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Jeff, you have succinctly defined why we "Bush haters" feel so strongly the way we do.
Oh, I've no doubt. I’m not crazy about Bush and haven’t been for a while, but I’m certain if I were in your shoes I’d be completely ticked off. Because you live in a country that has by majority endorsed a candidate and policy you despise. I get that- but the system is working, just not in your favor. Fortunately for you, it looks like the majority of the country is agreeing with you now, which means you might be able to rectify the situation in just a few short years.

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Plain view? Hardly. Bush LIED to me, to you, to everybody in America to persuade gullible people to endorse his unwarranted, illegal war so that he was able to proceed with it, branding any and all dissenters as upatriotic.
What I meant was that for THIS term his attitude toward Iraq was in plain view. It seems to me all of the "lying" done about Iraq was done in the first term and it didn't upset the collective nation enough to vote him out. Like it or not, the American people endorsed continuing Bush's plan in Iraq by voting for him. I don’t know of any agenda he’s pursued in his second term that differs from how he ran in the second election. Yet the collective “we” voted him in. That’s what I meant by “plain view”.

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We are heading towards a global economic collapse the like of which the world has never seen, hastened in no small part by the Bush administration's ludicrous deficit spending policies. I want you to contemplate 30% unemployment, a tax base so shrunken that people will lose their homes because property taxes will skyrocket as they will be the only source of revenue left to the government and even that will not be enough to maintain essential government services like police... all this happening in a country where there are more handguns than there are people...
I agree that government spending is ludicrous, but it isn’t fair to blame Bush for it. Yes his administration has blown it on this front, but so have many who’ve gone before him. Democrats, Republican- it doesn’t matter. We have deemed more things critically important than we can afford, so we are gong to crater economy to get them (and yes, war with Iraq is one of those things).

Isn’t there a quote somewhere about the failure of Democracy being immanent once people realize they can vote themselves money?

But once again, this isn’t Bush or his administration (though I’ll agree they contributed); it is a foundational problem with our country. We can’t control ourselves.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.