It’s a special historical blindness to forget how reviled and mocked
Reagan and Thatcher were in their own time, and to believe that Bush’s
treatment was unique.
Or literally every president; Obama was an unamerican secret muslim
and the Clintons were literally heads of a murderous conspiracy in the
eyes of the right.
How is the treatment of someone who left the public eye in 2009 more
coarsening to the discourse than what’s happened in the last ten
years?
Aside from total economic illiteracy and callousness towards the British population, she also had a pointless war with Argentina over a rock in the south Atlantic with some sheep on it, and oversaw a network of state sponsored Loyalist death squads in Northern Ireland.
The problem with pissing on Margaret Thatcher's grave is that you eventually run out of piss.
I actually - and controversially - am less anti-Falklands war than a lot of people, on the basis that the people who live there have the right to live there, and not under an Argentinian junta
On the other hand the war itself was conducted in an obviously unjust and (as it seems with everything UK) stupid fashion (see also “GOTCHA!”), and the victims of the war were by and large the people who fought it, rather than the Argentinians who have never even been there
In that more people died or were mauled than had do, and that decisions were made either by Thatcher herself or her government which resulted in **bad things** happening, the “GOTCHA!” example - the sinking of the Belgrano - being one example of that
I mean, if your an older person, the jingoism connected with the Falklands campaign may very well have left a bitter taste in your mouth. "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾" by Sue Townsend describes it rather well as an outpouring of chauvinism.
still, if I look at it from the perspective of the people actually living on the Falklands, I'd say it was a defensive war.
I’m 27, and my earliest vivid memories are about wars of adventure fought by the UK (my home country) in Iraq and Afghanistan on shaky evidence and shakier politics, so I’m quite bitter about all of that.
I think a rather well-sourced looking wikipedia-article is probably a better read compared to a book from 1983:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_General_Belgrano#Controversy_over_the_sinking
what do you think, does it change your opinion, especially the reactions of the Argentine navy personal?
There are some pretty major problems with monetarist policy, namely that you have to have the heart of a devil to ignore the human suffering it always causes.
the only known inoculation against reddit big brain rationalism is to have read a reputable history book, or at least one not by an actual white supremacist
Ronald reagan, george W bush, and donald trump are all monsters that,
through corruption and incompetence, verifiably got hundreds of
thousands of people killed. Is it really “crying wolf” if you’re right
every time?
(not to deny the democrats their own achievements in war crime, but
there’s a difference in magnitude at least.)
This is such a tone deaf take. You have a former President
who’s worth millions, and essentially guaranteed a life of
perpetual luxury. And your worry is that we might be too harsh
on him????
This is a war criminal that the mainstream liberal movement has
virtually embraced as a member of the #Resistance. They genuinely thing
Bush was an angel next to Trump, because he did his crimes less
blatantly. It’s pathetic. You have celebs warming up to him, people
openly wishing he was back, and him making portraits of POCs to stoke
his newfound fanbase. The selective amnesia is so insane, that it’s
infuriating to read someone complain about a problem in the
other direction.
I'm about to defend the man on a particular point, so keep in mind that my disdain for Dragon Army Guy, the guy OP linked to, is a lot of why I am here on r/sneerclub in the first place.
There's not a lot I trust him with, but I actually do trust him to never embrace Trump in the future.
His complaint about various rhetoric used against Bush is a lament that when we now apply that rhetoric to Trump, it has been devalued.
Dragon Army Guy is inflexible and he holds grudges (as do I). He fetishizes updating on evidence, while he himself remains fossilized in many regards. It took him three years of Trump's presidency to truly see and accept how horrible the man is.
But now that he is there, I highly doubt he will ever change his mind. He will never forgive Trump for the tens of thousands (to hundreds of thousands) of deaths he is directly responsible for, or anything else, for that matter. [I also trust him to never forgive a large chunk of the people who continue to support Trump, despite his obvious crossing of every line](https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/what-trump-has-taught-me-about-you-9a2f446a768c) (though he does give them several outs).
This sweet summer child seems to still trust that those agencies operate in any kind of good faith. Which makes any downstream conclusions completely irrelevant.
And also like, all the evidence that Cheney etc gutted them so they could pull whatever conclusions they wanted, eg how all the reports on WMDs (which was a stupid reason anyway) were bullshit and the contrary had been found
That was called the Office of Special Plans and it's pretty exhaustively documented by now. At the time the only way anyone heard about it was through whistleblowers who were ignored by the media.
I was only small during the second Iraq War (nine years old when it
began) but for a number of reasons I remember key features of it
vividly: the idea that GWB was acting honestly on the genuine
recommendations of allegedly honest security forces in the commonwealth
and US is fucking insane.
lol, you *don’t* think aluminium tubes are only used to make nuclear weapons? Come on, it’s not even “aluminium” it’s “aluminum”, there’s an obvious difference. Clearly they’re up to something with that fudgy spelling.
Much is made nowadays of how the Mainstream Media laundered the Bush admin's flimsy phony intelligence to beat the drums of war, and that was bad and I don't trust them not to do that kind of thing again. But at least in my hazy recollection, there were plenty of voices of dissent, including from within the same media, saying *hmm that looks kinda flimsy* or *didn't he already redeem his One Free War ticket?* or *wait what about the other war and Bin Laden?* or *what about that weapons inspector expert dude who says this is wrong?* Certainly a lot more of that than in 2001.
…set the stage for the situation we now find ourselves in.
I’m gonna keep saying this until it sticks or until they put me in a
home: the Trump era has nothing on the sheer insanity of the period
between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War. Bush had an approval rating
of over 90% in the weeks and months after the attacks, freedom fries
happened, the American Red Cross cancelled a sponsorship of the Dixie
Chicks after their anti-war comments. THE AMERICAN RED CROSS!!!
Everything was fucking insane. I remember people gloating over deaths (DEATHS!) of Iraqi tank drivers because British tanks didn’t get hit by the outdated Soviet era tanks these fucking nobody drivers were given to use. Everything fucking liberal types get upset at over by Trump pales into comparison to the literal million deaths Ellen DeGeneres is willing to forgive GWB for just because he’s civil (not to forget all of the other deaths GWB is responsible for).
Thinking about it, I never realized how solid a case you can make for
Bush actually being like hitler. Or the far right crazy christians
behind some of the gop for that matter. (I mean the ’we should support
Israel because armageddon will start there soon [to wipe the earth clean
of filt and start the eternal kingdom (a fourth reich if you will),
pretty reactionary].
Also this post is anti the band Ministry and that just shows he has
no taste.
Well you can also make a case of him not being like Hitler, because after something which makes reichstag fire look like a harmless prank, he didn't become that kind of a dictator, he "merely" started 2 wars, none of them against the soviet union. Plus the whole putting a minority in camps by race thing.
Although, of course, the war killed a lot of people, largely due to not valuing innocent people's lives equally.
- an intense focus on iraq to the detriment of more immediate
issues
- ignoring the intel on 9/11
- lackluster federal response to hurricane katrina
- iraq war, it’s huge waste, massive profits to military contractors
the VP had/has interests in
I do hand this to Bush, when push comes to shove, he gives a shit
about America. Unlike Trump. This is such a crazy low bar, that it seems
hardly to count.
Can you explain how he ignored the Intel on 9/11?
My understanding is that the IC basically ignored itself and interagency communication was garbage so no one had the whole picture.
Well there’s the infamous briefing titles “bin laden determined to strike inside us”.
Essentially when the bush team took over they redirected intel to start finding reasons to invade Iraq. This misdirection of focus was a contributing factor. Then under the auspices of 9/11 attacks the case for the Iraq war - which was transparently bs - was made. It was a weird thing, a kind of dual “they are doing wmd!!” And “but 9/11!” Although the Iraqi links to 9/11 were implied more than proven.
It was an utter shit show. Due to the required patriotism/jingoism, like no one pushed back on the war. Hell the nyt was out there basically acting as a state media source. Let alone Fox News.
It was basically this from starship troopers: https://youtu.be/ijvTiDnWJLE
None of that is ignoring intel. Of course we knew OBL was going to attack the US - he already had multiple times. The issue was figuring out when, where, and how an attack would happen. The IC just completely whiffed.
No question the Iraq war justification was garbage. But that's not my issue here
Honestly it still makes me want to cry bitter tears sometimes (for example: right now) when people MY OWN AGE, which is NOT THAT OLD, don’t remember how bad things were during the 9/11 to Iraq War years
i mean, the hundreds of thousands of people that just died of coronavirus didn't survive trump
the hundreds of thousands of iraqi's that died in the war didn't survive bush
the hundreds of thousands of people that died of AIDS while reagan did nothing didn't survive
Yes, every election is very important, because on the parties appears to be excusively run by a mixture of bumbling idiots and murderous psychopaths.
There is, in fact, a shitload the president can do, what on earth are you talking about? He consistently downplayed the severity of the virus, called it a hoax,gutted the pandemic response team (well before this happened), constantly downplayed the importance of masks, sabotaged testing efforts, etc.
It is such embarrasing fatalism to pretend that there was no way to avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths. Other, huge countries managed it pretty well.
Trump downplayed the pandemic to his followers, that's why it's politicized in the first place.
That hypothetical where Hilary can't do anything about mask wearing, it presumes that the alternate universe Trump who lost an election remains the face of the Republican party, which is just not how losing an election works historically, not to mention that the party not in power would do better to lambast the party in power for not doing enough. (Hell, even having presidency and senate, Republicans still blame Obama).
The crucial difference here is that with a non idiot in power, the non idiot doesn't continue down an idiotic disagreement that costs them popularity. Trump's stance on masks didn't win him any votes at all. I know a plenty of republicans who have trouble reconciling their support for Trump with mask wearing, and his ratings had been quite low (all he's managing to do is to get more and more fervent support from a fixed number of people).
As for individual states, republican governors can't do anything contradicting the word of a Republican president, or they would lose the next election. That doesn't extend to the opposite; they don't have to directly oppose every single word of a Democrat president, they have a wide range of actions like blaming said president for not doing enough, drumming up the disease and complaining about the need for the stricter border controls, etc etc.
edit: also I think any competent president would have an approval rating in the 70s right now. This is how disasters work, people cling to those in charge. This current situation is completely pathological.
edit: for example Bush's approval rating hit **90** after 9/11 . All a president needs to do to be popular in the times of sudden crisis is say the right words.
>He has a point--we've been told at least since 2000 that every presidential election is "the most important election in American history."
Indeed, if anything, it's the complete opposite to what these so-called 'experts' are saying: Elections are increasingly meaningless in bourgeois society. I think the average person increasingly realizes that bourgeois democracy is a sham and that Marxist revolution is the current way forward.
It’s a special historical blindness to forget how reviled and mocked Reagan and Thatcher were in their own time, and to believe that Bush’s treatment was unique.
Or literally every president; Obama was an unamerican secret muslim and the Clintons were literally heads of a murderous conspiracy in the eyes of the right.
How is the treatment of someone who left the public eye in 2009 more coarsening to the discourse than what’s happened in the last ten years?
Ronald reagan, george W bush, and donald trump are all monsters that, through corruption and incompetence, verifiably got hundreds of thousands of people killed. Is it really “crying wolf” if you’re right every time?
(not to deny the democrats their own achievements in war crime, but there’s a difference in magnitude at least.)
This is such a tone deaf take. You have a former President who’s worth millions, and essentially guaranteed a life of perpetual luxury. And your worry is that we might be too harsh on him????
This is a war criminal that the mainstream liberal movement has virtually embraced as a member of the #Resistance. They genuinely thing Bush was an angel next to Trump, because he did his crimes less blatantly. It’s pathetic. You have celebs warming up to him, people openly wishing he was back, and him making portraits of POCs to stoke his newfound fanbase. The selective amnesia is so insane, that it’s infuriating to read someone complain about a problem in the other direction.
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I was only small during the second Iraq War (nine years old when it began) but for a number of reasons I remember key features of it vividly: the idea that GWB was acting honestly on the genuine recommendations of allegedly honest security forces in the commonwealth and US is fucking insane.
I’m gonna keep saying this until it sticks or until they put me in a home: the Trump era has nothing on the sheer insanity of the period between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War. Bush had an approval rating of over 90% in the weeks and months after the attacks, freedom fries happened, the American Red Cross cancelled a sponsorship of the Dixie Chicks after their anti-war comments. THE AMERICAN RED CROSS!!!
Thinking about it, I never realized how solid a case you can make for Bush actually being like hitler. Or the far right crazy christians behind some of the gop for that matter. (I mean the ’we should support Israel because armageddon will start there soon [to wipe the earth clean of filt and start the eternal kingdom (a fourth reich if you will), pretty reactionary].
Also this post is anti the band Ministry and that just shows he has no taste.
Bush oversaw serious issues, from:
- an intense focus on iraq to the detriment of more immediate issues
- ignoring the intel on 9/11
- lackluster federal response to hurricane katrina
- iraq war, it’s huge waste, massive profits to military contractors the VP had/has interests in
I do hand this to Bush, when push comes to shove, he gives a shit about America. Unlike Trump. This is such a crazy low bar, that it seems hardly to count.
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