Are American Presidents embarrassing?

[Electerrific]

I suppose many of we Brits are always incredulous when Americans praise these elected guys like they're Gods, when any US Joe Public can theoretically become one?

 

But aren't they usually just embarrassing idiots (like our duller, home-grown bumbling buffoons?)? Reagan? Bush Jnr and to some dubious extent, Clinton? I like Obama, and Politics aside, he is a vast improvement on his awful and moronic predecessor, George 'Dubya' Buch Jnr?

 

Dubya was infamous for his Bushisms- incoherent, incorrect or stupid speeches or statements which even an illiterate ten year old could have better prepared?

 

Dubya said, amongst a huge back catalogue of disastrous and idiotic statements (these are quite coherent by comparison);

 

"The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur!"

(To Blair in 2001-2 about the failing French economy)

 

"And one of the things we've got to make sure that we do is anything."

(Discussing the Middle East after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Washington D.C. 2002

 

"Goodbye from the World's worst Polluter!"

(Smiling and whooping to a stunned Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy) when leaving the 2008 G-8 Summit in Tokyo)

 

Presidential aides must have mimicking Homer Simpson behind his back!

How stupid and disturbing can the World's most powerful man, with a nuclear button, be?

[Daid]

I suppose they might be embarrassing to an American, no more so than any of our own elected leaders and sidekicks might be to us at times. The fact that they have a say in pressing 'the button' doesn't concern me at all though.

[melthebell]

I'm hoping the button is packed away in the top cupboard these days

along with buckeroo, operation and kerplunk

[SiSiSi]

Reagan was the one I always felt sorry for. He was the biggest war-monger of the lot yet all he ever managed were a few of relatively minor skirmishes such as Grenada or dropping a couple of bombs on Gaddafi's tent. He desperately tried to escalate the Cold War, cheered on by Thatcher of course, but just couldn't get the Russians to play at WWIII. Poor lad.

[blake]

Bush Jnr may not have been all that great a president but one thing he is not, is stupid. Some people seem to have an IQ about 50 points higher in private, than in public and it seems Bush is one of them. Nobody can get to be president by being stupid. Even Warren Harding, who really was probably the dimmest president ever, was not stupid.

 

it makes the more childish members of the left feel better to call their opponents names when they can't beat them in elections. Calling Reagan stupid in particular is especially ridiculous. As a politician he changed his country more than any other President since 1945. How can accomplishing that, what he wanted, be stupid. What would have happened had he been smart.

[Mandem]

I always got the impression that the American president, whoever it was, was just a front man and really had no say, just did as he was told by the real power, ie the backroom staff, who never showed their faces in public

[Annie Bynnol]

Reagan was the one I always felt sorry for. He was the biggest war-monger of the lot yet all he ever managed were a few of relatively minor skirmishes such as Grenada or dropping a couple of bombs on Gaddafi's tent. He desperately tried to escalate the Cold War, cheered on by Thatcher of course, but just couldn't get the Russians to play at WWIII. Poor lad.

 

The Soviet Union had wanted Helsinki, detente and SALT 1 in order to legitimize their empires border, gain equivalence in nuclear arms and to see off any internal demands from dissidents.

Helsinki clauses about of human rights were ignored by the Russians in their own and client states because they became an internal issue under Helsinki. This was wrong to both left and right in western Europe and America and a blow to activists in the East.

 

Leonid Brezhnev was barely able to make decisions because of his addictions and could not prevent or control events in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iran and Afghanistan. Without political support the Soviet military moved accurate SS-20 missiles to target western Europe. NATO countries and France demanded a response and got the Americans to put the even more accurate Pershing missiles into Europe.

 

Reagan changed the American policy of containment to a policy of roll-back.

 

Reagan was not an intellectual, he was no Kissinger who wrongly predict the future but he was an actor, of the left and right, a listener and devolved tasks to others. (Bush jnr had non of these).

 

The demand for rights in the East was rising. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Havel, Wojtyła, Walesa etc became the focus for movements that Mikhail Gorbachev

recognised as the beginning of the end of for Soviet rule.

 

In Reagan, Gorbachev found a person who would help dissolve the Soviet empire. History might be kinder to Reagan than we were at the time.

[anywebsite]

I'm hoping the button is packed away in the top cupboard these days

along with buckeroo, operation and kerplunk

 

Not in the same cupboard as important everyday presidential strategy tools like those!

 

Hide it in the Risk or Monopoly box, they'll never find it.

[Manlinose]

i don't think, as a whole, they are any more embarrassing than many other countries leaders

 

i think i'd rather have bush jnr as my president than berlusconi or putin for example

[Super Hans]

Bush wasn't the best speaker, but not everybody feels comfortable talking to thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who are all hanging on your every word in front of you.

 

So I think the bushisms thing is largely irrelevant.

 

If you take it for what it is, probably the highest office in the world, nobody who ever reaches that level of Government will be dumb.

 

He's a graduate of Yale and Harvard, yet he's got a bunch of plebs on Sheffield Forum calling him dumb, yeah aight.