“P” is for Principles

This about *default, tagged , was written by for on February 28, 2017

The Guardian now loves them some Bush:

guardian-loves-bush

Comments

  1. Erik Sieven says
    February 28, 2017 at 11:50 am

    I am nostalgic about the early 2000´s, when Anti-Americanism was widespread in Europe. “Stupid white men” was a bestseller in this time, and caught the feeling quite well. At this time there were different ideologies competing against each other, the American Neo Conservative movement, which wanted regime change all over the world, especially the muslim world, and a traditional European lefty ideology, which was against wall in general. Now those two ideologies have emerged. Every respectable person is for regime change in Syria (and Russia and China, although they mostly do not dare to speak it out). They are united as the “big other” (Trump, Le Pen, Putin, AfD), the gruesome enemy on whom they project their wildest fantasies

  2. Patriot says
    February 28, 2017 at 1:03 pm

    Bush Jr. was perhaps the worst President this nation has ever had. No wonder The Guardian likes him.

  3. Dan Hayes says
    February 28, 2017 at 2:38 pm

    Patriot:

    Not only was GWB possibly one of our worst presidents, he along with Cheney et al should be hauled before a Nuremberg War Crimes Court for justice to be served.

  4. Sean says
    February 28, 2017 at 3:49 pm

    Every US president would have been hanged if a War Crimes Court applying the law as at Nuremberg had judged them.

  5. German_reader says
    February 28, 2017 at 4:19 pm

    I’m not nostalgic for the early 2000s (at least not for that reason, though in other ways things have gone downhill since then)…I was against the Iraq war and in some ways I’m highly anti-American, but it was clear to me even back then that the Left’s stance against Bush had little overlap with mine. Lefties hate America because supposedly it isn’t true enough to its “values”, not anti-racist enough, not universalist enough (really the opposite of what troubles me about American influence in the world). They aren’t even opposed to wars of aggression and militarism in principle…much of the mainstream left was quite enthusiastic about the Kosovo war because the Serbs supposedly were the new Nazis.
    “Antiracism” (meaning support for endless mass immigration into European and European-descended societies) is the only core value the left has nowadays, so it’s quite fitting the Guardian reinvents Bush as some sort of elder statesman.

  6. German_reader says
    February 28, 2017 at 4:23 pm

    Seems doubtful to me…what did Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter do that would make them deserve execution? I can’t really think of any wars of aggression launched by Reagan either (police actions like in Grenada or Libya don’t qualify imo).
    In a just world though Bush would undoubtedly have to face justice for what he did, and Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Joschka Fischer would be sent for trial and execution to Belgrade (though Blair at least might just as well be executed for what he did to Britain).

  7. Sean says
    February 28, 2017 at 4:55 pm

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/18/jimmy-carters-blood-drenched-legacy/
    Carter proved remarkably generous at providing financial, military, diplomatic and ideological support for fascist dictatorships that tortured and killed millions of members of their domestic populations in an effort to crush popular movements for social justice. Some of the regimes he backed carried out mass slaughter that amounted to genocide.

    “Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions,” said Noam Chomsky. Much like Nobel Peace-prize winner Barack Obama 30 years later, Carter was an advocate of human rights

    in the abstract, but of repression and imposition of power through violence in practice.

    Reagan had his proxy terror force of the Contras, plus El Salvador. Julius Striecher was hanged for merely failing to protect civilian life.

  8. jimmyriddle says
    February 28, 2017 at 6:51 pm

    Reagan armed and funded Rios Montt in Guatemala.

    He murdered about 200,000 Maya. Proportionately, one of the biggest genocides of modern times.

  9. Yevardian says
    February 28, 2017 at 7:00 pm

    Sean is directly paraphrasing one of Chomsky’s favourite soundbites I believe.

    Jimmy, was perhaps the one 20th century US President who sincerely believed in diplomacy, human rights and making the world a better place; and look where that got him.
    Reagan was kind of an idiot, I really doubt he personally inspired any US policy. Despite the rhetoric and the public false memory, internal US affairs were absolutely disastrous; nearly every major societal indicator began it’s steep decline with him. What’s happening in Syria now was happening then with US-funded terrorism in Central America and Iran (MEK). The mass migration of Hispanics to US began with him too. I think he was one of the worst Presidents of the 20th century. He was very lucky that his term coincided with the fall of the USSR.

  10. German_reader says
    February 28, 2017 at 7:57 pm

    Maybe…I’m not American, but given how the US has developed over the last 30-40 years I definitely have my doubts about the cult of Reagan as well.

  11. German_reader says
    February 28, 2017 at 8:01 pm

    Yes, I know, that was pretty horrible. But at least Reagan didn’t initiate a major geopolitical disaster like the Iraq war…though of course it’s possible it only was like that because the Soviet Union still existed and constrained the exercise of US power.

  12. TomSchmidt says
    February 28, 2017 at 8:52 pm

    Wilson was worse. Lincoln got 650,000 Americans killed. But I don’t know anyone worse than GWB in that regard after those two.

  13. neutral says
    March 1, 2017 at 11:45 am

    You left out Franklin Roosevelt, he got around 500k US soldiers killed and was responsible for the death of many more civilians all of the globe. It is hard to count because he killed so many, but one can safely start at over 10 million as the number of people he killed. Besides the gigantic body count of that mass murderer, his legacy left a world where whites in all nations are very simply put going extinct in the name of liberalism.