Why George W. Bush Let a Soldier’s Mom Yell at Him

This is patently false. George W Bush never took responsibility for anything. Never, in the eight years of his presidency did the words "I take full responsibility" or "the buck stops here" cross his lips.

 

Sanction death estimates vary widely. You manage to quote one of the highest. The best available evidence -- based on population growth stats, which showed little or no change after sanctions were imposed -- suggest that sanction-related deaths were much lower than such claims. Never mind that those deaths were squarely the responsibility of the Iraqi government, which refused multiple oil-for-food deals.

BS. He was in a box the entire time. He had no functioning WMD programs, no means to make them functioning. He was defanged, and posed no threat to anybody except his own people. The no-fly zones were an amazing bargain.

 

What was the mission of the U.S. military when they crossed into Iraq ? Regime change.

Was that mission accomplished ?

BTW: It was the ships crew who put that "mission accomplished" banner up, not the Obama White House.

It's SOP when a Navy ship returns from a cruise be it war time or peace time that it's announced to the crew, "mission accomplished."

Bush was a F-102 fighter pilot, considered to be pertty good at flying the most difficult fighters to fly the F-102. Now Bush didn't actually land that S-3 Viking on the deck of the carrier but he did fly it from San Diego to the carrier.

Maybe once a fighter jock, always a fighter jock.

 

Comparing the recovery time from the Great Recession that Obama inherited (which was a structural meltdown of the financial system caused by collapse of the housing market in which the economy fell 4.2 percentage points over 5 quarters, and over 10 million net jobs were lost), with the so-called "recession" Bush had (in which the economy *grew* by 1.0% real and never had two consecutive negative quarters) is inane.

Of course it took longer to recover from the Great Recession. The damage was far, far worse. That is why they call it "Great".

And this also made a huge difference:

Bush
Federal Spending increase, 2001-2006: +42.5%
Total government employment, 2001-2006: +840,000

Obama
Federal Spending increase, 2009-2014: -0.53%
Total government employment, 2009-2014: -540,000

During the recovery while Bush was president, we had massive increases in federal spending and hundreds of thousands of government jobs created.

During the recovery while Obama was president, we had austerity and hundreds of thousands of government jobs eliminated.

Austerity hasn't worked here any better than it has anywhere else.

 

So, the President's last Press Secretary joins the rewrite team!

George W Bush and his motorcade famously blew past Cindy Sheehan and a band of Iraq war vet's moms for day after day in 2005.

Dana Perino talks about these veterans getting the best medical care in the world.

The reality was that the GOP Congress routinly cut VA funding during the Iraq war.

And, as for Walter Reed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed_Army_Medical_Center_neglect_scandal

It's a nice, heartwarming, flag waving piece. It's also recycled spin from the days when the Bush White House was busy manufacturing "the good news" about Iraq.

 

You mean in the "Champagne unit" he got into with his daddy's influence do dodge Vietnam war combat?

 

the more soldiers a C in C gets killed the better you like him?

 

I've already shown you one reason:

Austerity:

Obama
Federal Spending increase, 2009-2014: -0.53%
Total government employment, 2009-2014: -540,000

Not Austerity:

Reagan
Federal Spending increase, 1981-1986: +46.0%.
Total government employment, 1981-1986: +879,000

Not Austerity:

Bush
Federal Spending increase, 2001-2006: +42.5%
Total government employment, 2001-2006: +840,000

What would be the situation if we'd seen spending increases over the past four years, and the Republican dominated states had not added over 600,000 people to the unemployment rolls, but had added 600,000 more paid jobs?

Here's another:

The fundamental problem in our economy is that their is insufficient demand for goods and services to power the kind of strong recoveries we had in the past.
It is not just this recovery that has been slow and weak. Compare the recoveries in 1990, 2001, and the current one, with earlier recoveries:



As the (now somewhat outdated) chart shows, all the recoveries before the mid 1980s were sharper and faster.

IMO, this is not simply some gigantic coincidence. Consumer spending drives the economy and recoveries, but has been anemic. The great engine of spending, the middle class, is tapped out and overridden in debt. As a result, we are not seeing growth in personal consumption like we did in earlier recoveries:

A big reason why we aren't seeing spending from the middle classes is that since the early 1980s is because we've taken almost all the growth in income and wealth of this country over the past 30 years and diverted it to the richest 10%, and mostly to the richest 1%:

Today the 1% has double the share of the nation's income (20%) and nation's wealth (40%) than it did 30 years ago:



And the top 10% are getting about 65% of the nation's income, versus about 50% 30 years ago. That means that the bottom 90% are today only getting about 35% of the nation's income, compared to about 50% 30 years ago:



That is 15 percentage points of $14 trillion in gross national income now going to the top 10% instead of the bottom 90%. Which equates to, proportionately, $2.1 trillion dollars going to the richest 10% instead of the middle classes, every single year.

If the richest 10% spends even 75% of its income, that equates to about $500 billion less spending in the economy, every single year. That is about the equivalent of 2 Stimulus packages every single year!

As a result of this huge transfer or income and wealth, the middle class, the great engine of spending (and thus demand) doesn't have the additional resources to spend. So when we have a recession, is it any surprise that recovery is slower? We've taken the assets and purchasing power away from the middle class, who spend it, and transferred them to the richest, who (proportionately) do not spend it, and thus have gutted the engine of growth and recovery for our economy.

The problem isn't an overall lack of money to spend. There are trillions and of trillions of dollars sitting in offshore bank accounts and in corporations and banks not being spent. The problem is that our "trickle down" policies over the past 30 years have not "trickled down" but instead have transferred those assets to people who don't spend them, and away from people who do.

As a result, the growth of real personal expenditures in the past four years has been roughly half what it was 30 years ago:

Year - % chng real personal expenditures
1982 1.4
1983 5.7
1984 5.3
1985 5.3
Average: 4.4

1992 3.7
1993 3.5
1994 3.9
1995 3.0
Average 3.5

2002 2.5
2003 3.1
2004 3.8
2005 3.5
Average 3.2

2010 2.0
2011 2.5
2012 2.2
2013 2.0
Average 2.2

Source data: http://bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=1&isuri=1
Table 2.3.1. Percent Change From Preceding Period in Real Personal Consumption Expenditures by Major Type of Product

So should it be any surprise that when we look at the recoveries since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution took effect, including the current one, we see shallower, flatter recoveries than we did before?

What would the situation be like if the middle classes had another $2 trillion in income to spend every single year in the economy?

If we want a return to stronger economic growth, we need a return to the policies that built up the middle classes, and to turn away from the policies that help bring it down. We don't need to pander to the richest any more. We need to stop austerity and create jobs for the middle class. We need to reverse "trickle down" policies, not extend them

 

Your claim that it was the ship's crew that put the "Mission Accomplished" sign up was discredited a very long time ago.

Nor was any of it SOP. The White House had the return of the carrier delayed for four days so they could stage this cynical event. At the time, the Abraham Lincoln was only 30 miles off the California coast, and was easily reachable by helicoptor.

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1871060,00.html

 

No where did I see where Reagan sold the weapons.

Well at least the Reagan administration didn't trade five terrorist leaders for an Army deserter.

 

Great answer from someone who just loves GW Bush and that old homespun Texas crap he spews on TV and ignores his record as a human being (a drunken, coke snorting nit wit who had a military record that would land anyone else in Leavenworth) and a continual failure at any business his daddy bought for him. Then as the dynamic CnC who was down in Texas playing around while his crack national security team sat with their thumbs up their asses while 3000 Americans were blown to bits. Yeah, he's a real national treasure because he happened to have a big "R" next to his name on the ballot and for that, to the imbeciles who still support him and his actions, he's really a class act. LOL

 

Which is why the world opposed Mr Bush reckless, unprovoked, war in the wrong country.

 

Nope.

"The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't ..." George W Bush, August 21, 2006.

 

He was a missing in action "fighter jock" for eight months. Anyone but a congressman's son would have been thrown in the brig and dishonorably discharged.

 

Clinton never had the intel of UN inspectors making hundreds of spot, unannounced inspections with free reign all over Iraq and finding no evidence of the WMD that Hussein supposedly have.

 

Even late as 2006, rather than man up and accept the responsibility for making the error of rushing to war in Iraq, he blamed it on the "intel":

… "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," Bush told ABC television in an interview scheduled for broadcast last night. "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."

The intel was different. But his neocon administration cherry picked data, relied on knowingly unreliable and coerced sources, and spun the data to justify the war they wanted long before Bush even got into office, much less 9/11.

 

Wonder why all those democrats that voted on the same intel never apologized but only blamed Bush?

 

Most of the Bush dead enders on this thread wouldn't have admitted that they voted for Bush in 2009.

But now that Jeb is running and much of the old Bush team is hiding under his skirts, the rewrite boys are busy, recycling all the old lies and spin pieces.

We've seen a lot of this lately, and I expect we'll see a lot more.

The Bush Adminstration's campaign for war in Iraq was never distinguished by any sort of honesty, and once the war turned into the disaster that knowledgable people predicted it would, the Bush White House spent far more time and energy on its spin efforts and winning the news cycle than it did on the war.

 

Wonder away. That is what happens when you ask questions with false premises.

 

Ah, more lib talking points. You guys ever get tired of making stuff up?

 

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politic...ssion-accomplished-meaning-says-bush-staffer/

 

Translation: I can't dispute what you are saying so I'll just march this old turd out and hope no one notices.

 

Nah, just sweeping up after your horse.

 

The Orders of battle for the U.S. military was regime change.

Finding WMD's was the mission of the State Department.

BTW: WMD's were found in Iraq.

Just an excerpt:

 

Quoting a Bush staffer, repeating the White House spin doesn't improve your case.

The "Mission Accomplished" banner was not put up by the crew in commemoration of the end of a long deployment.

It was prepared by the White House and shipped out in advance to be installed for view by the television cameras.

The entire thing was a cynical exercise in spin. The war had gone badly even before Bush started it, and it was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse.