Are American Presidents embarrassing?

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Well Bush Sr may look a bit goofy now but it's in a good cause....

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23444771

Yes; well done him. Maybe he reads SF and decided to even-up the debate.

[blake]

Clinton is a Rhodes Scholar and whether you like that or not, that is generally accepted as being an indication of 'academic ability'.

 

being good academically is not what made Clinton have what it took to get to be president. He got there because he had a talent for governing and politics in general. It was just the field that suited him. Clinton would have had some sort of political career even if he'd not been a Rhodes scholar but dropped out of high school in Arkansas. Maybe he wouldn't have got to be president, but he'd have done something.

[Chris_Sleeps]

Must be nice when former Presidents are raising charity money for someone's health care costs. What a fine health service they have.

[Owethemnowt]

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.

 

If someone hasn't explained it to you I will.

 

The family money got Bush into Yale where he failed to attend classes, complete assignments or submit essays. His year group college students gave personal accounts of this.

 

He was also kept from the draft by dodging it again due to family money and Texas contacts.

 

Bush actually is unqualified.

 

You should also read of his failed businesses and the fact that his family were the front to the Bin Laden family and other Saudis in the US years before Osama bombed them.

 

Also, due to the same contacts, when all commercial flights were grounded following the Twin Towers, Bush allowed the entire Bin Laden family to fly out.

 

The American people accepted that.

[blake]

yawn. Do you not get tired of regurgitating all this garbage.

 

how unhappy for you for never getting to see how government in liberal democracies really works.

[buck]

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.

Thank you for a well written post, Annie. A nice change from the blather going on around you. We sometimes get lucky with our presidents, not always. Reagan was just such a case. Jimmy Carter was a nice man, and has been a good ex president, but as a president he was a disaster. For only twice have we had a president who wasn't a WASP. JFK a catholic, and Obama, our first black president. Next one might be a woman, who knows. The times they are achangin'.

[Norseman]

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.

 

I don't know about that, just look at Blair and Brown, enough said!

Both Bush's puppets...Bush was the clever one, Blair and Brown just stood in line and obeyed and Milliband is no different either. Labour needs a leader with balls ....

[Rupert_Baehr]

Harriet Harm-Man?

[Norseman]

Harriet Harm-Man?

 

Possibly or then again there's Ed Balls isn't there????:hihi:

[BEDROCK]

George Bush junior was stupid in a very alarming and dangerous way.

 

For all the resources at his disposable for finding the most wanted man in history Bin Laden, he gave him weeks head start for supposedly instigating 9/11, in that fashion, 9/11 was either an inside job or someone else was responsible, they used Bin Laden as a scape goat either way.