Bush Gets a Bad Rap

The concept was to no longer sit idly by while a growing threat gathers. While Iraq did NOT have anything to do directly with 9/11, the reports promulgated by IRAQ itself, of their burgeoning nuclear program, made them too dangerous to leave unchecked. We had been bombing them for the better part of a decade, and the concept of them hooking their believed nuclear program with some willing terrorists was too great a risk to take. They were in violation of many tenets of the ceasefire agreement from 1991, which left us well within our legal rights to resume hostilities. As a bonus, instilling a new democracy in that part of the world, with a continued presence from us, and a subsequent staging area to launch attacks to any other part of that region, held the potential to be enormously beneficial for us and the rest of the civilized world by deterring future unrest, and shaping new governments that will form.

Sure. So ?

I very specifically addressed this in the OP. We always hear about moderate muslims that want to stand up to the radicals ruining their religion, but are afraid to stand up and speak against them, for fear of their own safety. Us committing to maintaining a strong presence would likely empower the moderate Muslims to stand up and take their religion back. It may have created more terrorists in the short term, but would have empowered change that would have destroyed the stranglehold that the radicals now possess over the entire region. In this fashion we could have stopped the flow of radicalism in its tracks. This wouldn't be a short process, but we could have drastically sped that process along. As it stands now, we have a slow drip of new terrorists emerging everyday, empowered by the radicals perceived successes ( ISIS etc), and there is literally no end in sight.

I don't want to keep going over the same ground in the same post. See above.

Lets not get bogged down in petty discussions about tax rates. The issues at play here are far wider. If I let you, you will break out in a debate about whether Clinton had a surplus. Give it a rest,

I disagree with the assertion that I made that implication.

When it was said that it would take weeks, that referred to ousting Saddam from power. That actually happened in days if Im not mistaken. The notion that anyone was claiming that we would have a presence there for anything less than years is an out and out lie. We knew it would be a long time, and in fact, having that presence there indefinitely was SURELY one of the benefits of going into Iraq. Yes the policing phase of our presence was more complicated than hoped, but something changing midstream during armed conflict is hardly shocking. While of course one can say youd feel differently if it were your relative, but the fact remains that deaths during the many years of Iraqi fighting were tiny. It seemed much larger because of the constant drum beat from the anti war left and the willing media. Magically these deaths in Iraq and Afhanistan, didn't get the same attention from the same anti war left and same willing media, once Obama came into power.

This same predicate has already been addressed in this same post, so I will not be redundant by giving the same answer. In regards to it being the costliest mistake in US history, I would argue that the mistake was in not following through on what was a smart move, which is taking a significantly more aggressive stance in the Middle East. Even if one were to stipulate that it was a mistake ( which Im surely not), how are you defining costliest mistake? I think that 50k + dead Vietnam soldiers may disagree with your assessment.

Taking into consideration the size and scope of Middle East intervention and the Housing Bubble crash, petty arguing about small changes in tax rates seems petty, and kind of silly.

 

Discussed above. Iraq was no urgent threat to the US. The concept that we, as infidels, could march in and invade a Muslim country on false pretenses and expect them to support our democracy is as much as a fairy tale now as it was then.

So there was no basis for invading and occupy Iraq simply because Hussein wasn't a nice fellow.

You don't enable moderate Muslims by having infidels invade their country on false pretenses.

Bush's tax cuts were a primary implementation of his domestic economic policy. But I pointed out the statistics to show that the economy was not that great under Bush, even in the best period. And the tax cuts were supposed to give us this great economy.

"Bush was no more at fault than anyone else, other than he happened to be the president when the economic game of Jenga that we as a nation had been playing since the early 90s, finally came tumbling down."

As president Bush had the power to do things (tighten lending and underwriting regulation, SEC and banking regulation enforcement, reduce homeownership programs instead of expand them, etc) that could have eliminated or mitigated the GR. I agree that would have taken a great amount of foresight, but I disagree that he was no more at fault than anyone else because he was president at the time the housing bubble blew up to its absurd levels, and, as you acknowledged, basically did nothing.

That wasn't what they said at the time.

We didn't go into Vietnam because we made a mistake about the commies controlling North Vietnam or having the wherewithal and support to take down SV. But as the work ground on, it because more apparent that it was a mistake to think we could win a civil war like that, so you do have an argument there.

Disagree for reasons stated.

 

Bush, Bush senior, Cheney, and Reagan were responsible for 9/11. First off, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FaMbnINwc the docomentary proves Bush the son was responsible for the second Iraq war that was predicated on willful false information of WMD's.

When Bush was elected Clinton told Bush, Gore told Cheney, and Sandy Burger told Condoleeza Rice that Bin Laden was trying to attack the U.S. and they ignored them. If Bush had listened to Clinton there would never had been ISIS. October,2000 Cathy Gannon is informed that the Taliban would hand over Bin Laden to Bush.
Bush rejects the hand over. If he had done that there would have been no war in Afghanistan and no war in Iraq. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26410.htm

Reagan did his part by financing the Mujahideen turned Al Qaeda 5 billion dollars to fight the Soviets and also financed their training. So we created Al Qaeda. Thanks Reagan!

Bush senior pulled the war crime of the twentieth century by back stabbing Saddam telling him he wasn't going to take action against him while Kuwait was slant drilling for oil on Iraqi territory, while Bush himself was in cahoots with the oil deal, did a bait and switch on Saddam and invaded Iraq anyway. Look up Bush's history with Zapata Oil, while changing its name years later, Bush was still involved in those deals. Starting to get the picture now?

 

Democrats were not talking about the threat of a housing bubble. There were some Republicans who were talking about it. Can you find a major Democrat politician from 2000-2007 who was warning about an upcoming mortgage collapse?

Their meddling is what caused those "sloppy rating, lending, and underwriting practices" in the first place. A bank is not going to play fast and loose with their own money. They're not going to accept a 1.5% down payment on a 300k mortgage, with no income verification, when their own money is on the line. However, when they suddenly have the assurance that the Government is going to come in and cover all the bad loans that they make, they suddenly have incentive to do things that they wouldn't normally do. And that's what happened.

 

I think you meant to quote Iriemon, not me.

 

Bush said that that bill was not strong enough to do the job. He was backed up on that I believe, by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Government seems to put out bills not strong enough to hurt the money makers, or big groups. It's like the bill Congress came out with as to reporting people buying more than two hand guns in a week at the same store. But they left out long guns not to (*)(*)(*)(*) off hunters and then drug dealers used that omission to buy 5-15 assault rifles at one time here in Arizona. A bad bill is as good as no bill.

 

I'm not aware of any, except for the fact that Frank and 60% of the Democrats supported the Republican bill to increase F/F oversight in 2005.

Disagree. Businesses are run by people who are susceptible to gold rush fever -- when everyone else is making great profits doing something there is tremendous pressure to do it too. We've certainly seen in the past the danger of unregulated markets where credit is involved, and I'm sure we will see it again in the future one day.

 

Bush said lots of things and did something else.

Republican Mike Oxley, head or the Republican finance committee, Stephen Blumenthal, acting OFHEO head responsible for F/F oversight, as well as Democrat Frank all urged passage of the House bill. Oxley and Frank even wrote a letter to the Senate urging them to pass it.

Instead, Bush opposed the bill, gave them the "one-fingered salute", and we got ... nothing.

 

So they agreed to a bill, even though they did not believe there was a housing bubble or a threat to the mortgage industry?

For a very long time banks would not set somebody up with a home mortgage unless that person had good credit, a good income, and a 20% down payment. Then the Government got involved and forced those banks (under threat of holding up mergers, denying new expansion permits, etc) to loan to people with bad credit and 1-3% down payments, with the assurance that any loan that goes bad would be covered by the Government in the execution of their social programs.

And, that's to ignore the reason banks started chasing those profits to begin with. Throw millions upon millions of previously unqualified borrowers into the market at the same time, while adding no existing inventory for them to buy, then watch what happens to existing home prices under the concept of supply and demand.

 

I'll tell you another bad bill they put out. There is a bill that will pay farmers not to grow certain crops. Done to keep the price up so the market is not flooded with one kind of crop and the price drops so low the farmer can't make any money. Trouble is, any land developer who buys so many acres of land for future development can get thousands of dollars every year for not planting crops, even when he has no intention of growing any. He is waiting to build homes, shopping center etc. You would want him to pass another bill that can't do the job that needs done?

 

Dealt with, the trend was in place long before 2000, you know it, I know it. Even if it wasn't, it was more due to Clinton policy than Bush. The results of the unwise Clinton waiver of the antitrust law for big banks took a decade to ferment, as did CRA jawboning and threats. Bad policy is not a lightswitch, despite how much you and yours seem to think that. Trying to BUSHDIDIT on the mortgage bubble is asinine.

Dealt with already in the prior post, dealt with default rate too, have seen the Complex obfuscation and cherrypick attempt of the blatant, obvious CRA role in the collapse many times, completely irrelevant. Nonresponsive and stand by prior post where CRA is concerned as completely unrefuted.

And the Fed toes the Complex line, no surprise there at all. Fact: CRA was one of the top three oily rag factors in the collapse, no way around it.

You are the union.

The article is factual and comprehensive as opposed to cherrypicked factoids and raw, unfounded correlations. Readers can read your cherrypicks and the Hillsdale piece and make up their own minds.

Then they can watch this if they are too lazy to read, from someone smarter and far more experienced than me (I don't agree with all of his POV, but believe any reasonable person should watch the three part video series):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31UlBnkQr0

 

How many thousands of people have been murdered in Mexico with that flaw in that gun bill?

 

I never said they were an urgent threat. Whether they support the democracy is of little to no consequence to us. It just so happens that they did initially support it, turning out in huge numbers to vote. Once it became apparent we weren't in for the long haul however, support for that democracy started to wane. Nobody wants to be in favor of an American system when the very real threat exists that the Americans will soon leave, the lunatics will be back, and American supporters run the risk of retribution for that support.

I never said it had anything to do with him not being a nice fellow. You have a penchant for non sequiturs.

You enable moderate Muslims by ensuring them you are going to support their efforts until the end, without the fear that you will lose your resolve, and leave them at risk for retribution for supporting moderate causes. You almost act as if Iraqis hates losing Saddam.

Yeah and Clinton had a surplus....we get it.



"Bush was no more at fault than anyone else, other than he happened to be the president when the economic game of Jenga that we as a nation had been playing since the early 90s, finally came tumbling down."

I would blame Bush no more than I would blame congress. Nobody uttered a peep about it in the 2006 election.

Not if you carefully pick and choose your soundbites they didn't.

I asked how you are quantifying "the costliest mistake" if we were to fictitiously stipulate that it was a mistake. Typically that would be defined by lives lost, but oddly you want to define costliest mistake as not having huge stockpiles of WMD's, which is a ridiculous specific standard that you are self servingly arbitrarily applying to how to define costliest. Conveniently, your defining could only refer to once instance. For the record, the articles drawn up for the resumption of hostility outlined I believe 23 different violations, so the legal justification to do so is inarguable.

 

Obviously they agreed with their Republican colleagues that more oversight of F/F was necessary.

The Govt did not force banks to make many billions of dollars on subprime loans. They did that because they made fat profits and bonuses.

Then the banks shouldn't have lent them the money and invested in the mortgages.

They did so because they made huge profits and bonuses, and they wrongly thought they had diversified and insured against the risk with securitizations and CDS from AAA rated companies.

 

Not at all, as the chart proves. Deal with it.

CRAs didn't cause the housing bubble. Deal with it.

CRAs were a tiny fraction of the subprime market. Deal with it.

LOL, I am what union. You have no idea what you are talking about, as usual. Deal with it.

LOL, a completely biased RW propaganda article is the best you can come up with? Deal with it.

 

But still denied that there was a housing bubble, eroding away your claim that homeownership programs "in the middle of a bubble, it is clearly the wrong thing to do." It wasn't very clear to them.

The Govt forced them to make a certain percentage of their loans to "underrepresented borrowers" or else be denied the right to expand into new territories, merge with other companies, and face other restrictions. The Govt also lowered the standards that banks employed to lend to borrowers, which naturally increased the amount of lesser-qualified applicants who went in looking for mortgages.

On what grounds would they have denied those applicants? They suddenly became qualified under the new homeownership programs that were enacted.

 

I never said it was clear to them. It probably wasn't clear to Bush. That doesn't erode my statement at all.

The percentage of loans they had to make was miniscule compared to the loans they made. Minority loans did not cause the bubble.

Any grounds they wanted. Inadequate verification of income might be a starter.

 

Bush called it an urgent threat.

We were never in it for the long haul. Bush said so on the eve of the invasion. If that was a fundamental problem the plan was fundamentally flawed from the get go.

Infidels invading a Muslim country on false pretenses is not enabling moderate Muslims. It is enabling radicals as we see.

I wonder.

Disagree for reasons stated.

I stated it is easier to see in hindsight.

"I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."
--Donald Rumsfeld, November 14, 2002
"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months"
-- Donald Rumsfeld, February 7, 2003
"I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks rather than months."
-- Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003
"No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years."
-- Richard Perle, March 9, 2003

http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Dick_Cheney_War_+_Peace.htm

If you were to stipulate that it is a mistake, WWII was the most costly.

 

Wrong.

Yes it did. Deal with it.

Dealt with in the clearest terms in my first post on this subtopic. You ignore that entirely, and instead proceed to spout the same, irrelevant, cherrypicked factoids, as I knew you would. The damage was done in the jawboning, threats and jiggering of Fanny Freddy policy, not in the actual rate of CRA defaults, the size of CRA loans in relation to the market, or any of the other tired, irrelevant deflective crap you posted on CRA.

From you, the king of the union label chart and soundbites, that's absolutely rich. To restate, the author of that article is smarter and more experienced than you ever have been or ever will be. Deal with it. You have no rebuttal whatsoever to the FACTS in that article, so are going to go on spewing ad hominems against the source and irrelevant, cherrypicked factoids. Deal with it. Readers should read the hilldale article and watch the Allison video I linked, especially the Allison video, which is probably going to be my response to inane, inaccurate union label propaganda on the financial crisis going forward. Here's a link again so folks can get to the TRUTH more easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31UlBnkQr0

 

I forgot about these quotes. In retrospect, they even further highlight the delusion and deception. Here are a few more gems:

01/10/2003, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
“… something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.”

03/27/2003, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary
“There’s a lot of money to pay for this … the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Of course, the real cost was at least 10-times this "optimistic" estimate.

03/16/2003, Dick Cheney, Vice President
“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . [in] weeks rather than months.”

05/01/2003, George W. Bush, President
“My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Under the banner “Mission Accomplished.”

 

Weakness enables radicals.... as we see today. Strength and commitment, is what moderates need before they can even dream of standing up to the radicals.

Technically, the costliest would be the Civil War

 

Infidels invading their country enables radicals. We didn't have those radicals there before we invaded Iraq by "mistake".

That is true.

 

If you are talking about Iraq specifically, it is my understanding that most of those came from other countries to commit their crimes. I was actually talking about the Middle East however, where Iraq is one small piece of the puzzle, and not really the indigenous hotbed of radicals.

 

Sure, radicals all over the Muslim world, as well as in Iraq, were motivated by the infidel invasion of a Muslim country on pretext. It was well documented.

 

Posts 5 and 6 are dead-on accurate. I was a homeowner and employed in the dot com business. I know, without question, neither crashes were the fault of Bush. And it goes without saying except to the low IQ that neither did 911.

Bush was and is a good man and a patriot.

/end