Absolutely the last word on this from me, I hope...

[avevale_intelligencer]

I’ve seen some complaints (not, as far as I know, related to my effluent) about “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” in connection with the incident last Thursday. So, hoist the lance, get winched on to the horse and let’s go round one more time, Mr Windmill.

I am not anti-American. I’m anti-Bush. (I was also anti-Reagan and anti-other-Bush, so possibly I’m anti-right-wing-radical-Republican, just as I’m anti-right-wing-radical-Tory/”new Labour” in this country. That doesn’t make me anti-British.) and it isn’t “knee-jerk.” It’s a considered view taken as a result of the observed actions of the parties concerned. This one is just worse than the others.

There is, as far as I can see, no justification whatsoever for him being in power. He may have won the last election with a genuine majority, yes, but according to what I understand are verified and widely reported facts (not op-ed) he did not win the previous one. He became president in 2000 by trickery, deception and the power of money, and everyone let him stand up there and swear an oath when he had already proved his honour to be worthless, and I would have thought having done that, even if it did not force a rerun of the election, would at the absolute least disqualify him from running again. Look, look, everybody, the emperor has no clothes on, and not only that, he isn’t even the emperor, he doesn’t look anything like the emperor, why is everybody cheering???

It really shouldn’t matter to me. I shouldn’t care. If they want to pretend he has a right to run their country, if they want to let democracy slide this one time, that’s their business. But then he declares a war, and the equally sad and corrupt government of my country runs yapping at his heels, and we’re involved. And maybe, just maybe, if he had not been in power, if the president of America had chosen a different response to the horror of 9/11 (would it even have happened under a different president? I don’t know) than to invade a random Middle Eastern country, maybe the bombing on Thursday would not have happened and a hundred dead people would be alive today.

Yes, I theorised that perhaps he was directly responsible for it. None of the counter-arguments have convinced me that he's not capable of it. However, I do recognise that this may be a product of my paranoia, fuelled by countless revelations of the kind of dirty tricks that American covert operations agencies *have* perpetrated at the behest of various presidents over the years, and so I withdraw the speculation pending further evidence (which, of course, won’t come to light for another thirty years).

I don’t think America should only elect Democratic presidents. I think America should elect the president it wants. But I’ll be a lot happier when they dump the president they didn’t elect, who got the job because Daddy had it before him, and who used it to plunge the world into war for his own selfish ends.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

From the viewpoint of an American who did everything she could to keep him from being elected both times he ran:

He's in power because he was elected there. At least the second time -- and he was allowed to run because we have pretty strict standards of innocence until proven guilty, and he was not proven guilty of anything that would disqualify him. We also have pretty strict standards of what disqualifies a candidate for president, for that matter, and being without honor isn't among them. Not because we don't care about honor, but because we do care about objective standards, and that is not an objective standard, however obvious it may feel. If we can say he's excluded because he's without honor, other people can do the same to people I actually like. I prefer to keep the standards objective. And if a majority of the Americans who bothered to vote (and this time it was a popular majority as well as an electoral one) chose to ratify in 2004 what they didn't get a chance to decide in 2000, it doesn't make him any less an elected president *now*. I suspect he was one before, at least by electoral vote -- I followed the informal recounts done by the press over the following year; it looks like he would've won it if it had been clean. It wasn't, but that doesn't mean the results came out different. Nixon would've won easily without Watergate; that didn't actually change anythign either.

I'm also pretty sure he had nothing to do with the London bombings. Not because he wouldn't be morally capable of it but because he's shown no sign of that kind of military subtlety. We're talking about a man who can't find his way to Afghanistan without getting lost in Iraq, and you think he's capable of calculating that a set of homemade bombs placed in the capital of his closest ally will benefit his own PR at home more than it will harm him via weakening the ally in question? I don't think so. I don't think it would occur to him. Something like that here in the US, maybe, although he doesn't need to -- so far he's been content to raise the warning level to exciting colors whenever he needs the attention. Taking it to Britain is more complex than he's ever indicated he can be.

Besides, he *does* need Blair. If he were going to fool with something like this, it wouldn't be right after the Olympic announcement; that's just bad for the ally Bush is counting on.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I suspect he was one before, at least by electoral vote -- I followed the informal recounts done by the press over the following year; it looks like he would've won it if it had been clean.

Then my facts are off somewhere. I saw a count of actual votes that put Gore clearly in the lead, if Fox News hadn't already called it for Bush.

Ah well. I need to pull back from this before I start to lose friends, if I haven't already. I think guyelfkin is right--I was a lot happier when I wasn't paying attention to this stuff.

[armb.livejournal.com]

> I was a lot happier when I wasn't paying attention to this stuff.

But finding out that it happened while you weren't paying attention wouldn't make you happy. You would probably have to go on not paying attention for ever, not stopping to wonder why anyone would ever bomb us.

[bedlamhouse]

Unfortunately, most of the subsequent press recount investigations in Florida that validated Bush's victory were buried on the back pages. Out of sight, out of mind, and so only the front page stories are remembered. Ah, well, that's life in AADD (American Attention Deficit ... oooh, cake!) land

Also, the news outlets completely fouled up their 2000 election activities and announcements - that's a whole 'nother can of worms. Suffice it to say that their confidence and rather smug feelings of being the arbitor of the electorate based not on actual votes but on polls was sufficiently shattered to make them much meeker and less willing to make sweeping pronouncements in 2004. I regard this as a Good Thing, even if I didn't care for the actual outcome.

[billroper]

And (just to be fair), I recall that there was exactly one recount scenario where Gore would have won, according to those press reports, but it wasn't the one that he'd asked for in court. Under all the other (numerous) recount scenarios, Bush won.

As a friend of mine observed, statistically the 2000 Presidential election was a coin flip.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the U.S. Constitution set up voting so the President isn't elected by the people. As we've seen, the people overall can select one candidate yet the other major one winds up in office because of the Electoral College.

Every session of Congress someone tries to overturn the Electoral College (which IMHO is outdated), and the folks from the smaller states keep it intact because it gives them more votes per person.

[delennara.livejournal.com]

It would be only half so bad, if the deeds of american presidents would afflict only american citizens. I wouldn't care who is their president then. But by going out, and killing citizens of other states without any previous agression and no UNO mandate, this boundary is clearly stepped over.

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

I dislike Mr Bush on a nearly personal level - without ever having met him. He just grates on me. But the fact is that he is not only "suffered" but well liked in a large part of the US population. And so are his decisions - whether we like it or not.
For what it's worth, I personally don't think that he has anything to do with the bombing - partly because I don't believe he thinks along those rather intricate lines of reasoning, partly because there are not a lot of European countries left who have anything positive to say about the war in Iraq. I don't think to bash an ally would be his first choice. Not after having had tea with the Queen.
I think, however, that Mr. Bush has to be rather grateful that Mr. Bin Laden is equally unsubtle and boneheaded. Just imagine the latter saying. "But that was not us this time. Definitely not. That must have been someone else. Someone who disagrees with the leniency towards Muslims in Britain. Someone who had need of a distraction and and has the means to do this."
For that kind of "Bomb" Mr Bin Laden would not even have to pay the explosives.

[billroper]

There are eighteen houses on the street where I live. For a variety of reasons, I don't know most of my neighbors well, but I believe there is at least one Muslim family living on the block. I don't recall anyone throwing stones at them, or mocking them at Christmas for the absence of Christmas decorations, or anything else of that ilk. I doubt that Muslims are treated any more leniently in Britain than they are in the U.S. and probably more leniently than they are in, say, France, where they passed legislation to prevent young Muslim girls from wearing a headscarf in class.

Of course, we have that pesky First Amendment thing. :)

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

It is a difficult question. In Turkey, for instance, girls are not allowed to wear head scarves at school or university. Female civil servants are not allowed to work in official buildings with a headscarf. The legislation in Turkey is way stricter than in western countries.
In Germany the head scarf question is ruled on "Länder" (single state) level - differently from state to state. HOwever, a number of LÄnder have forbidden civil servant teachers to wear religious insignia at school. That was largely aimed at headscarves (or rather the political and social opinion displayed by wearing them) - but, of course, in a country that has religious tolerance in its constitiution you have to treat all denominations equally. This only applies to state-run schools with civil-servant teachers who have to be 'constitutionally acceptable' to be eligible to be civil servants.
Of course, even during my school days it was strictly forbidden for both students and teachers to wear or display any political party padges. Discussion, yes, advertisement, no.