The Romney plan to rehabilitate the political image of George W Bush

[Bull Moose Base]

Though Romney will naturally try to avoid W being part of the conversation, for his close circle of economic advisors, he chose two of W's chief economic advisors.  (Romney also cited Dick Cheney as the exemplary VP pick, not that that means anything.)  The biggest difference between W and Romney, counter to their images, is Romney's platform is much more conservative.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Cheney was a good VP pick in 2000. At the time he wasn't seen as the evil man in the basement torturing people, but was instead the respected former Secretary of Defense credited with the victory in the Gulf War, along with Powell and Schwartzkoff. He filled in W's blank spots on Foreign Policy and had connections on the Hill. Aside from his health (which was problematic even back then), he was seen as able to step in and serve as President if necessary.

He met all the right criteria to veep for a Governor turned Presidential Candidate, Foreign Policy Cred, connections with Congress, and trusted with the nukes if necessary. Romney probably wishes there was another Cheney out there that is 15 to 20 years younger and doesn't have the health problems.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It is ironic that Pbrower accuses the "Revivers" of partisan hackery then goes on to trash Bush in a partisan fashion.


It is possible to revive Bush's image because he was a dynamic figure, in spite of his reputation as being a far right conservative. He is not Hoover at all. Bush wasn't asleep at the wheel at any point in his Presidency.


-Enron and Worldcom collapse so he signs Sarbox
-A large population of illegals, he wants to pursue a "Compassionate" response
-Seniors can't afford their drugs so he pushed Medicare Part D (Unfunded yes, Donut hole yes, but he still got the underlying program done and in place)
-Education system is failing so he passes NCLB (It has failed, but it was seen as the appropriate response by both sides and was a rejection of conservatism by Bush)
-Economy collapsing so he agrees to bailouts
-Terrorist attacks cause him to abandon his previous pledge to a "humble foreign policy"

However, I don't think 2012 is the time to do it.

[Vosem]

Except for partisan hacks who still believe that George W. Bush was a fine President, any attempt to revive Dubya as a model worthy of emulation will fail for at least the next fifty years. Democrats could long enunciate the name "Hoover" as a reason to vote for just about any Democrat. At the least Herbert Hoover had a moral compass that Dubya seemed to lack. Hoover  was the wrong man for the time. Dubya was the wrong President for any time -- a shallow, vainglorious, dishonest man who would have created a disaster or at the least turned a small calamity into a big one.

I'm not going to say anything about Hoover because that's just a meaningless rant. Dubya was a good President in a position where we needed a great President. The 'he will be viewed as bad for 50 years' is clearly not true; a PPP poll from this January showed Bush had an approval rating of 45/46; in that poll, he was doing better than Obama, who was at 46/49. That's not perfect, but that's not so bad you spend 50 years railing against him. When a has-been has approvals like that, that's 'meh'.

Sure he is divisive, but he has his supporters -- those who want to enrich themselves at the expense of others and reward themselves for treating others badly and selling off natural resources, and those who want their superstitions and bigotry accepted as undeniable fact. Greed, cruelty, and folly have their built-in constituencies, but a good society shows how ineffective and destructive they are. So what if he has his supporters -- the Mafia has its groupies, too. Is that good reason for giving command of the economy to crime syndicates?

Insulting 45% of the country is a great way to win any election. You'll motivate them to turn out against you. You continue your meaningless ranting by invoking the Mafia, who have as much to do with the issue at hand as Herbert Hoover does.

This election is about George W. Bush to the extent that politicians can reject the disastrous economic policies and international priorities of a failed President. Maybe the 2008 election was more that than the election of 2012 because the Republicans will have a different nominee. But the policies are the same, as the 2010 election showed. Republicans underplayed those policies and spoke only of 'budget deficits' and the 'failure' of President Obama to restore the good times. The 'good times' were a destructive binge, and the hangover is at best the recognition that one needs some other way to get a satisfying life.

George Bush was not a 'failed President'; his approval ratings may have declined in his final several years, and apparently once he killed your cat, but he was OK; as I said above, a good President where we needed a great one. But good luck telling Americans the 'good times' not merely won't, but shouldn't, come back. A great way to win an election. Your belief that the 2010 elections showed that Republicans are Bush-come-again is at least defensible, but your belief that this will result in a loss betrays a remarkable lack of mathematics skills, in that you seem to not understand that 44,593,666 (the number of votes Republicans got in 2010 House of Representatives elections) is more than 42,191,291 (the number of votes cast for anybody who wasn't a Republican, not just Democrats and other left-wing parties, in 2010).

Face it: the corrupt boom of the Double-Zero Decade cannot be restored; nobody believes in it anymore. Everybody wants easy money, but wise people recognize that most 'easy money' implies that one gets more than one's share of the reward from the industry and effort of someone else. (Sure, that may be an inheritance, one of the more benign ways of living off the achievements of someone else; a Rockefeller heir can't really hurt a deceased ancestor).

The last sentence about inheritance and Rockefeller is more rambling; it has less to do with the topic at hand than the Mafia or Hoover. Your point that the 2000s cannot be restored is a truthism; you can't travel back in time. The 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc. will also not be restored.

The big landowners, the tycoons and heirs, and the executives no longer need a successful and independent middle class. They never did; they had to tolerate it because of democracy. But that said, big landowners, tycoons and heirs, and executives have frequently shown a contempt for democracy because democracy keeps those people from grabbing everything of value. In other countries they have shown themselves the financial backers of fascistic movements. Such a middle class as they need consists of retainers in all but name -- schoolteachers who indoctrinate (or are fired), cops and soldiers who mow down strikers and protesters, clergy who offer 'pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die' to workers who toil to exhaustion for near-starvation rations but eternal damnation to anyone who shows any sign of dissent or resentment of severe inequity, professionals who are serve the needs of members of the economic elite as if maids or gardeners or else perform triage upon those who can still be exploited for profit.

Fascistic movements generally draw upon a base of middle- and lower-class supporters, though rich people can support it too. Fascism is (this should all really be past tense) not really a class ideology. Your first two sentences directly contradict one another. I don't even vaguely understand what point your trying to make with the rest of the paragraph except that I feel a little frightened now, both of you and of the characters you're describing.

Take a good look at two of the cornerstones of the old American middle class -- small farmers and small businesspeople. The consolidation of small farms into bigger ones has been seen as progress. Giant, vertically-integrated companies have squeezed out small-scale mom-and-pop manufacturers, food processors, restaurants, and banks. These giant entities have designed themselves to need only an expendable workforce that needs little training so that anyone who works for them can be disposed of at a moment's notice. Such a workforce is best described wit the Marxist word proletariat.

We're now beyond the point where this has anything to do with George W. Bush or reality.

Medical professionals have largely become employees for all practical purposes of insurance companies. Accountants know that they conceal scams of their clients or they lose their clients. Engineers at times are under pressure to cover up corner-cutting that can cause death and environmental calamities. Such professionals used to have some freedom of action that they no longer have.

In reply to your first sentence, doctors do deserve to get paid every so often. In reply to the second and third, it's always been that way. After all, if scams are revealed, accountants lose clients who have gone to jail, and if corner-cutting is revealed, engineers may lose their jobs; in America, this sort of thing is regulated pretty strictly (it was under Bush too), but it's this way everywhere. I don't understand what point you're trying to convey with the fourth sentence, so I have nothing to say.

Did you notice that the highly-educated part of the electorate voted heavily for Barack Obama in 2008? It used to be that a high level of education was one of the strongest indicators of being a likely Republican voter. Such is no more so. Middle-class blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and Jews voted heavily Democratic. Poor, undereducated whites voted heavily Republican. Maybe 'exotic' people distrust white elites that never trusted outsiders of any kind.

I don't understand the last sentence. With regard to the remainder, it was true in the 2008 election, though this again has nothing to do at all with George Bush.

I can say this -- in the event of a culling of the middle class, as normally happens under Hard Right regimes, those parts that seem at all 'foreign' are the most vulnerable. Hard Right regimes need plenty of cheap labor, but they don't need people capable of or tending to think outside the Box.  

'Culling of the middle class' does not normally happen under hard-right regimes -- this isn't a defense of them, but simply a statement of fact ('culling of political and ethnic opponents' happens). The second sentence is true. None of this has anything to do with George W. Bush.

In reply to this article's premise: as I mentioned above, as of January Bush's approval was 45/46 for/against. Democrats can no longer use Bush as a bogeyman because he is no longer as widely detested as he was a few short years ago, and your belief that the majority of Americans view Bush negatively is not held up by the data. If trends keep going this way, the idea of turning Bush into a new Reagan (somebody brought this up earlier) might be achievable by the end of the decade. But trends don't always continue, and I doubt becoming a hero will ultimately be Bush's fate; I do think time will judge him to have been a basically good President.

EDIT: Here's a link to the poll in question (http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/02/1-president-is-1-in-americas-hearts.html).

[Politico]

Except for partisan hacks who still believe that George W. Bush was a fine President, any attempt to revive Dubya as a model worthy of emulation will fail for at least the next fifty years. Democrats could long enunciate the name "Hoover" as a reason to vote for just about any Democrat. At the least Herbert Hoover had a moral compass that Dubya seemed to lack. Hoover  was the wrong man for the time. Dubya was the wrong President for any time -- a shallow, vainglorious, dishonest man who would have created a disaster or at the least turned a small calamity into a big one.

I'm not going to say anything about Hoover because that's just a meaningless rant. Dubya was a good President in a position where we needed a great President. The 'he will be viewed as bad for 50 years' is clearly not true; a PPP poll from this January showed Bush had an approval rating of 45/46; in that poll, he was doing better than Obama, who was at 46/49. That's not perfect, but that's not so bad you spend 50 years railing against him. When a has-been has approvals like that, that's 'meh'.

Sure he is divisive, but he has his supporters -- those who want to enrich themselves at the expense of others and reward themselves for treating others badly and selling off natural resources, and those who want their superstitions and bigotry accepted as undeniable fact. Greed, cruelty, and folly have their built-in constituencies, but a good society shows how ineffective and destructive they are. So what if he has his supporters -- the Mafia has its groupies, too. Is that good reason for giving command of the economy to crime syndicates?

Insulting 45% of the country is a great way to win any election. You'll motivate them to turn out against you. You continue your meaningless ranting by invoking the Mafia, who have as much to do with the issue at hand as Herbert Hoover does.

This election is about George W. Bush to the extent that politicians can reject the disastrous economic policies and international priorities of a failed President. Maybe the 2008 election was more that than the election of 2012 because the Republicans will have a different nominee. But the policies are the same, as the 2010 election showed. Republicans underplayed those policies and spoke only of 'budget deficits' and the 'failure' of President Obama to restore the good times. The 'good times' were a destructive binge, and the hangover is at best the recognition that one needs some other way to get a satisfying life.

George Bush was not a 'failed President'; his approval ratings may have declined in his final several years, and apparently once he killed your cat, but he was OK; as I said above, a good President where we needed a great one. But good luck telling Americans the 'good times' not merely won't, but shouldn't, come back. A great way to win an election. Your belief that the 2010 elections showed that Republicans are Bush-come-again is at least defensible, but your belief that this will result in a loss betrays a remarkable lack of mathematics skills, in that you seem to not understand that 44,593,666 (the number of votes Republicans got in 2010 House of Representatives elections) is more than 42,191,291 (the number of votes cast for anybody who wasn't a Republican, not just Democrats and other left-wing parties, in 2010).

Face it: the corrupt boom of the Double-Zero Decade cannot be restored; nobody believes in it anymore. Everybody wants easy money, but wise people recognize that most 'easy money' implies that one gets more than one's share of the reward from the industry and effort of someone else. (Sure, that may be an inheritance, one of the more benign ways of living off the achievements of someone else; a Rockefeller heir can't really hurt a deceased ancestor).

The last sentence about inheritance and Rockefeller is more rambling; it has less to do with the topic at hand than the Mafia or Hoover. Your point that the 2000s cannot be restored is a truthism; you can't travel back in time. The 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc. will also not be restored.

The big landowners, the tycoons and heirs, and the executives no longer need a successful and independent middle class. They never did; they had to tolerate it because of democracy. But that said, big landowners, tycoons and heirs, and executives have frequently shown a contempt for democracy because democracy keeps those people from grabbing everything of value. In other countries they have shown themselves the financial backers of fascistic movements. Such a middle class as they need consists of retainers in all but name -- schoolteachers who indoctrinate (or are fired), cops and soldiers who mow down strikers and protesters, clergy who offer 'pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die' to workers who toil to exhaustion for near-starvation rations but eternal damnation to anyone who shows any sign of dissent or resentment of severe inequity, professionals who are serve the needs of members of the economic elite as if maids or gardeners or else perform triage upon those who can still be exploited for profit.

Fascistic movements generally draw upon a base of middle- and lower-class supporters, though rich people can support it too. Fascism is (this should all really be past tense) not really a class ideology. Your first two sentences directly contradict one another. I don't even vaguely understand what point your trying to make with the rest of the paragraph except that I feel a little frightened now, both of you and of the characters you're describing.

Take a good look at two of the cornerstones of the old American middle class -- small farmers and small businesspeople. The consolidation of small farms into bigger ones has been seen as progress. Giant, vertically-integrated companies have squeezed out small-scale mom-and-pop manufacturers, food processors, restaurants, and banks. These giant entities have designed themselves to need only an expendable workforce that needs little training so that anyone who works for them can be disposed of at a moment's notice. Such a workforce is best described wit the Marxist word proletariat.

We're now beyond the point where this has anything to do with George W. Bush or reality.

Medical professionals have largely become employees for all practical purposes of insurance companies. Accountants know that they conceal scams of their clients or they lose their clients. Engineers at times are under pressure to cover up corner-cutting that can cause death and environmental calamities. Such professionals used to have some freedom of action that they no longer have.

In reply to your first sentence, doctors do deserve to get paid every so often. In reply to the second and third, it's always been that way. After all, if scams are revealed, accountants lose clients who have gone to jail, and if corner-cutting is revealed, engineers may lose their jobs; in America, this sort of thing is regulated pretty strictly (it was under Bush too), but it's this way everywhere. I don't understand what point you're trying to convey with the fourth sentence, so I have nothing to say.

Did you notice that the highly-educated part of the electorate voted heavily for Barack Obama in 2008? It used to be that a high level of education was one of the strongest indicators of being a likely Republican voter. Such is no more so. Middle-class blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and Jews voted heavily Democratic. Poor, undereducated whites voted heavily Republican. Maybe 'exotic' people distrust white elites that never trusted outsiders of any kind.

I don't understand the first sentence. With regard to the remainder, it was true in the 2008 election, though this again has nothing to do at all with George Bush.

I can say this -- in the event of a culling of the middle class, as normally happens under Hard Right regimes, those parts that seem at all 'foreign' are the most vulnerable. Hard Right regimes need plenty of cheap labor, but they don't need people capable of or tending to think outside the Box.  

'Culling of the middle class' does not normally happen under hard-right regimes -- this isn't a defense of them, but simply a statement of fact ('culling of political and ethnic opponents' happens). The second sentence is true. None of this has anything to do with George W. Bush.

In reply to this article's premise: as I mentioned above, as of January Bush's approval was 45/46 for/against. Democrats can no longer use Bush as a bogeyman because he is no longer as widely detested as he was a few short years ago, and politico's belief that the majority of Americans view Bush negatively is not held up by the data. If trends keep going this way, the idea of turning Bush into a new Reagan (somebody brought this up earlier) might be achievable by the end of the decade. But trends don't always continue, and I doubt becoming a hero will ultimately be Bush's fate; I do think time will judge him to have been a basically good President.

LOL! Priceless, particularly the section in bold because it captures the feeling I have whenever I read one of pbrower2a's diatribes. You are much more ambitious on here than I! Responding to a pbrower2a diatribe takes enormous effort. Well done, sir!

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO is not really something to run on.

[Politico]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO the current president is not really something to run on.

Fixed.

Who knows more about jobs and the economy: A successful businessperson, or a "community organizer" best known for having a politician's tongue?

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO the current president is not really something to run on.

Fixed.

Who knows more about jobs and the economy: A successful businessperson, or a "community organizer" best known for having a politician's tongue?

Herbert Hoover was a successful businessman too. We all know being a successful businessman automatically guarantees being a successful President.

[Politico]

If we're taking about jobs as a campaign issuem then being a former Bain Capital CEO the current president is not really something to run on.

Fixed.

Who knows more about jobs and the economy: A successful businessperson, or a "community organizer" best known for having a politician's tongue?

Herbert Hoover was a successful businessman too. We all know being a successful businessman automatically guarantees being a successful President.

We all know what four more years of Obama will look like. America does not want it. All apologies to France.

[pbrower2a]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

I congratulate you on finally saying something wise. Dubya really was a horrible President. He would have been a poor President had he been a liberal.  

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.

The fault is that the economic elites got "theirs" first and have been able to prevent any of their gain from trickling down.  Bureaucratic elites within giant corporations have preserved their culture of selfish greed, and they have successfully fended off any small-scale competition to their organizations. If anything these elites have sought an intensification of corporate power and control over the American economy -- and over the worker.

Those elites have their stooges in Congress; those stooges obey the lobbyists and not their constituents.

But that said, the "jobless" phase of the recovery is over.    

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No, the stimulus was as much tax cuts for the super-rich and business subsidies (very ineffective methods) as it was government spending on infrastructure which creates jobs more directly. Rescues of businesses on the brink of going under for no fault of their own worked (thus the slogan "General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead" resonates well), but rescues of culpable entities (giant banks, investment bankers, and insurance companies) are inefficient means of saving those who depend on those as holders of payrolls and pension funds.

"Obamacare" would ideally have been Medicare for all -- except that the medical-insurance business had no intention of abandoning a profitable, if parasitic cash cow. The American economy is now best described as semi-fascist to the extent that economic interests  effectively  have shares of power in government. That is bad economics and bad government.

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Three years after eight years of economic policies that gutted capital while rewarding those who gutted it. Economic crime became one of the easiest ways in which to get rich. Consider the analogue: you go on a binge in a gambling casino with the proceeds of an IRA. The $40K that you brought in took you twenty years to save. Sure, you spend about $5K on souvenirs and other flashy trinkets at the gift shop, but in one night you expend the rest in gambling. Women in gaudy attire cheer you on as you make bad bets that deplete 20 years of savings.

So you get 'comped' a hotel room and some drinks... but you decide to quit when the money is gone. Maybe you didn't hock your car so that you have the dubious pleasure returning in a more expensive vehicle that you don't own (a $100K commercial bus instead of a $20K automobile)... but it was a fun night. For six exhausting hours you lived like some fake Balkan prince, but you ended up a pauper.

We as a nation gave up the productive investments in job-creating plant and equipment so that some hucksters could sell people housing that they could never pay for and turn early-stage interest and lending fees into expensive luxuries.        

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.

The solution is to go back to what we used to do well. We need to return to manufacturing so that people who work in factories can buy little bungalows, compact cars, and household furnishings on installment plans as they did in the 1950s. We need a tax system that rewards work and service instead of bureaucratic power and political connections. We need a tax code that favors small business over big business. Think about it -- the high graduated taxes of the 1950s created niches for mom-and-pop entities in food service, retailing, and even banking and manufacturing.  We need to re-invest in human capital so that more people can be more productive and merit higher pay than is possible in business models that well fit dullards as employees.
  

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The policies did more damage than did the image. Mitt Romney seems to support deflationary measures without a corrupt boom. If anything that asks for a double-dip recession.
 

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No, just a rehash of policy positions from the national Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, American Crossroads, etc....  

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George W. Bush was a Washington neophyte, too, and he presented that as a political asset.

 

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He would be Hoover 2.0

[BigSkyBob]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

Had George Herbert Walker Bush ran on his real agenda--"Read My Lips, Taxes will go up!"-- he never would have been nominated by the Republican party, and, if they had, even tankboy could have beat him in the general. GHWB obtained the Presidency through fraud. To validate that act of fraud in any way is pathetic.

Had Bill Clinton run on his real character--"I cheated on my wife in the past. I am cheating on her now. And, I will continue to cheat on her in future. I feel no shame or guilt."-- he wouldn't have set foot in the White House either.

[Politico]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

Had George Herbert Walker Bush ran on his real agenda--"Read My Lips, Taxes will go up!"-- he never would have been nominated by the Republican party, and, if they had, even tankboy could have beat him in the general. GHWB obtained the Presidency through fraud. To validate that act of fraud in any way is pathetic.

GHWB was an effective VP, and other than raising taxes he did not really make any mistakes as POTUS. He was the last veteran to occupy the oval office if that counts for anything. Smart guy, too. Furthermore, taxes went up less than they would have under Dukakis, and less than they did under Clinton.

[BigSkyBob]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

Had George Herbert Walker Bush ran on his real agenda--"Read My Lips, Taxes will go up!"-- he never would have been nominated by the Republican party, and, if they had, even tankboy could have beat him in the general. GHWB obtained the Presidency through fraud. To validate that act of fraud in any way is pathetic.

GHWB was an effective VP, and other than raising taxes he did not really make any mistakes as POTUS.

First of all, raising taxes wasn't just a "mistake," it was an attack on the democratic aspects of our constitutional republic. The Constitution enshires the principle that the American people are a sovereign, self-governing people. The people express their will at the ballot boxes by choosing the representatives that will vote according to their will. For our democratic constitutional republic to work, politicians have to honor their campaign promises. Doing a one-eighty on your central platform makes a mockery of the process. It reduces elections to a sham process voters choice to be lead by a person. [Bill Clinton fraudulently claiming he was a chastened, repentant philander when in fact he he was unreformed and unrepentant, reduced the process of choicing a leader to a process of chosing a name.]

If the electorate isn't given an accurate assessment of the character of the candidates, or, what they will really do when elected, elections are little more than picking a name.  Minimizing what GHWB did is akin to claiming Jonathan Pollard only made one mistake in his life.

Second, forchristsake GHWB nominated David Souter to the Supreme Court. If you are going to shill for the reprehensible Mitt Romney wouldn't it behoove you to at least fake a sincere belief that Bush blew it by nominating Souter?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

George W. Bush, unlike his father, should have never came anywhere near the White House.

Had George Herbert Walker Bush ran on his real agenda--"Read My Lips, Taxes will go up!"-- he never would have been nominated by the Republican party, and, if they had, even tankboy could have beat him in the general. GHWB obtained the Presidency through fraud. To validate that act of fraud in any way is pathetic.

GHWB was an effective VP, and other than raising taxes he did not really make any mistakes as POTUS.

[Bill Clinton fraudulently claiming he was a chastened, repentant philander when in fact he he was unreformed and unrepentant, reduced the process of choicing a leader to a process of chosing a name.]

lolwut

[Simfan34]

Has anyone considered that such a plan, if it does exist, would serve to pave the way to a palatable Jeb Bush vice-presidency?

[Democratic Hawk]

Has anyone considered that such a plan, if it does exist, would serve to pave the way to a palatable Jeb Bush vice-presidency?

Don't know. The one Bush I've time for is the 41st president who, at least, got it that the bills have got to be paid. Shrub cut taxes like Reagan but expanded government like LJB - but, at least, the great man - and I'm talking the 'Uncivil Civil Rights Reformer' perfected "tax-and-spend" liberalism - and America prospered with the gross federal debt as a % of GDP continuing its decline

I miss the Golden Age of Capitalism. Born too late to benefit from it. I wouldn't be starting a family this day and age. No security. Not one bit

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Has anyone considered that such a plan, if it does exist, would serve to pave the way to a palatable Jeb Bush vice-presidency?

Don't know. The one Bush I've time for is the 41st president who, at least, got it that the bills have got to be paid. Shrub cut taxes like Reagan but expanded government like LJB - but, at least, the great man - and I'm talking the 'Uncivil Civil Rights Reformer' perfected "tax-and-spend" liberalism - and America prospered with the gross federal debt as a % of GDP continuing its decline

I miss the Golden Age of Capitalism. Born too late to benefit from it. I wouldn't be starting a family this day and age. No security. Not one bit

Bush 41 is better than his spawn, but still pretty crappy. It's an open secret that he was involved with the CIA for a long time, including with a company called Zapata that was cover for the bay of pigs.

[Donald Trump’s Toupée]

Obama's presidency have rehabilitated George W. Bush. It's no coincidence that Bush's popularity numbers have increased pretty drastically over the last 4 years. Not to mention, a lot of Obama's policies (especially those regarding foreign policy) has all but vindicated Bush, and have made Obama look like a hypocrite at times in the process.

Further, I have always held the belief we would see a Truman effect with GWB. It hasn't been a long enough time yet, and I don't think it will be nearly as great as Truman, but it comes to no surprise to me that people will appreciate GWB more as the years and decades go by.