On the wires is the ‘oral History’ of Bush presidency, and no that is not an oxymoron. In fact we are wondering if Barack Obama is listening enough to have learned the lessons of any prior presidency, oral or otherwise.
Photo: George W. Bush
We hear that the University of Virginia will record the rich oral history of the Bush presidency, an ambitious project that was announced this week. This is an open talk thread where you can discuss this topic or anything on your mind.
Read the details here and here and here.
So what is an oral history, boys and girls? It’s just pretentious talk in academia for recording interviews with various people who are assumed to have some knowledge of the subject. Leave it to over-thinking eggheads to develop fuzzy terms for simple thoughts.
In the case of George Bush. you might expect UAV to load the interviews with the worst dregs of liberal intelligentsia pontificating about George Bush’s legacy. It would start with liberal Dan Rather (see video below). Unfortunately this isn’t one of Larry Sabato’s projects, who is a brilliant political analyst and fair minded in all things. A liberal coffee drinker is leading the effort.
But that’s where funding comes into play. The George W. Bush Foundation is substantially funding the project, so they are stuck presenting a fair model or risk poverty. Nothing like free enterprise to get a fair shake from liberals. So they will do 100 interviews with people who actually worked with George Bush, like cabinet officers and advisers, rather than banana peels like Keith Olberman.
Love him or hate him, we should expect Bush’s legacy to be viewed by historians as at worst average, and at best seminal. An oral history should record it fairly as so.
Barack Obama should learn the lessons of the oral history of the Bush presidency. When George Bush entered office, the prior occupant had the reputation of both obfuscated and paralyzed decision making. George Bush was the decisive leader we all craved, whether we agreed with those decisions or not.
And now we have history repeating itself: an indecisive, poll-oriented, metrosexual president who is paralyzed in office for fear of making a bad decision. Is Obama deaf to history? He leaks memos from a nobody Afghanistan ambassador to give the president cover for doing nothing at all, week after week, while our soldiers fight. We’ve seen this before, but Obama hasn’t learned the lesson from our recent history.
They say that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. So too they will say that Obama brooded while our brave men died in Afghanistan. With the blood of our soldiers on his hands from indecisiveness, Obama should study the oral history of Bush presidency. He owes it to the troops and the principled people who support their mission.
November 13th, 2009 at 3:29 am
obama is actually worse than i thought, and i had very low expectations.
it is like watching valens defend the roman empire against the barbarians all over again …
except without the experience
November 13th, 2009 at 3:51 am
A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. There is much truth in that statement. I have been viewing a series of pictures that the GOP needs to use in the 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
I’m not talented yet in using HTML to copy images but I will learn soon enough. There is a graph that I see quite frequently at the Gateway Pundit blog that shows a graph of the annual deficit during the Bush years and the projected annual deficit during the next 8 years of the Obama administration.
That “picture” is worth a thousand words and needs to be posted over and over again at ALL GOP leaning blogs.
November 13th, 2009 at 3:57 am
ummmmmmmm ….
you just right click on the image and “copy image address”
and post that link on the blog you want.
good night Tim V, i am off to work.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:14 am
Good night sweet Lisa, may the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to shine upon you.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:26 am
McCain,
May I compliment you on another articulate post? Your contrast of Bush’s decisiveness contrasted with Obama’s lack thereof, hits the “nail on the head ” so to speak.
You hinted at but did not fully develop the contrast between the as you say “meterosexual” Obama and the “man’s man ” Bush.
Another compare and contrast possibility that could have been exploited is Obama’s supposed great rhetorical ability compared to
Bush’s inability to properly pronounce the word “nuclear” and his wonderful additions to the English vocabulary with new words such as “misunderestimated.”
There are several more contrasts that I will highlight in a subsequent post/comment.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:36 am
All politicians have a reputation for lying. The reasons for this are pretty obvious. To appeal to one set of voters you tell them what they want to hear and to another what they wish to hear. It’s called “campaigning.”
The problem becomes that sometimes or more accurately “often” the two different messages don’t quite square with each other, let alone what is called “the truth.”
Integrity is a quality that most people highly value. In my humble opinion, on the integrity scale Bush beats Obama hands down. I’m sure liberals, or as they like to call themselves these days “progressives” will parrot back to me, something along the lines of “Bush lied, people died” or Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. I welcome that debate,a debate comparing the integrity of the two men. As Bush would say, “bring it on.”
November 13th, 2009 at 4:59 am
After 9/11 Bush united the nation, because we saw a terrorist attack and we agree on what we saw.
After Fort Hood Obama divided the nation into people who saw a terrorist attack and people who try hard to believe that what they saw is not what they saw, but something different.
At the end of the process majority will believe their eyes and their common sense and just a small group of followers will stick with the official story.
November 13th, 2009 at 5:05 am
McCain,
YOU are a fracking Idiot.
The stupidity, lies, and indecision of Boob, Chummey, and Rumsnuts lost both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (to the profit of Halliburton) and cost the unnecessary lives of over 4,000 American soldiers (to the profit of Halliburton).
Saddam was evil, but if we had taken out his Al Qaeda enemies in Afghanistan, it might have emboldened his generals to take out Saddam for us.
Both Bush #41 and Bush #43 are notorious for their indecisiveness and bad decisions unless they profit their friends.
I was a Republican for 40 years. The Republican “conservatives” and Tea-buggers have done more harm to our country by their gullibility than the Communist Party ever did.
November 13th, 2009 at 7:46 am
“After 9/11 Bush united the nation, because we saw a terrorist attack and we agree on what we saw.
After Fort Hood Obama divided the nation into people who saw a terrorist attack and people who try hard to believe that what they saw is not what they saw, but something different.
At the end of the process majority will believe their eyes and their common sense and just a small group of followers will stick with the official story.”
This is better applied to the blind supporters of the Bush Disaster. We saw him grow the size of government more than anyone in history, we saw him spend more than anyone in history, we saw him not respond to Katrina, We saw him reading my pet Goat as our country was attacked, we saw him admit there where never any WMD’s, we saw him socialize the banks, we saw him complelty unaware of the econmoic disasters his policies where briging us. We all saw this with our own eyes and let’s just hope that :
“At the end of the process majority will believe their eyes and their common sense and just a small group of followers will stick with the official story.”
November 13th, 2009 at 7:52 am
All you sheep complaining about The President taking “to long” to send in more troops should learn to think for yourselves and not just get irrate by anything you are told to whine about. The last increase request for more troops under the Bush disaster took 8 months before he responded. No one on either side complained then because rational people realized that our government had just made the largest military blunder in our history by rushing into Iraq without getting the facts, the armor or the support our troops needed first.
November 13th, 2009 at 7:56 am
“George Bush was the decisive leader we all craved, whether we agreed with those decisions or not”
What an insane thing to say. We don’t care if you are wrong or right, we just want it fast?
Didn’t work out well for Chenny’s quail hunting and it didn’t work out well for our country.
In the wake of the horrible disaster Bush left the country in, it is amazing that some of you are still able to deny it.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Dear John, my comment was on the topic of terrorism, not economics, but since you’ve gone off topic, I’ll follow your lead. In my chart George W Bush is the second greatest President after his father George WH Bush. 41 freed Eastern Europe and 43 worked very hard to get the new democracies there into the safety of NATO and European Union. I was born in the communist Eastern Europe and Bush’s foreign policy there was very important for me. Obama betrayed Easter Europe the first chance he had and keeps doing it, sucking up to Putin in a fake hope of come “Camp David Carter” moment. Different people – different interests. We just care about different things sometimes.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:40 am
# 11 John – the economic collapse occurred because T. Kennedy, B. Frank and C. Dodd set the banks up for disaster by forcing them (during the Clinton presidency) to make a certain % of sub-prime loans to people who would never have qualified under typical loan application requirements. Let’s stop pointing fingers at each other and look to our elected leaders who in other times would have been hanged for sedition or jailed for corruption. We must stop class warfare and begin to demand the Congress and other government officials be held accountable to the same laws (and healthcare) as the average citizen. Hypocrisy is poison to all.
November 13th, 2009 at 8:47 am
George Bush was the decisive leader we all craved, whether we agreed with those decisions or not.
Ehhh, I think there is something to be said for careful deliberation instead of brash decisive action. I think a balance is needed, but being too confident in one’s “gut” can lead to a lot of the problems we saw with Bush — a certain dogmatism and refusal to air opposing viewpoints. I don’t think this is necessarily desirable for a president.
Now there is merit to your point of course. Just as excessively instinctive decision-making can be harmful, so can excessive hand-wringing and navel-gazing. A deliberation-vs-decisiveness balance is needed, and I have to say that personally I think Obama is closer than GWB to a proper balance here, despite all of the problems I have with him.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:17 am
I was a Democrat…never voted for either Bush.There was a time I thought Clinton was the best thing to ever hit this planet. I almost fainted being on the rope line to shake his hand.
Funny thing happened, though. I started paying attention ( I don’t think your average citizen does ). I was stunned at what I learned, and horrified at what I had once stood behind.
Bush could make decisions..right or wrong..and the man loved our country. He did protect all of us, and I found his speeches comforting,and hopeful. When it came to lead, follow or get out of the way, Bush lead.
The One is standing still, neither leading or following…just preening in front of the closest camera, with a wife that has the fashion sense of drunken piss-ant on a Saturday night.
Mrs. Bush would never have worn a plunging neckline to the Ft Hood Memorial, and Pres. Bush would have worn a dark tie instead of a bright red one.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:32 am
I don’t see what “fashion sense” has to do with anything. Completely irrelevant.
Also, I don’t get this notion that the simple ability to “make decisions” is what’s truly important, and whether a decision is correct or not is secondary. I can think of plenty of situations in which making no decision is preferable to making the wrong decision (marriage, for one). There is no a priori reason that “making a decision” should be an especially quick or impulsive process.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:02 am
On the economic front and who’s to blame, there is an informative report produced by Front Line with the objective of proving that free markets do not work. It features an event in 1998 of a near identical break down of the fiancial market, involving derivatives. Brooksley Born, a federal regulator, attempts to discover and then regulate them. She is beatten back by a team consisting of Treasury Secretury Robert Rubin, Timothy Gitner, Larry Summers, and for credibility Alan Greenspan. Greenspan advises Congress that regulating derivatives would be counter produtive and unnecessary, the best course was to do nothing and let the free market take care of it. This was the course that was taken. To me this looks more like a protected market and not free market. Protected by the strength and power of government. Brooksley Born lost her job as a regulator shortly there after. Thank you President Clinton.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Bush did what he did, because of 9/11 which wasn’t his fault. And he kept us safe right after that. So he kept his promise. He wasn’t perfect, but if Gore was in that position right after 9/11 things would of been worse much much worse.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:25 am
To me this looks more like a protected market and not free market.
Yeah that’s a great point Dave. This collapse is often cited as evidence that “free markets don’t work”. The typical narrative is that excessive “greed on wall street” led to poor investment decisions that ultimately came crashing down.
What people fail to realize is that the risky investment activity was a direct result of regulatory incentives put in place by the government. Those investors weren’t working within a true free market; they were working in an environment in which certain sorts of investments were guaranteed by government subsidies and protections.
In other words, government oversight and regulation — not corporate greed — established the incentives that led directly to the big problems we’re seeing. It wasn’t the failure of the free market system, it was the failure of a heavy-handed regulatory structure.
November 13th, 2009 at 11:34 am
There is little point in rushing to make a decision if it is the wrong decision. Obama has asked his national security team to “go back to the drawing board” and develop a timeline, methodology and eventual exit plan.
Comparing a war to a fire is an apt analogy. One fights a house fire differently than a forest fire and when fighting fire we fight the root of the fire first.
Identifying where the fires start, how best to fight them and having a vision for eventual success is the way to go. Success in this scenario involves turning the war over to the Afghanis.
If we want success and results we need a plan. Would you build a house, car or computer without one?
November 13th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Rhayander,
As an attorney, I feel compelled to object to your post #16. If people started thinking before they acted, 95% of my business would dry up. Not to mention the fact that all of our lives would be a bit less full without the laughs we get on a daily basis from idiot politicians, celebrities etc.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Haha, good points Tom. The last thing I’d want is to hurt your livelihood in the Golden Age of Stupidity!
@dude: Yeah well said, that was the point I was trying to make as well.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Haha, rush to a decision? Your point would be valid if there was any more information to be learned in order to make a decision. It’s all there. The recommendations from experts are there. Nothing has changed. Meanwhile soldiers die because Obama is brooding over nothing.
What Obama suffers from is a typically liberal problem which I find very interesting. It’s an inability to assess risks, and to be willing to accept the consequences of decisions for better or worse. The decision won’t have a certain outcome which is why he is so flummoxed.
November 13th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
McCain,
You mean like the Iraq war plan?
November 13th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Jym Allyn, I believe your post # 8 is worthy of a “moron” award. Do we offer those here ? Or should it be called the “barking moonbat award” ?
Either way, ding,ding ding, we have a winner !