News Is george w bush the worst president ever?

[Poop-Loops]

And yet, the Democratic congress doesn't do it. Odd. I think that just means that a lot of Democrats are pretty extreme.

Holding someone accountable to lying a country into war, eroding the laws on which it was founded, politicizing branches of government that are supposed to stay neutral and otherwise ruining the country?

Yeah, frickin' extreme right there.

 

[BobG]

Old thread, recently resurrected (not by seycyrus) and seycyrus wasn't around for that.

In any case, if Bush being a war criminal would be an argument for calling him the worst President ever, showing that he isn't nullifies that argument. Of course, that isn't to say a similar, but more reasonable argument couldn't be made. Ie, whether it was strictly illegal or not, Bush certainly flouted the intent/authority of the UN. Of course, the single good foreign policy act I give Clinton credit for was also flouting the intent/authority of the UN. So just going against the wishes of the UN doesn't automatically make an act wrong. http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0699c.asp

I agree with the spirit at least (actually, I never saw what the US had to gain by getting involved in Bosnia/Kosovo at all).

If Iraq had WMDs, there was nothing wrong with the US invading, regardless of how the UN felt about it. It's the bungling of the UN issue that's bad, not the invasion, and bungling things in the UN is not a war crime.

Technically, at least a few members of the government could be liable for war crimes for violating the Geneva Convention and laws of armed conflict, though. One problem with using military comissions to resolve cases involving Guantanamo detainees is that the military isn't exempt from the laws of armed conflict. The military might never resolve a single case. The military judges and military prosecutors keep resisting against breaking some long standing rules of military justice.

Aside from the spin, which may or may not be true (although the reluctance of the military does lend some credence to the spin):

The Supreme Court, then, is hardly the only thing standing between the president and kangaroo convictions at Guantanamo. The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they'd been out on the battlefield, they'd have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they're not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That's not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It's because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence.

You had some interrogation methods that were certainly beyond anything the military could use and you have detainees that the military can't try and still stay within their own rules. That isn't a positive sign for the overall legality of how the detainee issue has been handled.

 

[rewebster]

The dems still don't hold enough votes to override Bush's vetos (I haven't looked it up but, I think Bush only vetoed one bill before the Dems got in).

The big bad thing about impeaching Bush would be--Who would end up being Pres IF he was impeached? Who's to say we don't have the lesser of two evils as it is, right now?

Poops-loop---don't leave the country just yet---Whoever wins, it (I hope) can't be as corrupt as it has been for the last seven years.

You can tell if a repub is 'a little more honest' than the 'other' repubs if he talks about how many rats have left the stinking ship over the last five years.