey about the maneuvering behind the scenes are worthy of a third-rate banana republic in a Conrad novel.

ive heard from education ppl that 'no child left behind' while imperfect did have some really positive aspects, its biggest problem was that it was an unfunded mandate

The only way to reform the education system is to nationalize it, then teach first graders how to read with Conrad novels.

jesus no

What?

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushdropsdog.htm

It was actually a softball team, not Girl Scouts. Still funny, though!

Also I am against book-burning but not book-bashing, and Heart of Darkness is one of the books that has pissed me off the most due to its rampant, unapologetic racism.

iraq, jhoshea + canks otm

esp since it's closely tied with false claims about wmds for justification

dan i'd love 2 know ur reaction when u first heard about the nigger of narcissus - like, at least you need to start reading heart of darkness to find out it's racist, with this shit u just look at the cover and ur like 'lol wut'

also i gotta be honest, i cant get that worked up about the torture stuff. maybe i'm just jaded but it's not like the dudes were killed! i mean i hate when conservatives try to marginalize it and compare it to hazing or some shit, and i understand on a conceptual level it's more galling i guess because there's no real justification for it, whereas women and children dying is sort of an accepted consequence of war, but the end result is still much shittier - also tbh i am assuming that some of the dudes tortured were terrorists, which makes me not really care that much

i mean, at least they aint gettin beheaded

Some of the dudes getting tortured were random people picked up in international airports.

I picked Katrina because there was no rational justification or ideological misunderstanding for not responding to the situation.

Plus he did it to us, and we are more important than foreigners.

i mean, at least they aint gettin beheaded

this is essentially my mother's entire defense of the bush administration.

Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. [1] The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference).

i mean sure it's only a couple hundred people but let's not try to downplay it. in light of the fact that our government is supposedly built on principles of transparency and rule of law, and given that sometime in the middle of the 20th century we became the self-appointed international torchbearer for these principles it's a pretty striking moral failure to set up a gulag right off the coast of florida.

it might be right on the bottom of the list next to plamegate but that doesn't mean you shouldn't lose sleep over it. (lord knows as a naturalized iranian citizen i do).

I heartily endorse this poll and/or event but cannot vote due to (a) aaaaaargh the choice and (b) no 'is total cunt' option.

Bush regrets some stuff

I'd say there are plenty of 'total cunt' options on this poll

i wonder how bush will feel if obama succeeds in cleaning up his myriad messes

relieved? jealous? etc???

Yeh, to go into Iraq you've just got to be very very wrong, but to give thumbs up to GB you've got to be a real cunt.

maybe i'm just jaded but it's not like the dudes were killed!

apart from like the dudes that got tortured and then died, in the showers and cells at abu graib etc.

i thought phillip gourevich and errol morris' standard operating procedure was a really excellent illustration of how iraq was wrong on so many levels. i agree with the things rumsfelt etc say about how casualty figures obscure the true picture of war - in this case, because they're so overwhelming, you don't even start to get a picture of what was happening everyday, in terms of people being picked up on the street and imprisoned en masse, housed in absurdly overcrowded and insecure shell-magnet jail cells, treated like shit day and night even without it reaching the point of torture, and even when the torture didn't reach murder.

so iraq, with all the geneva-convention flaunting etc that it entails.

schlump have you seen Taxi To The Dark Side?

The No Child Left Behind is one more nail in the coffin that is the dumbing down of the American populace, and will work to ensure that the next generation is dumb enough to elect the spawn of Bush president in 2016. By emphasizing standardized tests (and therefore "teaching to the test") and dramatically narrowing the curriculum, it punishes students that have needs that lie outside of the average. A gifted student with a more open mind will not be able to pursue their interests, and challenged students will find helpful programs disappear as funding is taken away to make sure the NCLB quota is reached school-wide. Did anyone scream "Socialism" when Bush decided to step up the federalizing of national education?

yeah actually i think a lot of people did

what is weird about the torture thing is that I've always assumed they did this stuff anyway so none of it was particularly surprising. blame movies/24.

schlump have you seen Taxi To The Dark Side?

nuh uh and i was just making a note to having seen the thread get bumped. i was kind of a little disappointed in the standard operating procedure docu, but that's maybe because i'd read the book and love morris - it's the aforementioned everyday stuff that seems more affecting than the sensational headline grabbing things, and i think the problem with sop was that it made these seem like freak occurrences, when it seems that it was only the documentation that was particularly unusual. uhh, it all just reminds me of watching docus about my lai with shaky veterans talking about scalping kids, or about zimbardo prison experiments: people just shouldn't be put in these situations. the book of sop is great for revealing the profound lack of planning involved in arranging prisons - like the people who traveled to kuwait to see what an average prison population might be in a neighbouring country, not even in wartime, and knew that abu graib wasn't one tenth.

i am rambling. what's taxi to the dark side like? i remember a favourable sight and sound write up.

xp akm - yeah, i can't believe that this was the freak occurrence it's treated as, just one that people were idiotic enough to document, adding another grizzly dimension to the torture while doing so.

Taxi to the Dark Side is MUCH better than the Morris doc, schlump.

― Adam Bruneau

dude are you the 8bit musician from atl or another adam bruneau

obama's not going to make a big spectacle of dismantling the torture mandate - he'll just quietly dismantle it.

one of the biggest drawbacks of the torture regime - from a strictly selfish pov - is that america has opened the door to other countries torturing americans with impunity if they so choose. quietly dismantling the series of executive orders that authorize torture wouldn't send the loud message that needs to be sent if america wants to put that beast back in its box.

tracer otm.

plus after all it is part of something he ran on: restoring the idea of the US as a leader by example (btw in the debates, i noticed cnn's ohio undecideds graph spiked sharply when he spoke of this).

I'd say there are plenty of 'total cunt' options on this poll

― sonderangerbot, Wednesday, 12 November 2008 23:44 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That's my point: No way in hell can I choose just one, or three, or 12. This revolting arse bomb bulldozed his way through the planet so many times and in so many disgusting ways that an 'is total cunt' option would make the choice much easier.

That's my point: No way in hell can I choose just one, or three, or 12. This revolting arse bomb bulldozed his way through the planet so many times and in so many disgusting ways that an 'is total cunt' option would make the choice much easier.

― GO BLACK DUDE FROM SPACE ♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡ (Autumn Almanac), Wednesday, November 12, 2008 2:46 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban

didn't you vote for john howard?

Only after I got the hell away from my excessively-right-wing brain-washing parents. Not proud.

(in fact I mentioned it in the 'not proud' thread for that very reason)

ethan quit using jaymc's xls for evil purposes

no kidding

t/s voting for a wank before said wankitude took place v stalking complete strangers

how am i stalking you, dogg? i saw on ilx a couple weeks ago you said you voted for john howard and remembered it because - really - what the fuck. before that i only knew you were the angry roided out dude who reminded me of mark c and didnt even know you were australian & capable of voting for john howard

From that CNN article:

The president said he wishes he had not spoken in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003. The now-infamous moment occurred aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln only a month after U.S. troops in Iraq were deployed.

HOW COULD ANYONE NOT SEE THAT THIS WAS AN INCREDIBLY BLOODY OBVIOUSLY STUPID THING TO DO?? EVEN AT THE TIME IT WAS A REALLY REALLY INCREDIBLY BLOODY OBVIOUSLY STUPID THING TO DO. WHAT THE FUCK.

dude are you the 8bit musician from atl or another adam bruneau

― and what, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 11:58 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest

Hah. Yeah that one, an old Super Madrigal Brother!

more signing statements than all the rest of the presidents in US history, combined.
the Unitary Executive

fart around with Karl Rove

One of the most striking things about Standard Operating Procedure the book for me was how much of the torture at Abu Ghraib was inflicted on prisoners who were either obviously mentally ill or at least deranged from previous imprisonment, torture and war. Just one more unanticipated (for me) further level of horror.

I voted Iraq war for all the reasons listed above plus--instead of a detail picked to represent the whole as some people are saying of Gitmo etc.--it's the big tent that really encompasses every last nugget of shit. Imperial dreaming, steamrolling congress, breaking alliances, illegal invasion, torture, incompetence, delusion, criminal fiscal irresponsibility... it's all right fucking there.

You could add Walter Reed to the list too, though wartime administrations screwing veterans isn't exactly unprecedented.

by emphasizing standardized tests (and therefore "teaching to the test") and dramatically narrowing the curriculum, it [no child left behind] punishes students that have needs that lie outside of the average

i just want to point out that there are two different things going on here. focusing on standardized tests isn't a terrible idea. in fact, on a certain level, it's sort of commendable thing to do. almost all the countries in europe and asia with high standards of education do widespread standardized testing. that said, it's really pathetic that in america "standardized testing" = multiple choice scantron forms. which does, yes, lead to a drastic narrowing of the curriculum.

compare our science tests ("which part of the diagram shows the ribosome: A, B, C or D?") to those from sweden ("write a two paragraph essay explaining how you would construct an experiment to test whether a new chemical fertilizer works. include a drawing") or singapore ("explain everything you can about this circuit diagram, using words, graphs and equations. be sure to explain potential applications") or new zealand ("explain why a long distance runner might eat brown rice while a short distance runner might drink a sports drink, with detailed reference to cellular respiration and macromolecules").

anyway part of the problem in the US is the influence of the military-industrial complex. so in the 80s you get brilliant nobel prizewinner physicists and chemists like glenn seaborg and isaac asimov (OK he's not a nobel winner but quite an egghead) working on the science standards. and they basically produce a watered-down version of university chemistry and physics for teenagers, which is totally developmentally inappropriate and not real or motivating for learners. i guess this is the long way of saying that i have nothing against NCLB except for the fact that the particular standards that americans tend to be real up on (rote memorization, ability to apply certain mechanical math operations, fact based recall memory instead of higher critical thinking) aren't particularly great standards to be teaching to.

i think another part of the problem is that unlike, say, sweden, we've got enough of a scale problem that it wouldn't make sense to do essay form national standardized test grading. unless we get the national guard to do it. hey, there's an idea!

are those actual for real standardized science tests for high school kids in other countries

i am paraphrasing from memory of a class i took last winter quarter, but yes. the questions are more fleshed out than that, though (they're about a paragraph of explanation of the situations + bullet-pointed "starters" for the kids to work from)

i guess the other problem with NCLB is the particularly draconian approach that state DoE take toward the test scores. i use a low-stakes standardized math test at the beginning of the year to figure out what my students are bad at (in california, it's arithmetic with fractions and simplifying / solving rational expressions, year after year). which is great. but it would be pretty hard to do take that sort of reflective attitude toward my test scores if i were really afraid that - like at my mom's school - low test scores would lead to the DoE firing the entire administration and appointing new administrators from outside the community, and dictating school reform from 500 miles away. because, you know, if there's one thing struggling teenagers need it's total strangers creating upheaval and disruption in their lives. way to boost morale on a sinking ship! hang the captain!

BTW the professor for the class was obama's education advisor (1inda dar1ing-hamm0nd) so let's cross our fingers she gets the cabinet post

some quick googling shows that not to be the case, ah well

Without getting into the definition or uses of standardized testing, how it was defined in NCLB is the problem. And the fact that it was based upon and sold by Rod Paige and Margaret Spellings of the Houston Independent School District and it's successes is an even bigger problem. Those successes were criminally inflated and invented, infiltrated by profiteering and privatization and cronyism.

Like every other aspect of this administration's agenda.

agreed!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5147422.ece

The Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. "Hang him?" — he asked.

"Why not?" Mr Putin replied. "The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein."

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: "Yes but do you want to end up like (President) Bush?"

Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: "Ah -- you have scored a point there."

^^^thats seriously one of my favorite anecdotes of the past 25 news cycles

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Obama saying he would unequivocally close Guantanamo as soon as he was in office during the 60 minutes interview got a lot of cheers in my house.

http://unreasonablefaith.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/missionsacomplished.jpg

Obama saying he would unequivocally close Guantanamo as soon as he was in office during the 60 minutes interview got a lot of cheers in my house.

― forksclovetofu, Monday, November 17, 2008 7:12 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

You, robin and the pitbull?

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