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It's easy to sit at home and criticize the decisions Bush has made. He's the president. It is his duty to make difficult decisions. We have the luxury of being able to see what the outcomes are before we decide what our decision would be. I personally think that our going to war with Iraq was a good decision. Others don't.

The trouble isn't that he has to make difficult decisions. I can respect people when they have to make a difficult decision. I personally thought going to war in Afghanistan was not a good decision, but I recognize it was a difficult decision, I understand the reasoning behind it, and I respect him for having made that difficult decision.

The problem, as I see it, is that he's making difficult decisions willfully based on willfully skewed information, and for someone doing that, I have less than no respect -- I think it's downright contemptible. For example, why is the energy task force made up solely of oil and energy execs? Where are the balancing environmentalists? As far as Iraq goes, I thought was a horribly stupid idea, especially since a) it took away from the goals in Afghanistan, b) it was *hugely* criticized by both the US and world population, and c) every single reason he used to justify the war was, if not obviously meritless, then highly questionable at the time he was making it. This was not something I thought stupid based on sitting back and watching the outcome, I thought it was a stupid idea from the get-go. Making matters worse, he ignored the advice of people who had real knowledge of the situation. He wasn't a victim of bad intelligence -- the administration set up a group to feed them the intelligence they wanted to hear.