George W Bush being considered good again

[Twed]

It's a damning sign of everything, isn't it? This tweet thread sums it up well:

https://twitter.com/dubsteppenwolf/status/986648913062047746

Figures on the center are constantly harking back to the good enemy, because they value comportment more than ideology. You can be evil and have the intellectual capacity of a fried egg as long as you wear good suits and don't curse. This is also another reason why Obama is so revered. It doesn't matter that he passes a Republican health care plan, doubles down on the racist prison state or drones some shit out of some babies, because he's such a good public speaker and always looks so well turned out.

Fuck this. Give us a monkey that passes single payer whilst simultaneously shitting and cumming. Anybody who values how superficially respectable somebody is above all else--or completely forgets how a previous figure used to be a huge figure of fun himself--should be removed from discourse entirely.

[Utter Shit]

Figures on the center are constantly harking back to the good enemy, because they value comportment more than ideology. You can be evil and have the intellectual capacity of a fried egg as long as you wear good suits and don't curse. This is also another reason why Obama is so revered. It doesn't matter that he passes a Republican health care plan, doubles down on the racist prison state or drones some shit out of some babies, because he's such a good public speaker and always looks so well turned out.

It's more a case of the system being absolutely fucked to the point that whoever is in charge is going to be forced into making horrible decisions daily, but someone like Obama seemed like he wanted to do the right things wherever possible. I don't think it's really fair to just dismiss him as just a good actor, which is near impossible to disprove...unless he's the best actor the world has ever seen, he was a good person trying to make positive changes but having to make compromises. That is a world away from someone like Trump who actively embraces making life as shit as possible and is pretty obviously a sociopath.

It's over-the-top cynical, and wholly inaccurate, to act like all politicians are as bad as each other, and I would suggest it's less a case of everyone being too stupid to realise all 'good' politicians are superficial, and more a case of you being too cynical to realise that a lot of them are genuinely trying to achieve good things but get stymied by the fact that they are in impossible jobs, because limited budgets means you're only ever moving money around and every sector you help with additional funds is essentially a death sentence for the people affected by the money you take from elsewhere.

As for Bush...well he obviously isn't being considered good as the thread title suggests, but it stands to reason that he is slightly re-assessed, doesn't it? At the time, it seemed utterly impossible that someone as thick as him could be in such a position of power, but Trump gives that a little bit more context - to paraphrase someone brilliant but forgotten by me, "Bush is real world stupid, Trump is Homer Simpson stupid"...Bush was in over his head, but he probably wasn't evil and he probably wasn't intellectually sub-normal compared (by average standards rather than high office standards), whereas Trump is both.

EDIT: Just had a sudden vague memory that Twed might be a known wind-up merchant, if so disregard this post.

[drummersaredeaf]

Can Trump do this though?

https://youtu.be/TxNprnas7i8

Case closed.

[biggytitbo]

I've said it before, but the only way to stop these cunts is to hang them as a deterrent. If Bush and Blair had been hung for Iraq then you can be pretty sure the next round of politicians would be slightly more careful before they start a war. We could even create  a new aphorism - if you can't handle dangling above the floor, don't start that war.

[canadagoose]

Give us a monkey that passes single payer whilst simultaneously shitting and cumming.

You should post in HS Art more.

Yeah, it's hard to believe that Bush is being thought of as a good guy these days. A lot of people have short memories, it seems. Bush and Trump are both clowns in their own way, and I wonder if Bush's "Bushisms" were a purposeful thing to make people remember him more fondly in the future.

[Paul Calf]

Biggy and Twed's Death and Re-Education Camp Of Fun will be full of only the most deserving cases.

[manticore]

To understand Trump, you do indeed have to understand the system that produced him, a system of politicians being paid by Wall Street and big corporations to do their bidding, which is what Clinton, Bush, Obama etc. did. Obama was a compliant machine politician and the machine is evil. Trump is largely being a compliant servant of the Republican Party right-wing establishment, whch is worse, but at least he's exposing the horrors. He's not an aberration, he's a result.

Trump will have to work very hard to kill as many people as Bush did - maybe he'll manage it, who can tell? He's not as evil as Nixon, I'm pretty sure of that.

[biggytitbo]

The political establishment regard Trump as an horrific embodiment of everything they stand against, but sadly if they could look in a magic bullshit removing mirror he is what they would see reflected back - their contorted, twisted, true selves, stripped of all the spin, PR and artifice.

[thenoise]

Can Trump do this though?

https://youtu.be/TxNprnas7i8

Case closed.

I've forgotten how entertaining he clearly found it. Grinning contentedly and trying to catch the second shoe, before making a quip about it.

He doesn't caaare about the shoooooes [/Valerie off of peep show]

Yeah I miss him a bit, but we'll look back with amused bafflement on Trump one day. Assuming he doesn't fucking kill us, that is.

[Utter Shit]

Oh yeah there is no doubt that if we survive Trump, with a few years' distance we will forget all the lives he ruined and find not only his behaviour, but the whole situation of him even getting in, hilarious. To be honest, despite myself I often find myself grimly amused by it now, although I'm sure if I was affected by his policies or the atmosphere he was fomented in the States it wouldn't be so funny.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think the difference is that despite starting an illegal war and being ignorant as fuck he still seemed to fall on the right side of hanlon's razor.

Trump is a petty, spiteful man baby who doesn't care who he fucks over in the wake of his persuit of feeling like a winner.

It could also be argued both of them were easily led by the cuntiest person in the room, and trump's crew are far worse.

[Howj Begg]

Twed, where is your thread about Cynthia Nixon? I'd like to post this on it please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HohD8NVW3M

[madhair60]

I always thought he was good.

[madhair60]

lmao not really that would be mental

[ajsmith2]

 Good 'again'? Surely 'for the first time considered not the worst thing imaginable, and even then only relatively' is more accurate.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Good 'again'? Surely 'for the first time considered not the worst thing imaginable, and even then only relatively' is more accurate.

I dunno was he always the worst? What about Reagan or Nixon?

Reagan is an interesting one in the sense of just how much his influence seemed to affect film and television. All them action films and airwolf and that. Reganite shite.

[imitationleather]

Total jackasses get misty eyed and nostalgic about David Cameron and George Osborne. Just because who we have now is total fucking shit does not mean that everything in the past was good.

I guess one of those troll cunts might be like "Ah actually things are good now actually." They can get fucked the cunts.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The difference there is that Cameron and Osborne are directly responsible for the situation we have now. You can't really land that on Bush given Obama had two presidential terms, not that I'm attempting to blame him for anything at all.

[ajsmith2]

I dunno was he always the worst? What about Reagan or Nixon?

He definitely introduced a level of blatant undignified crassness and stupidity that wasn't in play before, and that Trump offers a different flavour of.

Were ardent Republicans even proud of W Bush at the time? I should have been paying more attention, but I don't think so. I get the impression they rah rahed for the party while trying to do their best to ignore and work around the eejit that was fronting it at the time.

[idunnosomename]

He didn't look like a monkey. Though he did look a bit like a chimpanzee.

[Dr Rock]

He looked cool when he dodged them shoes being thrown at him, with his little smirky face untroubled.

[Twed]

Good 'again'? Surely 'for the first time considered not the worst thing imaginable, and even then only relatively' is more accurate.

Good point, not sure why I wrote "again".

Twed, where is your thread about Cynthia Nixon? I'd like to post this on it please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HohD8NVW3M

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=66025.0

Biggy and Twed's Death and Re-Education Camp Of Fun will be full of only the most deserving cases.

Your pitiful common-sense dad act whenever the conversation takes a left turn is revealing of your frustrations and it's beautiful.

Were ardent Republicans even proud of W Bush at the time? I should have been paying more attention, but I don't think so. I get the impression they rah rahed for the party while trying to do their best to ignore and work around the eejit that was fronting it at the time.

Which makes it even sadder that Democrats today like him.

[Oops! Wrong Planet]

There's the argument that Bush has in effect saved hundreds of thousands of lives through the Malaria Initiative he set up that's delivered millions of mosquito nets and anti-malarial treatments to Africa.

On the other hand he got Blair's mouth wrong.

[Dex Sawash]

I was Bush-sceptic back in 1999-2000, no way was he as thick as he came across. Turned out he was even thicker than that. Man sure can dodge a draft shoe though.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

That painting was actually an attempt to paint a perfect humanoid, splicing a cool 50/50 split between Tony Blair and himself.

The perfect humanoid has a fucking weird collar doesn't he?

[Large Noise]

It really annoyed me that Bush got attention for those portraits. It's an absolute piece of piss to print a picture of someone and turn it into a painting. Any cunt could do it, you just need to make a grid on each piece of paper to get the scale right when you're sketching it out.

That and the Iraq thing.

[Funcrusher]

Trump has yet to commit an act of murdering barbarism on the scale of the invasion of Iraq, so Bush 2 still wins at this point.

[Fambo Number Mive]

The UK equivalent might be John Major, who seems to have become more popular since he left office, in particular since Cameron and Brexit. Although Major seemed to become more popular in the Blair years as well.

[yesitsme]

Funnily enough I was talking about this very thing last night.  I was saying that if you had a time machine and went back to the Dubya days you'd be hard pushed to convince people that there was another down from here.

Don't worry about this fuckwit folks, there's a bloke coming soon who's going to make him look like a rocket scientist.

They'd never believe you.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The UK equivalent might be John Major, who seems to have become more popular since he left office, in particular since Cameron and Brexit. Although Major seemed to become more popular in the Blair years as well.

I don't know if Major has become more liberal in his age, or the Overton window shifted so far right that he appeared left of new Labour but I guess his popularity has gone up because the last few times he has spoken has been to say "Mate." at the tories for enacting some very spiteful schemes on the poor.