Let's relive the Bush years!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Let's relive the Bush years!

yronic heroism: Oct 31, 2008

The Daily Show was nowhere near as influential at the beginning of this decade as, say, South Park. Anyone remember That�s My Bush?

# ? May 11, 2020 03:16

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# ? May 5, 2024 14:32

Improper Umlaut: Jun 8, 2009

Clouseau posted:

An argument I remember hearing at the time was, well, whatever the case may be with weapons of mass destruction, the fact is that Saddam is a bad person and everyone will be much happier when he's gone.

There was definitely a lot of that going around, I can remember the best response to that argument I saw was scrawled on a makeshift cardboard bumper sticker in the back of some guy�s station wagon.

�Saddam Hussein is a pig but an unprovoked war with Iraq is stupid.�

Which really summed up the whole situation we were in quite nicely.

# ? May 11, 2020 03:36

Cease to Hope: Dec 12, 2011

readingatwork posted:

Alan Keyes�s opening gambit was to announce he got the FDA to let some kid named Navarro get �the treatment he needs� which I strongly suspect is some sort of religious alternative medicine horseshit. I�ll do some research once this is done to be sure though.

UPDATE: Did the research. It was a 4 year old with cancer and the parents wanted experimental (but not necessarily bullshit) treatments not yet approved by the FDA for use with children. Conservatives got their way and he got the treatment but he died anyways in 2001 at age six and the treatment in question was never proven to be effective. It's a really sad story actually. https://www.mdpolicy.org/policyblog/detail/revisiting-the-thomas-navarro-story

The Burzynski Clinic is one of a bunch of shady-rear end cancer clinics that offer snake oil to people with stage three or four cancer, taking advantage of the fact that chemo/radiation courses are hellish and Texas in particular has very lax "compassionate care" laws that allow you to sell exorbitantly expensive snake oil to people who have a very low chance to survive as it is.

Woo medical pseudoscience blurred into the right-to-die discussion and whether homosexuality was genetic around this time. It wasn't always the right pushing woo either; one of the big arguments in favor of horseshoe theory was the fact that green parties tended to have some goofy views on alt medicine or genetic causes. (This fades away in the US but becomes more of a mainstream liberal position in Europe WRT genetically modified food.) The Navarro case wasn't a big one but it gives you an idea of the lay of the land building up to the Terry Schiavo case, early in 2001.

Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 11, 2020

# ? May 11, 2020 03:42

Improper Umlaut: Jun 8, 2009

Falstaff posted:

There's a reason the 90's saw such incredibly successful third party runs, and why everyone and their dog laughed about how the two main parties had almost no daylight between them.

One of the best examples of satire coming from this time was Billionaires for Bush or Gore:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815211537/http://billionairesforbushorgore.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires_for_Bush

# ? May 11, 2020 03:51

A GIANT PARSNIP: Apr 13, 2010; Too much fuckin' eggnog

readingatwork posted:

A post in another thread reminded me that Bill Maher was a thing at this point and probably worth following since he will later get booted from his show for political reasons.

https://youtu.be/onyFxcQFA70

lol Bill Maher lost his dumb show because Dinesh fuckin D'Souza said the 9/11 terrorists were true warriors and Bill agreed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_Incorrect#Controversy_and_cancellation

# ? May 11, 2020 05:35

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

lol Bill Maher lost his dumb show because Dinesh fuckin D'Souza said the 9/11 terrorists were true warriors and Bill agreed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_Incorrect#Controversy_and_cancellation

oh yeah. i sorta remember that poo poo floating around with D'Souza and other random religious conservatives would get super hard wishing their underlings would kill thousands for their evangelical horseshit. its obviously still around but since 911 is almost 20 years behind us and the religious right isnt as mainstream as it used to be, you dont hear about it as much.

# ? May 11, 2020 05:48

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

maher will eventually say that someone willing to do a suicide attack is not a coward, and for that will have his show where his gimmick is that he's willing to say uncomfortable and non-mainstream things cancelled

don't get me wrong, maher's a huge rear end in a top hat, but that particular bit of insane hypocrisy from the freeze peach crowd always stuck with me

# ? May 11, 2020 07:15

forkboy84: Jun 13, 2012; Corgis love bread. And Puro

I just saw this thread and it is a blast, but I gotta know why the Democratic field was so thin in 2000? How come the only person running against Gore was Bradley? Because benefit of hindsight but Gore seemed a pretty piss poor candidate aside from "is VP", he was tainted by association with Clinton, and it's not even like Clinton oversaw some great Democratic victories in the 90s.

# ? May 11, 2020 11:23

Chinese Gordon: Oct 22, 2008

forkboy84 posted:

I just saw this thread and it is a blast, but I gotta know why the Democratic field was so thin in 2000? How come the only person running against Gore was Bradley? Because benefit of hindsight but Gore seemed a pretty piss poor candidate aside from "is VP", he was tainted by association with Clinton, and it's not even like Clinton oversaw some great Democratic victories in the 90s.

Clinton was actually very popular and one of the reasons Gore lost (or rather, was in a position to have the election stolen by judicial fiat) was because he made the decision to distance himself from Clinton.

# ? May 11, 2020 11:54

Soviet Space Dog: May 7, 2009; Unicum Space Dog
May 6, 2009

NOBODY WILL REALIZE MY POSTS ARE SHIT NOW THAT MY NAME IS PURPLE

ToxicAcne posted:

As someone who became an adult after Bush was gone, I'm curious as to how Democrats justified going to war in Iraq?

The late 1990s was probably the peak of "Humanitarian" interventionist thought (that the world consisted of Good Liberal Democracies and Bad places where Bad strongmen did Bad ethnic cleansing, and that it is the duty of the Good Liberal Democracies to go blow up the Bad Men). The Third Way type center-left put a lot of stock in it. Iraq was the big shiny version of intervention because it finally gave everyone a chance to do Liberal Nation Building. This ended up killing the whole zeitgeist because it turns out that the people running the Good Liberal Democracies were actually also evil pieces of poo poo who did most of the Bad things that Bad strongmen did to control the country.

The actual justification is hard to describe because what happened was a massive media propaganda campaign. There might be weapons of mass destruction, and even if there weren't it didn't matter because Saddam Hussein was bad. Backing this up was a pretty clear subtext that any dissent was unacceptable. The only acceptable positions were being an openly bloodthirsty neocon, or a principled humanitarian imperialist who wants the same outcomes as the neocons. Everything else was mocked.

# ? May 11, 2020 12:10

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

the democratic party has always been shockingly hawkish. the only exception that i can think of was vietnam after it was obviously unwinnable, and loving nixon ended up ending vietnam

most of the military-industrial complex leans republican, but it faces no opposition from the democrats

# ? May 11, 2020 12:33

Srice: Sep 11, 2011

Soviet Space Dog posted:

The actual justification is hard to describe because what happened was a massive media propaganda campaign. There might be weapons of mass destruction, and even if there weren't it didn't matter because Saddam Hussein was bad. Backing this up was a pretty clear subtext that any dissent was unacceptable. The only acceptable positions were being an openly bloodthirsty neocon, or a principled humanitarian imperialist who wants the same outcomes as the neocons. Everything else was mocked.

Yea even as someone who was against invading Iraq when many of my highschool classmates were for it I was surprised to learn years later that the anti-war protests in the leadup to Iraq were some of the largest on record. I thought I was following the news closely at the time but I truly had no idea. At best I knew that there were some protests happening but the scope of them were barely touched on by much of the media. I suspect I'm not alone in that regard!

# ? May 11, 2020 14:00

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

the complete failure of those protests led to some serious disillusionment with the potential of activism to shape policy, i remember. they were just ignored and had no real bite to them, there was no 'or else' - a rude awakening indeed for the people who truly believed in liberal democracy and the power of peaceful protest

# ? May 11, 2020 14:18

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

pthighs posted:

This type of thing was why I was quite surprised when Bush won. For many Americans, the 90s was a time of massive prosperity and few worries; why would you switch away from what seemed to be working?

I was around 20 at the time.

What I remember was that people were convinced that both parties were more or less the same so they voted based on who was more interesting.

Also the right wing long term smear campaign against the Clintons as the most corrupt people in history was going well for them.

# ? May 11, 2020 17:23

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

Jaxyon posted:

I was around 20 at the time.

What I remember was that people were convinced that both parties were more or less the same so they voted based on who was more interesting.

Also the right wing long term smear campaign against the Clintons as the most corrupt people in history was going well for them.

tbf the clintons *are* pretty spectacularly corrupt

# ? May 11, 2020 17:29

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

Here's an article from Mother Jones eulogizing the pay phone, which was fast on it's way to becoming extinct.

Dearly Disconnected

Mother Jones - Jan/Feb issue posted:

by Ian Frasier

We cursed and abused them, and now many of us do without them. But pay phones recall a commonality in our culture. A tribute to this vanishing American icon.

Before I got married I was living by myself in an A-frame cabin in northwestern Montana. The cabin�s interior was a single high-ceilinged room, and at the center of the room, mounted on the rough-hewn log that held up the ceiling beam, was a telephone. I knew no one in the area or indeed the whole state, so my entire social life came to me through that phone. The woman I would marry was living in Sarasota, Florida, and the distance between us suggests how well we were getting along at the time. We had not been in touch for several months; she had no phone. One day she decided to call me from a pay phone. We talked for a while, and after her coins ran out I jotted the number on the wood beside my phone and called her back. A day or two later, thinking about the call, I wanted to talk to her again. The only number I had for her was the pay phone number I�d written down.

The pay phone was on the street some blocks from the apartment where she stayed. As it happened, though, she had just stepped out to do some errands a few minutes before I called, and she was passing by on the sidewalk when the phone rang. She had no reason to think that a public phone ringing on a busy street would be for her. She stopped, listened to it ring again, and picked up the receiver. Love is pure luck; somehow I had known she would answer, and she had known it would be me.

Long afterwards, on a trip to Disney World in Orlando with our two kids, then aged six and two, we made a special detour to Sarasota to show them the pay phone. It didn�t impress them much. It�s just a nondescript Bell Atlantic pay phone on the cement wall of a building, by the vestibule. But its ordinariness and even boringness only make me like it more; ordinary places where extraordinary events have occurred are my favorite kind. On my mental map of Florida that pay phone is a landmark looming above the city it occupies, and a notable, if private, historic site.

I�m interested in pay phones in general these days, especially when I get the feeling that they are about to go away. Technology, in the form of sleek little phones in our pockets, has swept on by them and made them begin to seem antique. My lifelong entanglement with pay phones dates me; when I was young they were just there, a given, often as stubborn and uncongenial as the curbstone underfoot. They were instruments of torture sometimes. You had to feed them fistfuls of change in those pre-phone-card days, and the operator was a real person who stood maddeningly between you and whomever you were trying to call. And when the call went wrong, as communication often does, the pay phone gave you a focus for your rage. Pay phones were always getting smashed up, the receivers shattered to bits against the booth, the coin slots jammed with chewing gum, the cords yanked out and unraveled to the floor.

You used to hear people standing at pay phones and cursing them. I remember the sound of my own frustrated shouting confined by the glass walls of a phone booth � the kind you don�t see much anymore, with a little ventilating fan in the ceiling that turned on when you shut the double-hinged glass door. The noise that fan made in the silence of a phone booth was for a while the essence of romantic, lonely-guy melancholy for me. Certain specific pay phones I still resent for the unhappiness they caused me, and others I will never forgive, though not for any fault of their own. In the C concourse of the Salt Lake City airport there�s a row of pay phones set on the wall by the men�s room just past the concourse entry. While on a business trip a few years ago, I called home from a phone in that row and learned that a friend had collapsed in her apartment and was in the hospital with brain cancer. I had liked those pay phones before, and had used them often; now I can�t even look at them when I go by.

There was always a touch of seediness and sadness to pay phones, and a sense of transience. Drug dealers made calls from them, and shady types who did not want their whereabouts known, and otherwise respectable people planning assignations, and people too poor to have phones of their own. In the movies, any character who used a pay phone was either in trouble or contemplating a crime. Pay phones came with their own special atmospherics and even accessories sometimes � the predictable bad smells and graffiti, of course, as well as cigarette butts, soda cans, scattered pamphlets from the Jehovah�s Witnesses, and single bottles of beer (empty) still in their individual, street-legal paper bags. Mostly, pay phones evoked the mundane: �Honey, I�m just leaving. I�ll be there soon.� But you could tell that a lot of undifferentiated humanity had flowed through these places, and that in the muteness of each pay phone�s little space, wild emotion had howled.

Once, when I was living in Brooklyn, I read in the newspaper that a South American man suspected of dozens of drug-related contract murders had been arrested at a pay phone in Queens. Police said that the man had been on the phone setting up a murder at the time of his arrest. The newspaper story gave the address of the pay phone, and out of curiosity one afternoon I took a long walk to Queens to take a look at it. It was on an undistinguished street in a middle-class neighborhood, by a florist�s shop. By the time I saw it, however, the pay phone had been blown up and/or firebombed. I had never before seen a pay phone so damaged; explosives had blasted pieces of the phone itself wide open in metal shreds like frozen banana peels, and flames had blackened everything and melted the plastic parts and burned the insulation off the wires. Soon after, I read that police could not find enough evidence against the suspected murderer and so had let him go.

The cold phone outside a shopping center in Bigfork, Montana, from which I called a friend in the West Indies one winter when her brother was sick; the phone on the wall of the concession stand at Redwood Pool, where I used to stand dripping and call my mom to come and pick me up; the sweaty phones used almost only by men in the hallway outside the maternity ward at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York; the phone by the driveway of the Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota where I used to talk with my wife while priests in black slacks and white socks chatted on a bench nearby; the phone in the old wood-paneled phone booth with leaded glass windows in the drugstore in my Ohio hometown � each one is as specific as a birthmark, a point on earth unlike any other. Recently I went back to New York City after a long absence and tried to find a working pay phone. I picked up one receiver after the next without success. Meanwhile, as I scanned down the long block, I counted half a dozen or more pedestrians talking on their cell phones.

It�s the cell phone, of course, that�s putting the pay phone out of business. The pay phone is to the cell phone as the troubled and difficult older sibling is to the cherished newborn. People even treat their cell phones like babies, cradling them in their palms and beaming down upon them lovingly as they dial. You sometimes hear people yelling on their cell phones, but almost never yelling at them. Cell phones are toylike, nearly magic, and we get a huge kick out of them, as often happens with technological advances until the new wears off. Somehow I don�t believe people had a similar honeymoon period with pay phones back in their early days, and they certainly have no such enthusiasm for them now. When I see a cell-phone user gently push the little antenna and fit the phone back into its brushed-vinyl carrying case and tuck the case inside his jacket beside his heart, I feel sorry for the beat-up pay phone standing in the rain.

eople almost always talk on cell phones while in motion � driving, walking down the street, riding on a commuter train. The cell phone took the transience the pay phone implied and turned it into VIP-style mobility and speed. Even sitting in a restaurant, the person on a cell phone seems importantly busy and on the move. Cell-phone conversations seem to be unlimited by ordinary constraints of place and time, as if they represent an almost-perfect form of communication whose perfect state would be telepathy.

And yet no matter how we factor the world away, it remains. I think this is what drives me so nuts when a person sitting next to me on a bus makes a call from her cell phone. Yes, this busy and important caller is at no fixed point in space, but nevertheless I happen to be beside her. The job of providing physical context falls on me; I become her call�s surroundings, as if I�m the phone booth wall. For me to lean over and comment on her cell-phone conversation would be as unseemly and unexpected as if I were in fact a wall; and yet I have no choice, as a sentient person, but to hear what my chatty fellow traveler has to say.

Some middle-aged guys like me go around complaining about this kind of thing. The more sensible approach is just to accept it and forget about it, because there�s not much we can do. I don�t think that pay phones will completely disappear. Probably they will survive for a long while as clumsy old technology still of some use to those lagging behind, and as a backup if ever the superior systems should temporarily fail. Before pay phones became endangered I never thought of them as public spaces, which of course they are. They suggested a human average; they belonged to anybody who had a couple of coins. Now I see that, like public schools and public transportation, pay phones belong to a former commonality our culture is no longer quite so sure it needs.

I have a weakness for places � for old battlefields, car-crash sites, houses where famous authors lived. Bygone passions should always have an address, it seems to me. Ideally, the world would be covered with plaques and markers listing the notable events that occurred at each particular spot. A sign on every pay phone would describe how a woman broke up with her fiance here, how a young ballplayer learned that he had made the team. Unfortunately, the world itself is fluid, and changes out from under us; the rocky islands that the pilot Mark Twain was careful to avoid in the Mississippi are now stone outcroppings in a soybean field. Meanwhile, our passions proliferate into illegibility, and the places they occur can�t hold them. Eventually pay phones will become relics of an almost-vanished landscape, and of a time when there were fewer of us and our stories were on an earlier page. Romantics like me will have to reimagine our passions as they are � unmoored to earth, like an infinitude of cell-phone messages flying through the atmosphere.

Here's what my cell phone looked like at the time by the way:

I also found this story

Feb 9, 2000 - F.B.I.'s New York Office Head Leaving for a Delaware Bank

The New York Times posted:

By William K. Rashbaum

Lewis D. Schiliro, the head of the New York office of the F.B.I., is to retire next month after a 25-year-career in which he oversaw investigations ranging from racketeering by Mafia figures on the streets of Little Italy to terrorist attacks on United States citizens around the world.

A self-effacing administrator, Mr. Schiliro, 50, will join MBNA America Bank in Wilmington, Del., the second-largest credit card issuer in the nation, as a senior executive vice president, he said in a telephone interview yesterday. Mr. Schiliro said he would concentrate on support services and managing the firm's properties.

F.B.I. Director Louis J. Freeh, who said he had known Mr. Schiliro since the two men attended the bureau's academy together 25 years ago, praised him as ''an outstanding investigator and a superb leader.''

Mr. Schiliro's successor as assistant F.B.I. director in charge of the New York office, the bureau's largest field office in the country, has not been named, but several officials said a leading candidate is Barry Mawn, who currently heads the bureau's office in Boston. Mr. Mawn also has headed the agency's offices in Newark and Knoxville, Tenn., and worked for more than a decade in New York, where he investigated violent crimes and supervised other agents working on terrorism cases.

Mr. Schiliro is leaving the office after a two-year tenure as its head marked by a growth in the threat of terrorism in the United States and abroad and a dramatic increase in the amount of money Washington has set aside to investigate and prevent violent acts of terror.

After the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, Mr. Schiliro traveled to Nairobi in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to help oversee the New York agents working on the case in the two countries. He later oversaw the creation of the New York office's rapid deployment force, one of several special F.B.I. teams around the country that includes investigators and evidence technicians who are ready to board a plane on short notice and respond to terrorist attacks and major crimes outside the United States.

In his years with the bureau, Mr. Schiliro oversaw drug cases, went undercover collecting garbage to investigate organized crime's influence in the carting industry and testified as an expert witness in the trial that ended with the conviction of John J. Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family.

Seems legit.

Finally, this was the month that Ralph Nader joined the race as the Green Party candidate:

Feb 22, 2000 - THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE GREEN PARTY; Vowing to Restore Confidence, Nader Joins Race

The New York Times posted:

By Lizette Alvarez

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, announced today that he would make a second run for the presidency as a Green Party candidate and vowed, as he did in 1996, to take on big business and its influence on government.

''I can no longer stomach the systemic political decay that has weakened our democracy,'' said Mr. Nader, who will compete for the Green Party nomination against three others. ''It is necessary to launch a sustained effort to wrest control of our democracy from the corporate government and restore it to the political government under the control of citizens.''

Mr. Nader, 65, whose quest for the White House in 1996 earned him less than 1 percent of the vote, said at a news conference that he would raise enough money to pay his campaign workers but would not spend a nickel on polling, consulting firms or television advertisements. In 1996, he spent less than $5,000 of his own money.

First known for his crusade against the automobile industry in the 1960's, Mr. Nader founded several consumer advocacy groups over the years, including Public Citizen, which focus on corporate and government wrongdoing. The Green Party, an offspring of the antinuclear and environmental movements, shares similar goals, among them its pursuit of ''ecological wisdom'' and ''grass-roots democracy.''

Portraying himself as the only candidate willing to shake up the system, Mr. Nader said he was concerned about the growing disparity between rich and poor.

''Despite record economic growth, corporate profits and stock market highs year after year, a stunning array of deplorable conditions still prevails,'' Mr. Nader said in a statement posted on his Web site.

He acknowledged he would face an uphill battle as the Green Party nominee. Democratic and Republican candidates have huge campaign war chests and months of campaigning already behind them. Nevertheless, Mr. Nader said, he would be content to infuse ''a powerful message'' into this year's presidential election.

Democracy Now link for more detail including an interview with the man himself:

https://www.democracynow.org/2000/2/21/democracy_now_exclusive_ralph_nader_announces

(He was good!)

readingatwork fucked around with this message at 17:38 on May 11, 2020

# ? May 11, 2020 17:31

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

V. Illych L. posted:

tbf the clintons *are* pretty spectacularly corrupt

See how well it worked?

They're not. Not by governmental standards.

Regular people sure.

# ? May 11, 2020 17:31

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

Jaxyon posted:

See how well it worked?

They're not. Not by governmental standards.

Regular people sure.

uh, bill was pretty chummy with epstein and also the clinton foundation is up to tons of skeevy stuff

# ? May 11, 2020 17:35

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

like i'm sure that there's worse corruption elsewhere but that is no excuse, clintonite corruption is a perfectly valid target and not really a smear at all

# ? May 11, 2020 17:38

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

V. Illych L. posted:

uh, bill was pretty chummy with epstein and also the clinton foundation is up to tons of skeevy stuff

Sure and also the rest of the government is doing poo poo like that and worse.

But your post could be from ultra-right wing facebook and look no different and that's my point.

V. Illych L. posted:

like i'm sure that there's worse corruption elsewhere but that is no excuse, clintonite corruption is a perfectly valid target and not really a smear at all

Thank you very much for arguing against a position that nobody in the entire thread is holding, everybody is very proud of you.

Here's a shocking fact! The Republicans don't care about the *actual* corruption the smear campaign was going to go that way no matter what.

Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 17:42 on May 11, 2020

# ? May 11, 2020 17:39

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

if you don't want the other guys attacking you for doing bad stuff, don't elect people who do bad stuff

i'm sure the republicans are going to push joe biden being a huge creep in this election, which is unfair because they're bigger creeps but also true because biden's a huge creep and that's a major liability for him as a candidate

corruption on the other side is *perfectly fair game* so long as it's actually present. scumbags going after each other for corruption is one way to reduce corruption, since you can be sure that it'll be used against you politically if you partake!

e. wait i am very confused - clinton's corrupt but the attacks on that corruption were smears because they would've happened without that corruption

how in the world does that work

V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 11, 2020

# ? May 11, 2020 17:44

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

Jaxyon posted:

Sure and also the rest of the government is doing poo poo like that and worse.

I think you seriously underestimate how bad "standard" Washington corruption can be. Just because it's usually legal and doesn't make waves in the media doesn't mean it's not incredibly destructive.

# ? May 11, 2020 17:49

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

V. Illych L. posted:

if you don't want the other guys attacking you for doing bad stuff, don't elect people who do bad stuff

i'm sure the republicans are going to push joe biden being a huge creep in this election, which is unfair because they're bigger creeps but also true because biden's a huge creep and that's a major liability for him as a candidate

corruption on the other side is *perfectly fair game* so long as it's actually present. scumbags going after each other for corruption is one way to reduce corruption, since you can be sure that it'll be used against you politically if you partake!

e. wait i am very confused - clinton's corrupt but the attacks on that corruption were smears because they would've happened without that corruption

how in the world does that work

I don't know how to explain this to you but the comment was about how effective the smear campaign was, not about whether the person was actually corrupt.

I get that you need to say the Clintons were bad people, a position that literally nobody is arguing against. But that was not the point.

# ? May 11, 2020 17:50

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

readingatwork posted:

I think you seriously underestimate how bad "standard" Washington corruption can be. Just because it's usually legal and doesn't make waves in the media doesn't mean it's not incredibly destructive.

I don't, and the Bush years made the Clintons look like amateurs, especially the Iraq War.

But people constantly repeat verbatim right wing talking points about the Clintons, who are indeed, bad people. I'm talking about the effectiveness of the smear.

# ? May 11, 2020 17:53

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

V. Illych L. posted:

e. wait i am very confused - clinton's corrupt but the attacks on that corruption were smears because they would've happened without that corruption

how in the world does that work

To be fair Republicans usually can't attack Democrats on the basis of things they actually do because they do those things as well. As a result they tend to make a bunch of fake scandals up to use instead (you saw this a ton during the Obama years).

# ? May 11, 2020 17:54

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

readingatwork posted:

To be fair Republicans usually can't attack Democrats on the basis of things they actually do because they do those things as well. As a result they tend to make a bunch of fake scandals up to use instead (you saw this a ton during the Obama years).

sure but specifically the corruption attacks against clinton were basically legit, if overblown. i'm not defending poo poo like the lewinsky affair which was just pure scum behaviour from the GOP (though i will say that shagging your interns is really gross even when you're not president of the United States that's not really what that was about), but i absolutely want corrupt politicians calling out other corrupt politicians as corrupt, that's a Good Thing

# ? May 11, 2020 18:03

Falstaff: Apr 27, 2008; I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

readingatwork posted:

To be fair Republicans usually can't attack Democrats on the basis of things they actually do because they do those things as well.

Yes, actually, they can. In fact, Rove is going to turn that into the standard playbook for the Republican party in the years to come. But we'll get there when we get there.

# ? May 11, 2020 18:18

Jaxyon: Mar 7, 2016; I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

readingatwork posted:

To be fair Republicans usually can't attack Democrats on the basis of things they actually do because they do those things as well.

It is stunning to me that you believe this.

# ? May 11, 2020 18:52

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

i'll be honest. i was 10 when 9/11 happened and i was big dumb patriot who bled red white and blue espcially about iraq and stuff mostly because i didnt know better and my "cool" uncle influenced me. i was gop type up until the beginning of high school where i became more and more progressive for various reasons mostly because i hated the religious right and dumb little petty poo poo and i actually became politically aware slowly. now i am some lefty thing. anyway, i wanted to say this thread is good poo poo because i can actually read about awful poo poo that happened.

# ? May 11, 2020 19:14

White Light: Dec 19, 2012

Jaxyon posted:

Also the right wing long term smear campaign against the Clintons as the most corrupt people in history was going well for them.

This is pretty much bang on, especially with the rise of Fox News as an up-and-coming network that did 24 hour coverage on the Impeachment hearings for like a straight month.

Clinton's name was pretty much mud at that point, even Gore was doing his best to get away from the negative stigma that gravitated around Bill. A lot of people in general were tired of the craziness and drama that he brought to the White House during his second term, they really just wanted a 'boring' president to sit there and be forgettable. You really just had to be around during that time to get an accurate bead on how toxic his name was in the late 90s, especially after his acquittal which made rural voters frothing at the mouth to kick him out.

Unfortunately the terrorist attacks the year later taught us all that, yeah, maybe we should pick someone more competent holding the keys to the kingdom.

# ? May 11, 2020 19:26

Solaris 2.0: May 14, 2008

ToxicAcne posted:

As someone who became an adult after Bush was gone, I'm curious as to how Democrats justified going to war in Iraq?

In addition to what other posters have said, it's hard to underestimate how much 9/11 broke everyone's brains wrt to terrorism and the middle east in general. Being seen as "soft on terror" was seen as a career-ender and no one wanted to be anti-war or against America or ARE TROOPS. Yes there were massive protests against the Iraq War, and my high school class did a "walk out", but most Americans supported the Afghan war, most thought Saddam had WMDs, the Media was fully on board with war, and most Americans supported removing Saddam by force.

With that said, in the house 126 Democrats voted against the war, only 81 voted for (still far too many but still.)

The senate was the problem. 29 Democrats voted Yes, 21 voted no. The below Democratic senators had the correct vote in history (the no vote)

quote:

21 (42%) of 50 Democratic Senators voted against the resolution. Those voting against the resolution were:

Sens. Akaka (D-HI), Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Byrd (D-WV), Conrad (D-ND), Corzine (D-NJ), Dayton (D-MN), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Graham (D-FL), Inouye (D-HI), Kennedy (D-MA), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Reed (D-RI), Sarbanes (D-MD), Stabenow (D-MI), Wellstone (D-MN), and Wyden (D-OR).

source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002

Anyway don't want to cause a derail and keep this thread focused but the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 is, aside from the Patriot Act, one of the most consequential acts of our government in recent times so it is worth diving into a little deeper.

# ? May 11, 2020 22:26

1stGear: Jan 16, 2010; Here's to the new us.

quote:

(Russia was invading Chechnia or something at the time. I�ll research it more later)

Chechnian separatists had been blamed for a series of apartment bombings. An obscure bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin took a hawkish stance against both the bombings and the subsequent invasion of the breakaway Chechnian state and it helped him secure victory in the presidential election after Yeltsin's resignation. A persistent conspiracy theory has lingered around the bombings claiming that some of them, particularly one in the city of Ryazan, were staged by the Russian government to secure Putin's election. While the initial invasion of Chechnya would be extremely successful, it would soon be bogged down by a difficult-to-defeat insurgency that would keep the region in chaos for years to come and weaken the legitimacy of the Russian government.

Oh well. I'm sure this Putin guy will continue the liberalization of Russian and that themes of government staging/taking advantage of terrorist attacks to invade countries and be trapped in quagmire wars will never come up again in this thread.

# ? May 11, 2020 22:33

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

Here's Clinton's 2000 SOTU address if anybody was interested (I kind of am).

https://www.c-span.org/video/?154326-1/2000-state-union-address

Democracy Now analysis:

https://www.democracynow.org/2000/1/28/clinton_state_of_the_union_address

Also I found a Democracy Now look at Saddam's history (up to 2000, obviously) with the US. The guy being interviewed is very pro-intervention but a lot of the things he's talking about like the CIA's connection's Sadam's uprising are absolutely true:

https://www.democracynow.org/2000/1/24/is_saddam_hussein_a_creation_of

The Frontline special mentioned:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/
(Note, one of the interviews listed is with Dr Ahmad Chalabi who was one of the more infamous "sources" for Iraq's WMDs. Needless to say, take any information you read with a grain of salt.)

BTW if you're wondering why I'm using so many DN links it's because it tends to be decent analysis and the archive is free and easy to search. It's a good way to absorb the news from the time if you don't want to actually sit through entire hour-long speeches. Keep in mind though that it's not terribly mainstream so the perspectives people ~actually~ tended to hear are closer to the ones you'll see in the LAT/NYT or on CNN/MSNBC/Fox News.

1stGear posted:

Chechnian separatists had been blamed for a series of apartment bombings. An obscure bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin took a hawkish stance against both the bombings and the subsequent invasion of the breakaway Chechnian state and it helped him secure victory in the presidential election after Yeltsin's resignation. A persistent conspiracy theory has lingered around the bombings claiming that some of them, particularly one in the city of Ryazan, were staged by the Russian government to secure Putin's election. While the initial invasion of Chechnya would be extremely successful, it would soon be bogged down by a difficult-to-defeat insurgency that would keep the region in chaos for years to come and weaken the legitimacy of the Russian government.

Oh well. I'm sure this Putin guy will continue the liberalization of Russian and that themes of government staging/taking advantage of terrorist attacks to invade countries and be trapped in quagmire wars will never come up again in this thread.

Did not know that. Thanks for the info!

# ? May 12, 2020 03:11

jet sanchEz: Oct 24, 2001; Lousy Manipulative Dog

Around 2005 I worked with a guy here in Toronto that had specifically left America because he hated Bush and the Iraq war so much. He basically said that he liked Toronto when he visited as a kid and decided "gently caress America and all that it stands for" and moved up here. I saw him about 10 years ago, same industry as before, bartending, I guess it worked out for him.

He must be so loving happy, I mean, lol

# ? May 12, 2020 04:23

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

Listening to Clinton's SOTU. Not going to do a full play-by-play but loving hell did that man love him some tax credits. Just... so many tax credits. Tax credits for days.

He was also a big fan of charter schools, fighting terrorism, and taking the deficit super seriously. I'm not going to say I'm in hell because he's actually a fairly engaging public speaker but Christ almighty does he suck.

E: To his credit he seems to take global warming moderately seriously. His solutions are all market-based half-measures though.

# ? May 13, 2020 03:11

readingatwork: Jan 8, 2009; Hello Fatty!; Fun Shoe

Content: Having a surprisingly hard time finding political cartoons from that far back but the Boondocks archives are free at least:

(Feb 27, 2000)

# ? May 13, 2020 03:26

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

jet sanchEz posted:

Around 2005 I worked with a guy here in Toronto that had specifically left America because he hated Bush and the Iraq war so much. He basically said that he liked Toronto when he visited as a kid and decided "gently caress America and all that it stands for" and moved up here. I saw him about 10 years ago, same industry as before, bartending, I guess it worked out for him.

He must be so loving happy, I mean, lol

Well, you have to imagine that having a mediocre life in Canada is still better than having a mediocre life in the States. poo poo, if he gets sick, at least he can go to the doctor.

# ? May 13, 2020 03:45

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

readingatwork posted:

Content: Having a surprisingly hard time finding political cartoons from that far back but the Boondocks archives are free at least:

(Feb 27, 2000)

funniest part is the GOP has degraded even farther since than. dont they not even have any POC congress/senators anymore?

# ? May 13, 2020 04:28

ToxicAcne: May 25, 2014

Dapper_Swindler posted:

funniest part is the GOP has degraded even farther since than. dont they not even have any POC congress/senators anymore?

They have Tim Scott in the senate but that's all I know of.

# ? May 13, 2020 05:17

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# ? May 5, 2024 14:32

Aztec Galactus: Sep 12, 2002

ToxicAcne posted:

They have Tim Scott in the senate but that's all I know of.

I know that Will Hurd is the only black republican in the House, not sure about other denominations

# ? May 13, 2020 05:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Let's relive the Bush years!

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