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You honestly think he did it all on his own?

If you get much of your news as I do from trolling www.news.google.com, they just posted a headline for a Fox News piece:

""President Readies Final State of the Union Address""

I've known for a long time, in fact since he took office, that Bush was a disaster, but I never thought he would actually destroy the Union.

We'll at least the S.O.B. appears ready to admit he's done it.

So this Jim Kunstler fella wrote this article that started this thread?

He sounds a little bit to sarcastic and seems like a fear monger. I can?t take that type of person serious. Also under his bio it does not say what degree he graduated college with, so I suspect it was not English or Journalism. But thats an assumption. I do agree with his condemnation of sprawling suburbs. There is a serious lack of community planning when it comes to home building in this country. But throwing in all these other subjects makes him to schizophrenic

But to comment on the thread subject line I will say this:

Our president is ignorant, but not stupid. He has followed the doctrine of nation building in order to make us safe. If everyone is free than there will be no problems, right? Its a doctrine that only looks at the end benefits and not the true cost.

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The next administration? We're f8k'd for the next 40 years, i.e., the rest of my life.

Although my quality of life is better than many hundreds of millions around the world (I'm referring to basic living conditions: roof and walls, indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, gas -- yes, I like these things), I have no grand expectations of much more than that, and I count on myself to make my life fulfilling. But I would really appreciate it if I could keep my measley little decent life in one piece, please.

Never mind. Reality just slapped me into clarity again.

The direction of the US will be based upon who wins and most importantly which corporation donates the most amount of money.
I also agree that the military / foreign policy to an extent, is an extention of corporate power and sponsorship via the president.

I bet Rumsfeld is relaxing and enjoying his retirement like a number of others who resigned (jumped ship) from the Bush administration.
I will always believe that its the captain of a ship that has the power to call the directions!

brian_em,

i'm not going to give you a ton of crap, after all, it's independent, out of the box thinkers that this country desperately needs and lacks, but i'm not going to sit on my hands about it either. i think what needs to be added is that, yes, GWB is a horrible president, but in order for him to pull off everything he has done wrong, he must have many many accomplices. this isn't a monarchy, you can't just point your finger as the king of a country and say, "my country is doing THIS tomorrow." there's alot of bad eggs in the US government.

"But when there is a threat to our country, we need to show our teeth."

and what threat is that?

"I think the way we are dealing with Iran is more than fair."

ok. now i'm curious.....why should we have gone into Iraq, if according to you, it wasn't a total mistake?

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Dunno, are there? I've had mine for 1 1/2 years. I think there was 1 or 2 others at the time.

Brewster.
completely off topic. BUT
What's the deal with all the cat avitars on this site lately?

Yeah, there's worse people among earth's 6 billion than GWB, but they're not the leader of the worlds most powerful nation, a fact that still makes me queasy after 7 years.

And GWB didn't cause 9-11, but he and his arrogant, jingoistic and greedy chickenhawks fertilized the ground for decades more of islamic terror by using 9-11 as an excuse for the neocons long desired war on Iraq. Had they simply finished what they started in Afghanistan, our standing in the world and our prospects for future peace would be much brighter. But even that was too much, and Afghanistan is again a disaster.

The narratives that get sold on conservative news channels are amazing, but the emperor still has no clothes.

I think you're really missing the BIG picture here - That an article like this was published during Dumya's visit and no one was fired and beheaded speaks volumes about what the REAL middle-east sentiment is towards the "Leader of the free world".

I know I'm going to catch a ton of crap for this post. But i feel people need to hear the other side sometimes. Even though I support the party, I'm not Gw's biggest fan. But threads like this, I find somewhat unintelligent, and counter productive.

For one, Not everyone who supports our actions overseas is a bible-quoting, cowboy. It's like me saying every liberal is a flag-burning, hippie. It's just not the case.

Granted the war in Iraq has not gone smooth. I disagree with some of the management of the Bush administration But, that's why it's called a war and not a sewing circle.

I find it somewhat annoying when people post articles from very slanted sources and try to pawn them off as hard facts, when they are actually opinion pieces. George Bush's entire trip to the mideast was not JUST about iran.

I'm sorry, but a website called anitwar.com, obviously has an agenda, no matter who the president of our country is. And why do all these people believe that all of our foreign conflicts are directly related to George Bush? I think it has to do with a psychological problem of people in our country. It's so much easier to pin all their problems on a scapegoat that they can bitch about to their peers, than to believe that there are other forces, foreign to them, beyond their understanding, that could possibly be the real threat. I see the allure with this mentality. Honestly I wish this was the case myself. If all the world's problems revolved around George Bush alone, then one would assume we would achieve world peace in less than a year. As nice as that would be, it's just not the case. George Bush might be an idiot, he might say nuclear in a funny way, but, I'm not letting Ahmadinejad house sit for me anytime soon.

George Bush might not be the best guy, but I'm sure there are far worse people in the world. You know, no one in this country wants war. No one wants their sons to die in a far off place. But when there is a threat to our country, we need to show our teeth. I think the way we are dealing with Iran is more than fair.

I'm not even going to touch the points about our consumerist nation. B/c yeah, we most definitely are, and if you think you are above that. News flash, you aren't. If you were, you'd be tending sheep in Iowa or something. Not living in the shadow of the Cultural Mecca of the world. But again, our consumer mentality, our corporate industry,machine, complex, what ever you like to call it is not caused by george bush, and will not disappear anytime soon. No matter who the president is.

"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars."

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/featu ... /09/16/tsurumi/index.html

The Dunce

His former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological liar.

By Mary Jacoby
Salon
Sep 16, 2004

For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush's professors at Harvard Business School, was content with his green-card status as a permanent legal resident of the United States. But Bush's ascension to the presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native to secure his American citizenship. The reason: to be able to speak out with the full authority of citizenship about why he believes Bush lacks the character and intellect to lead the world's oldest and most powerful democracy.

"I don't remember all the students in detail unless I'm prompted by something," Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect -- the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite."

The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA students in Tsurumi's macroeconomic policies and international business class in the fall of 1973 and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a professor of international business at Baruch College in New York.

Trading as usual on his father's connections, Bush entered Harvard in 1973 for a two-year program. He'd just come off what George H.W. Bush had once called his eldest son's "nomadic years" -- partying, drifting from job to job, working on political campaigns in Florida and Alabama and, most famously, apparently not showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.

Harvard Business School's rigorous teaching methods, in which the professor interacts aggressively with students, and students are encouraged to challenge each other sharply, offered important insights into Bush, Tsurumi said. In observing students' in-class performances, "you develop pretty good ideas about what are their weaknesses and strengths in terms of thinking, analysis, their prejudices, their backgrounds and other things that students reveal," he said.

One of Tsurumi's standout students was Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., now the seventh-ranking member of the House Republican leadership. "I typed him as a conservative Republican with a conscience," Tsurumi said. "He never confused his own ideology with economics, and he didn't try to hide his ignorance of a subject in mumbo jumbo. He was what I call a principled conservative." (Though clearly a partisan one. On Wednesday, Cox called for a congressional investigation of the validity of documents that CBS News obtained for a story questioning Bush's attendance at Guard duty in Alabama.)

Bush, by contrast, "was totally the opposite of Chris Cox," Tsurumi said. "He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that." A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.

In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, "made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, 'The government doesn't have to help poor people -- because they are lazy.' I said, 'Well, could you explain that assumption?' Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, 'No, I didn't say that.'"

If Cox had been in the same class, Tsurumi said, "I could have asked him to challenge that and he would have demolished it. Not personally or emotionally, but intellectually."

Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film "The Grapes of Wrath," based on John Steinbeck's novel of the Depression. "We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt's policies 'socialism.' He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing. And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically."

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."

Many of Tsurumi's students came from well-connected or wealthy families, but good manners prevented them from boasting about it, the professor said. But Bush seemed unabashed about the connections that had brought him to Harvard. "The other children of the rich and famous were at least well bred to the point of realizing universal values and standards of behavior," Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came late to class and often sat in the back row of the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber jacket from the Texas Air National Guard and spitting chewing tobacco into a cup.

"At first, I wondered, 'Who is this George Bush?' It's a very common name and I didn't know his background. And he was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, 'My dad has good friends.'" Bush scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class.

The Vietnam War was still roiling campuses and Harvard was no exception. Bush expressed strong support for the war but admitted to Tsurumi that he'd gotten a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard through his father's connections.

"I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class," Tsurumi said. "Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, 'George, what did you do with the draft?' He said, 'Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.' And I said, 'Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How'd you get in?' When he told me, he didn't seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war."

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. "He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off."

Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.

In recent days, Tsurumi has told his story to various print and television outlets and appears in Kitty Kelley's expos? "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." He said other professors and students at the business school from that time share his recollections but are afraid to come forward, fearing ostracism or retribution. And why is Tsurumi speaking up now? Because with the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq and Osama bin Laden still on the loose -- not to mention a federal deficit ballooning out of control -- the stakes are too high to remain silent. "Obviously, I don't think he is the best person" to be running the country, he said. "I wanted to explain why."

----------

Mary Jacoby is Salon's Washington correspondent.

Honestly, I'm flat out embaressed. The next administration is going to have to waste all of its time repairing the damage this buffoon caused. Just look at the state of our foreign relationships alone. You would have to look far and wide at this point to find a more difficult task than convincing the rest of the world that NO, WE AREN'T ALL A BUNCH OF FAST FOOD GUZZLING COWBOYS WITH NO RESPECT FOR ANYTHING BUT NASCAR & REALITY TV. Not to mention our internal issues! Oh, and I still chuckle at the fact that Dubya's stupidity has been severe enough to spawn a sit com, an animated satire & countless other televised kneeslappers. This is the leader of our nation. And we flat out have no choice but to laugh at him.

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Yep and I'm sure that today the USofA will spend a trillian dollars via the Plunge Protection Team to prop-up the markets - Talk about throwing good money after bad - Next thing they'll roll out the Weapons of Mass Distraction!

and now the panic ensues.....

http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

linky,

in all honesty, at the risk of sounding like a $hit, i would have a problem helping out 99% of those people. i see how most of them live, and i have little sympathy for the consequences that they are currently dealing with.

another thing now that you mentioned your house and your struggle with buying it......i'm simply amazed at how fast people insist on buying a house, and this stigma that goes along with renting.

people immediately frown on renting. everyone always told me, "well, if you can afford it, you should buy something as soon as you can, right now you're just collecting rent receipts, wasting money."

if i only had a nickel..................

this way of thinking follows suit perfectly with American mentalities. they never look at the consequences long term.

if you buy a house in a nice neighborhood in Suburbia, NJ, a half acre of land, considering the state avg. property tax is $6,000, i would say you're looking at around $8,000 per year (my folks pay over $10,000 in Morris County). divide that buy twelve......about $670 per month! for another $400 in most suburban towns in NJ, you can get a small 1 bedroom apt.......with no interest costs, maintenance, landscaping, bla bla bla bla bla, and if your company moves, so can you!

if your mortgage/property taxes would end up being another...i don't know.......another $1,500 (i would say this is conservative, considering most people have very little money to put down initially)......think of how many other ways you could be investing it, rather than pi$$ing it away to some lender.

don't get me wrong, people make money on real estate, that goes without saying, but when i look at the amount of money my parents have spent on their house over the past 35 years, and the amount of money they could get for it now..........what they gained was a nice house in the woods, privacy, luxury, freedom, a big backyard for their kids to play in......but what they have lost......a few million dollars.

everyone's in a rush, everyone's following the status quo, everyone's gotta keep up with the Jones', and it's a shame. a bunch of money spending robots.

linky, the part about the soup and Shoprite.....priceless.

you go girl!

TRP3 you make a very, very good point. I watched the Democratic debate last night, and they were discussing how they were going to bail out people who are in danger of foreclosure.

Now, for those who have lost jobs or those who are uneducated and were victims of predatory lenders, I don't have a problem with helping them.

However, I see no reason why the rest of us should bail out people who knew better and might lose their homes. I'm talking about people who took out mortgages over their heads with little down and flexible interest rates, or did stupid things like take interest only mortgages because they didn't want to wait and save for a huge $700,000 house. I think they didn't see this coming because they want what they want, and they want it now.

My husband and I went through hell to land a leaky railroad condo downtown. For years we had no vacations, no new clothes, no going out to nice dinners etc. I haven't been on a plane in five years. We choked back the same turkey soup from a free Shoprite turkey twice a week for a month before we closed on our starter house, because, against the advice of our greedy mortgage broker, we refused to fold closing costs into our mortage and pay thirty years compounded interest on it. btw: My husband makes over $100,000.

After going through that I see no reason why my tax dollars should reward greedy people and speculators by claiming that they're victims. And I say again, I do not include people who didn't know better or those who have come into financial hardship.

I mean, come -on. Who didn't see this coming.

ANd regarding, Dubya. Less than a year at this point. Thank God.

this is slightly off topic, but it's in response to brewster's last post. he/she brings up some good points about this country:

brewster wrote:

"They sold the future of their country to get from rich to filthy rich hereditary oligarchs, while the rest of the country sold their own futures to party like rock stars on borrowed money because their leaders told them they deserved to have a good time."

i don't like GWB anymore than you do brewster, and in the end, it is the people's decision what they spend their money on, and this is something many Americans simply cannot realize about their country and about themselves. these big companies are making zillions of dollars because.....the middle/middle upper class cannot stop buying CRAP (like 60" LCD screens).

American "culture" is so amazingly consumer-based, it's part of Americans' lifestyles....they want everything, and don't like to wait for it.....it is like that now, and it was like that as far back as when GWB was getting drunk at his secret college fraternity parties..........long before he took office.

you don't want a huge mortgage? don't buy a 5 bedroom, 3500 sq. ft. house with huge property taxes, maintenance costs, heating/electric, landscaping, etc. (when you have 1 child, to boot!).

you don't want a big car payment? don't by an Escalade because your son decided he wants to play soccer and now you need to justify that "we need a bigger vehicle". (oh yeah, and then after 18 months when you get bored with it and decide to "just trade it in" so that you can get the next bigger and better model)

the list goes on and on. people in America are clueless about the value of the dollar (which is quickly declining quite literally) and until they realize it, the rich will continue to bank on their consumerism mentalities.

for those of you who do not live like this, and i'm sure there are plenty on this forum, i applaud you, and i don't mean to offend those of you with big huge vehicles and big huge houses, but the facts are there about American spending and where that money finally ends up.

the $60,000 salary always wants to live a $70,000 salary.

change your lifestyle, and you change your life.

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Those ARE truly a testament to his idiocy, and his 2 elections are truly a testament to the idiocy and avarice of the electorate. I can understand how the ignorant bible thumping yahoos in flyover country got gulled by the snake oil show, but the willingness of the educated financial elite to entrust our country to that moron has always boggled me.

I had one of my rare conversations last week with my gazillionaire Private Capitalist brother, who admitted Bush's 2nd term was a disaster. When I asked what was so great about his first term besides cutting taxes on his Greenwich and Hampton crowd, I got nothing but smoke. They sold the future of their country to get from rich to filthy rich hereditary oligarchs, while the rest of the country sold their own futures to party like rock stars on borrowed money because their leaders told them they deserved to have a good time.

I despair, and I wonder when 60" LCD screens will start turning up in hock shops?

Top ten dumbest things our commander-in-chief ever said. Truly a testament to his idiocy.

http://politicalhumor.about.com/cs/georgewbush/a/top10bushisms.htm

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Wow, that was great, like Paul Krugman on a drunken rant.

The American Economy has no clothes.

For those NOT acquainted with ace-in-da-hole U$ FEDGOV Policy, war is THE racket used to grease the wheels of the insider-cronyism practiced within the District of Criminals, which in case you didn't notice is on the verge of collapse:

Fullblown Panic

Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover's face.

George W. Bush, tried to appease the beast by offering each American adult the dollar equivalent of half a month's mortgage payment -- with the exhortation to drive forthwith to the nearest WalMart and blow it on salad shooters and plasma TV's -- but Hooverzilla just laughed at the offering and pounded the equity markets further into the dust of loss, while the "bank-like" guardians of wealth lay in the drainage ditches bleeding from their ears and eyes.

My favorite moment was seeing Treasury Secretary Paulson and one of his fellow shaved-head deputies at a press conference rostrum frantically trying to calm the news media rabble like a couple of extraplanetary high priests from a Star Trek episode -- the batteries having run down in their laser wands, and their incantations ("liquidity! liquidity!) veering into mystifying glossolalia.

I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. That crashing sound out there is the armature of confidence needed to support an economy based on faith that borrowed money will be paid back. It's as simple as that. (Doesn't seem so exciting now, does it?)

The United States is so broke, its people at every level from the Federal Reserve on down don't know whether to shit or go blind. The homeowners cringing in the media rooms of their 5000-square-foot personal family resorts don't know how long they can stay put microwaving pepperoni hot pockets with the default clock ticking.

The mortgage "servicers" don't know how they will persuade interested parties like, say, the Illinois State Cafeteria Workers' Pension Fund (holder of X-amount of mortgage-backed securities underwritten by, say, Merrill Lynch or Deutsche Bank) to foreclose on properties scattered everywhere from Key West to Bainbridge Island -- or if there is actually any legal mechanism known to man that would make it possible to "work out" the sliced-and-diced collateral.

The millions of maxed-out credit card holders and the issuers of their plastic are stuck together paddling a leaky tub in a sea of troubles every bit as wide, deep, and polluted as the one the mortgage junkies and their enablers are sinking in. The developers of malls, office parks, and power centers are weeping into their filing cabinets as the harsh daylight of insolvency stops the orgy of "consumption" and the retail tenants pack up their unsellable goodies for the liquidators, and the rent checks stop arriving in the mail, and the notes on this mall and that mall enter the eerie realm of "non-performance."

And, of course, there are the genius wonder boyz and Wall Street playerz whose algorithms and turpitudes underwrote the script of this horror show -- for all I know they'll end up laughing into sugary skull drinks on a beach in the Cayman Islands, or doing Chinese fire drills in federal prison (or simply ass-fucked on the granite countertops of their Tribecca aeries by mobs of angry, repossessed, swindled former American dreamers pouring into Manhattan from the tract house dormitories of New Jersey and Long Island).

There's a lot to be concerned about out there. I don't mean to be too cute about it. But, as the master once said, nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

A whole closet full of "other shoes" is now waiting to be dropped. Surely the biggest clodhoppers in the closet belong to the hedge funds, representing trillions and trillions of dollar-denominated "positions" which, however hallucinatory, had previously yielded enough real "money" year-by-year to keep all the realtors and Humvee dealers in the Hamptons goose-stepping to Goldman Sachs's drumbeat.

These "positions" can't help now from moving into counterparty crisis territory, especially as the bond insurers such as MBIA and Ambac go up in a vapor, and if that happens the damage could be so colossal globally that Stephen Hawking might have to be brought in to run the Federal Reserve.

This is going to be a rough week. Fastening your seat belts may not be enough for this ride. Better superglue yourselves to the floorboards and pray for God's mercy.

Anti-Iran Coalition in the Gulf? Read This...Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations. The consequences of further war in the region are hideous, not least because they are incalculable.

Even Bush, with the ruin of Iraq before him, must surely see that. Yet in his confrontational remarks about Iran, he offers no carrot, no inducement, no compromise - only the big US stick. This is not diplomacy in search of peace. It is madness in search of war.

WASHINGTON - His approval ratings are dreadful, his moral authority suspect. Many Republicans fear President Bush backlash guarantees catastrophic election defeats this fall, including losing the White House.

One of Bush's stoutest loyalists even admits: "As a practical matter, he has now become irrelevant to the national conversation."

George W. Bush cheerfully begs to differ.

A year before he leaves town after two turbulent terms for a new home in Dallas and his beloved Crawford ranch, Bush is unusually ebullient these days.

"We've come through some pretty rough times, but things are goin' great now," he told an old friend recently.

Folks, we're being led by a madman and from the looks of it the evil & stupid parties are offering-up more of the same (Dr. Ron Paul excluded), WTF happened to this country?!?