Governors Of Texas

"I think the president should have stood by his word, and that meant Karl should have left. [...] I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which was that if you were involved in this in any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it."

"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.""

"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."

"I heard Bush say, "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.' I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn't make a lot of sense."

"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."

"This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare."

"[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."

"George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics... You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president. ... This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

"I just think that what’s happening right now, inspired by the Republican right and the Bush definition of family values and all other values, is so devastating and so negative and so really scary. And I keep waiting: where is the reaction? Where is the revolt? Where is the, you know, the democracy? And where is all these things? And so, I don’t know where it’s all going to go. But I’ll tell you, that’s one reason I’m going to stay around."

"That international criminal, I mean George Bush... If there is any justice in the world, undoubtedly, this man and his ilk, without a doubt, should be sentenced to 100 deaths. There is no doubt about it."

"His eyes are so close together he could use a monocle."

"I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. He got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war. ... Those were his exact words. ... The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars. He said it very clearly."

"Few talk or think about Iraq these days; the media ignores this important but demolished nation. Iraq, let us recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain's Tony Blair, and financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia. Most people don't understand that Iraq remains a US-occupied nation. We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil being extracted by big US oil firms since 2003."

"In the United States at the start of the new millenium, climate skepticism was on the rise, fueled by the ascension of the George W. Bush administration, which had deep roots in the oil industry. Bush repudiated any effort at carbon control soon after taking office, and underlings in his administration routinely pressured federal scientists to alter their reports or stop talking to reporters."

"President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted the president's right to wield virtually unchecked power. They have used the tragedy of 9/11 to implement a radical political agenda, attempting to ram through a right-wing wish list, from gutting social security to delivering tax cuts to the rich, to discarding basic civil liberties. Our government now routinely invades the privacy of its own citizens, then pulls the cloak of national security over its operations to hide its deceptions and blunders from public view. The economy has been trashed, inequality is now at levels not seen since the Great Depression, and at least 5 million more Americans live in poverty than did at the start of the Bush presidency. Many eminent historians and economists are concluding that George W. Bush has earned the distinction of being the "worst president ever.""

"President James K. Polk, who presided over the invasion of Mexico, saw its significance as an example of how a democracy could carry on and win a foreign war with as much "vigor" as authoritarian governments were able to do. He believed that an elected civilian government with its volunteer people's army was even more effective than European monarchies in the quest for empire. The victory over Mexico proved to the European powers, he felt, that the United States was their equal. Standing tall through military victory over a weak country: it was not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush who thought up that idea. The tradition is as old as the United States itself."

"President George W. Bush used to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande and a hungry mother is going to try to feed her child.” When Hispanics heard that, they knew he cared and were willing to listen to his policies on education, jobs, spending, etc. Because his first sentence struck a chord, Hispanic Americans were willing to listen to his second sentence. We heard this from other demographic groups as well. President Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, a modern-day record for a Republican presidential candidate."

"The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday — no matter what happened Tuesday."

"We are left with two choices: either Bush and associates are guilty of "supreme international crime" including all the evils that follow, crimes that go vastly beyond anything attributed to bin Laden; or else we declare that the Nuremberg proceedings were s farce and that the allies were guilty of judicial murder."

"Do as George Bush said, not as he didn't do."

"I did not expect to ever find much to admire about President George W. Bush. But as a Muslim who has come to work in America, I have recently had to revise my opinion... I never thought I'd say it, but now I long for the Republican Party of George W. Bush."

"Which United States president will go down in history as the greatest humanitarian to have served in the office? The Republican Herbert Hoover is often known as the 'Great Humanitatarian' for his work administering famine relief in post-World War I Europe, and Bolshevik Russia, in the 1920s, but he did all that before he actually became president. Others might make the case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who succeeded Hoover in the White House, whose New Deal initiatives relieved poverty and sickness on a grand scale within the United States. But I'd suggest that there's one president whose contribution dwarfs all the others. Unlike Hoover, he launched his program while he was in office, and unlike FDR, he received virtually no votes in return, since most of the people who have benefited aren't U.S. citizens. In fact, there are very few Americans around who even associate him with his achievement. Who's this great humanitarian? The name might surprise you; it's George W. Bush."

"He could lie his way out of anything. Not so with President Bush. He tells the truth and sometimes it's on accident. It just slips out. That's what I like about him. He's a regular guy; not Slick Willie."

"I hate the way [President Bush] walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo."

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

"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.'"

"He does not believe that God told him to run for president. He does not believe that God told him he would win, and he certainly does not believe that God told him to drop bombs anywhere in the world."

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

"[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."

"During the 2000 campaign, President Bush sounded very much like a realist, with his suspicions of "nation building" and his warnings about American hubris. Then along came 9/11. The National Security Strategy that he released in September--which calls for "encouraging free and open societies on every continent"--sounds as if it could have come straight from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible. I suppose that makes George W. Bush a neocon. If it's good enough for the president, it's good enough for me."

"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."

"I think it's great we have a president who seems like he's always looking directly into the sun."