George W. Bush

"the so-called Global War on Terror of the oil-fueled, climate-denying Bush administration that killed more than half a million and demonized billions. People pushed back, there were victories, and they mattered."

"Bush paints in a similar fashion to the way he talks- affecting a folksy, homespun, plain-speaking tone, with just enough hame-fisted strangeness and bungling mistakes to keep things interesting."

"President Bush inadvertently played right into the hands of bin Laden. The invasion of Afghanistan was justified: that was where bin Laden lived and al Qaeda had its training camps. The invasion of Iraq was not similarly justified. It was President Bush's unintended gift to bin Laden."

"In all my public statements, I was not at all in favor of anything he [G.W.Bush] did. He was a disaster for the country in his reaction to 9/11...Worst president we've ever had... To say that Trump is similar is ridiculous because it trivializes the situation.... He's got enough nutcases around him between Bolton and Pompeo that I would worry very, very much. But to say that he's George Bush is to miss the point. You've got to look back at George Bush... and understand what a mess he put us into. We have not gotten out of Iraq. We have not gotten out of Afghanistan. We have not gotten out of the War on Terror, this global war on terror, which is the greatest fiction since the Cold War back in 1945."

"You are a Bible pervert, Bush!"

"The (US) military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body... George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol as one of the first acts of his presidency, alleging it would straitjacket the US economy with too costly greenhouse emissions controls. Next, the White House began a neo-Luddite campaign against the science of climate change. In researching “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,”... getting war casualty statistics out of the Department of Defense (DoD) is easier than getting fuel usage data."

"Whether you love or loathe George W. Bush, you can not deny that he has learned how to read a teleprompter."

"I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, I didn't have the grounds to call him a racist. But I believe that in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don't always choose the right words, and that's why I'm here."

"Democracy cannot function with a systematically lied-to public. Nor can it function if the responsible governmental officials are effectively immune from prosecution for their ‘legal’ crimes, or if the financial string-pullers behind the scenes can safely pull those strings. In America right now, both of those conditions pertain, and, as a result, democracy is impossible. There are only two ways to address this problem, and one of them would start by prosecuting George W. Bush.... UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair should hang with the U.S. gang, but who is calling for this? How much longer will the necessary prosecutions wait? Till after these international war-criminals have all gone honored to their graves?"

"The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all. This is merely gangster “law,” ruling on an international level... The seriousness of this international war crime is not as severe as those of the Nazis were, but nonetheless is comparable to it... On 15 March 2018, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies headlined at Alternet, “The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq” and wrote that “our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion,” and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.... On 6 February 2020, BusinessInsider bannered “US taxpayers have reportedly paid an average of $8,000 each and over $2 trillion total for the Iraq war alone”, and linked to the academic analysis that supported this estimate. The U.S. regime’s invasive war, which the Bush gang perpetrated against Iraq, was also a crime against the American people (though Iraqis suffered far more from it than we did)."

"Huey helps the FBI wage war on terrorism"

"Editor's Note Despite the tremendous reader response to “The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon,” we have decided to bring back “The Boondocks” on a probationary basis. However, should material be deemed inappropriate, we are prepared to bring back “Flagee and Ribbon” at a moment's notice. United We Stand."

"[President George W. Bush] has a vision which can be described with two other words: Manichaean paranoia ... the notion that he is leading the forces of good against the empire of evil, that in that setting, the fact that we are morally superior justifies us committing immoral acts. And that is a very dangerous posture for the country that is the number one global power. ... The fact is he squandered our credibility, our legitimacy, and even respect for our power."

"Push, I'm affiliated with more terrorists than G. Bush!"

"Where will President Bush go after Baghdad? If he seeks to pressure Israel into what the Israeli Right and the War Party think are premature and foolish negotiations, he will court a savage backlash in an election year, and fail. If he embraces the Sharon Doctrine and puts military pressure on Syria and Iran, he will do so without Tony Blair, without NATO and without U.N. backing, and he will be seen worldwide as 'the leader of a rogue superpower.'"

"I'm with the ABB-"Anybody But Bush"-movement right now."

"He's kind of like a slot machine. Because every time he opens his mouth, he knows he's gambling just a little bit."

"I love it when our president gets something right, because when he gets something right, he is the happiest man on Earth. He gets that little smile on his face, that 'I can't believe that came out correctly smile'."

"I think he's just fun to watch."

"He is a man who distrusts rhetoric and who is obviously not a great public speaker. As a friend of mine once said, watching Bush give a speech is like watching a drunk man cross an icy street. You really want him to get to the other side, but it's clear he won't be able to make it without a lot of stumbling."

"El diablo está en casa. Ayer estuvo el diablo aquí, en este mismo lugar. Huele a azufre todavía."

"We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic."

"If the U.S. government had prosecuted Bush administration officials for their war crimes during the “war on terror,” the ICC would not now take jurisdiction. But after Barack Obama said, “Generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,” his administration refused to prosecute those implicated in the torture and willful killings of detainees during the Bush administration."

"I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

"Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don't need to care about science, literature or peace."

"Bush came into office telling his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, he was "tired of swatting flies"- he wanted to eliminate Al Qaeda. On September 11, 2001, after Bush had been in office for seven months, three thousand Americans were murdered in a savage terrorist attack on U.S. soil by Muslim extremists. Since then, Bush has won wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, captured Saddam Hussein, probably killed and certainly immobilized Osama bin Laden, destroyed al Qaeda's base, and begun to create the only functioning democracy in the Middle East other than Israel. Democrats opposed it all- except for their phony support for war with Afghanistan, which they immediately complained about and said would be a Vietnam quagmire. Now they claim to be outraged that in the months before 9/11, Bush did not do everything Democrats opposed doing after 9/11. What a surprise."

"At least he speaks better than Peña Nieto."

"Bush's resurgence is in large part due to mounting opposition to the Obama's presidency's left-wing agenda, but it is also spurred by Obama's image as an out of touch, aloof and elitist president, divorced from economic and political reality on the ground. A lot of Americans frankly miss the down-to-earth and significantly warmer leadership style promoted by President Bush, as well as his unfailing sense of optimism and heart-felt pride in America on the world stage. You certainly won't ever find Bush apologizing for his country or extending the hand of friendship to her enemies."

"We treat presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice. In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago. And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al-Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both."

"Economy is on the rise, kicking into overdrive / Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies / Unemployment's staying down, Democrats are wondering how / revenue is going up, can you say "tax cuts" / Bush was right! / Bush was right! / Bush was right!"

"He's unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated and apparently quite proud of all of these things."

"He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he'll never find them."

"Bush rose to some pretty big occasions; something that no American leader has quite lived up to since. But it was Bush's decency and insistence on preserving the compassionate side of conservatism that, I think, we are beginning to miss the most... Bush managed to win two elections. For all his flaws, he was classy and serious... I suspect that Bush, like Harry Truman, who also left office as a bit of a joke, will enjoy a bit of a grudging resurgence in popularity in years to come. Do we miss him yet? More and more each day."

"George W. Bush has inadvertently destroyed only Baghdad, not Washington, and the costs of the Iraq War in blood and treasure are far less than those of Korea and Vietnam. Yet he will be remembered for the Iraq conflict for generations, long after tax-cut-driven deficits, No Child Left Behind and comprehensive immigration reform are forgotten. The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina."

"Some U.S. journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction."

"[George W. Bush] was having lunch with a good friend of mine in 1999 and talking about running for president. he said, "I don't know if I'll run, but if I do, I'll win." My friend, who is a Democrat, thought it was the usual political bragging and said, "why do you say that? Every candidate says that." W turned to him and said, "Because I know exactly who I am and Al Gore has no idea who he is." You know something? W nailed it."

"As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness."

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

"We had higher standards at the White House. The president said he was going to restore honor and integrity. He said we were going to set the highest of standards. We didn't live up to that. When it became known that his top adviser had been involved, then the bar was moved."

"I do not believe that the President was in any way directly involved in the leaking of her identity, but that was a very disillusioning moment for me when I found out when it initially hit the press, and I was in North Carolina, if I remember correctly, and a reporter shouted out to the President, "Is it true that you authorized the secret leaking of this classified information?" We walked onto Air Force One, and the President asks, "What was the reporter asking?", and I said, "He asserted that you were the one who authorized Scooter Libby leaking this information," and he said, "Yeah, I did.""

"Taking his own counsel, which he admitted rested on his religious convictions and intuition, George W. Bush decided after becoming president that he would rid the world of Saddam Hussein, which already had congressional sanction in 1998. Bush made several public statements about his mission to remove "evil" tyrants and destroy governments that sponsored terrorists. Bush's instincts took more stimulus from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives in the national security system. Even before 9/11 the White House had investigated what a global war on terrorism might entail. For a president impatient with the complexities of foreign policy, the national security analyses provided little comfort. No other government (not even Israel's) had much stomach for redefining the continuing struggle against terrorism as a war upon a particular state, including Iraq. Even after the shock of 9/11 and the start of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, the Bush administration found little international support in making Iraq Target Number One for international action. Instead, the consensus, communicated by the State Department and the CIA, was that Saddam Hussein's days were numbered and that his ability to attack his neighbors had been largely, if not completely, destroyed. Saddam was "contained." The president did not accept these assurances."

"He couldn't get his judges appointed. He had trouble getting his legislation passed, and he lost Republican control of the Senate. His approval ratings in the polls began to sink. He was already beginning to look like a lame duck president. With everything going wrong, he did what any of us would do. He went... on vacation"

"I'm proud of the fact that I stood up early and unequivocally in opposition to Bush's foreign policy. That opposition hasn't changed."

"In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher opinion of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush."

"I said the President of the United States gets his jollies masturbating horses!"

"We praise President Bush for his strong record on civil rights enforcement, and for becoming the first president ever to ban racial profiling by the federal government."

"Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court-martialed."

"a deficit that had control because George W. Bush gave the wealthiest people in this country massive tax cuts while waging disastrous and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment, yet it is you, the members of the United States military, who achieved it. Your courage, your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other made this day possible. Because of you our nation is more secure. Because of you the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free."

"Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country."