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2020 Presidential Election: Biden v. Trump

I think the difference is Bush respected the law and didn't think he was above it. Trump think he is god and only his word matters.

As much as I disagreed with Bush, at his core, he's a decent person. Trump is evil through and through. He has no empathy or morals.

Bush was incompetent, started a war based on lies and was an elitist, but compared to Trump, he's almost St. Francis.
 
Biden won the primary without running an aggressive campaign. The COVID-19 crisis doesn't call for an aggressive campaign. There's a strong argument that the American people don't necessary want candidates to run typical campaigns. I think all of these are in Biden's favor.
 
Bush is not a good person, he cares absolutely 0 for the million dead Iraqis. Cuddling up to Ellen and the Obamas doesn't make him decent. But that's neither here nor there to this thread.
 
He helped millions of people in Africa battle HIV/AIDS. He went full on to help the people in Haiti.

The Iraq War was immoral and based on lies. There's no doubt about that. It stains him forever. I'm not downplaying that at all, but unlike Trump he has done some good things for people.
 
Sanders is way smarter than me so if he says Trump is more dangerous than Bush I'll stop saying Bush is more dangerous than Trump and agree. I was extremely encouraged by Biden today in the periscope with Bernie. Thought he was lucid if a little stuttery-slow. Had some great canned talking points, was deferential at times to Bernie, and at other times nearly Presidential. I think he's gonna struggle with stamina on the long campaign trail at this point and will have some weak points and look extremely weak against Trump in debates, but his bar is pretty low. If Trump just bullies the shit out of him, it'll be a bad look.

Look man, I get that you really liked Bernie. But c'mon, Bernie is 78, Biden is 77. Bernie had a heart attack on the campaign. Don't make it sound like Biden is the geriatric here.
 
Bush is not a good person, he cares absolutely 0 for the million dead Iraqis. Cuddling up to Ellen and the Obamas doesn't make him decent. But that's neither here nor there to this thread.

Sure. But there can still be worse than really really really bad.

By the way, CNN reported on Bernie's endorsement. They showed about 15 seconds of Bernie's actual endorsement followed by about 2-3 minutes one analyst talking about why it matters.

Meanwhile, Bernie's endorsement is pretty much the only thing on my Facebook feed. As this crisis continues, it's easy to see that this election will primarily play out on social media and I guess maybe Fox News.
 
Sure. But there can still be worse than really really really bad.

By the way, CNN reported on Bernie's endorsement. They showed about 15 seconds of Bernie's actual endorsement followed by about 2-3 minutes one analyst talking about why it matters.

Meanwhile, Bernie's endorsement is pretty much the only thing on my Facebook feed. As this crisis continues, it's easy to see that this election will primarily play out on social media and I guess maybe Fox News.

Yea MSM reeeeeeally dislikes Sanders if that was unclear. Sirota and Joy are extremely savvy, but within Washington media politics have made themselves enemies of the power brokers within DC media which isn't good strategy necessarily. But I do kinda wish more people outside millennials and gen Z would get on board with the "millionaires employed by billionaires" idea that the media class is not the same as the general public at large and they don't have your best interests at heart even if they do lean left.
 
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If the motivation was based on dislike of Bernie, you'd think the media narratives would be "Bernie Bends Knee to Biden" or "Is Socialism Dead?" or "Biden's Win Shows Centrist Path to Victory," not "Bernie endorses Biden. OK, that's nice. Detroit is stacking up dead bodies in freezers."
 
Agree with rj about what bush dos did for HIV in Africa. If you don't know you should look it up. Despite all the gop hate and anti gay rhetoric and anti people of color policies he raised a shit ton of money for a cause he did not need to because it was the right thing.

Iraq war was clearly awful. I've long thought it was, in part, because he crazily and misguidedly thought it was in some way protecting his pops.

Saying he's kissing up to Ellen and the Obama's is just arrogant enough to assume they wouldn't see it or have better judgement because they need someone else in their life to kiss their ass.
 
IMO, Dubya was a terrible POTUS. His wrongheaded decisions on the Iraq War alone were devastating. Add in the bungled response to Katrina (another example of a GOP POTUS failing to lead and provide a national response until it was too late), the economic meltdown in 2008, the No Child Left Behind act (never adequately funded), and the bunglers and corruption and sinister figures in his own administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, etc.) and he's awful. I'll give him the HIV Africa effort and his successful outreach to Latino voters in the 2004 election (which may have provided his margin of victory over Kerry), but otherwise his policies (like his tax cut) usually caused more harm than good. Like Trump, he had few intellectual or experience qualifications for the job, and mainly got it because of his father and because he was able to raise a shit ton of money in the 2000 GOP primaries to overwhelm John McCain. He only looks better when compared to Trump. He certainly is/was a better human being than Trump, of that I don't think there's much doubt. Having said that, neither Dubya nor his presidency are much to write home about, and even Trump trashed his legacy in the 2016 SC GOP primary and suffered no harm.
 
I think W is a bottom five POTUS ever, but I don't think he is an evil and incompetent bastard like Trump is, was and always will be.
 
I think W is a bottom five POTUS ever, but I don't think he is an evil and incompetent bastard like Trump is, was and always will be.

Oh I agree, Trump is definitely worse. If you're making some people miss having Dubya as POTUS, you know you're doing a terrible job. Given that, I still find it hard to see much that's good in Dubya's presidency even now. The GOP has really picked some winners as POTUS in the 21st Century thus far.
 
W post-Trump would be more dangerous than W pre-Trump. A lot of these guys were only held in check by "norms" that are now gone.
 
The Iraq War makes GWB's Presidency worse than Trump's, there is no arguing that. Bad, evil, corrupt, whatever adjective you want to use, Bush's actions as President killed over a million people who otherwise would not have died. If you're trying to measure them against each other using any other criteria then dead bodies, you're just wrong.
 
W post-Trump would be more dangerous than W pre-Trump. A lot of these guys were only held in check by "norms" that are now gone.
Yep. That's the only real impact Trump has had on the GOP. He hasn't changed anything they didn't already believe in or want to do. He hasn't turned them into some new "reflection" of him.
All he's done has been to allow them to drop the final pretexts of "civility" they once tried to project. They've *always* been just like him. Now they know they can just show it, and they love it.
 
The Iraq War makes GWB's Presidency worse than Trump's, there is no arguing that. Bad, evil, corrupt, whatever adjective you want to use, Bush's actions as President killed over a million people who otherwise would not have died. If you're trying to measure them against each other using any other criteria then dead bodies, you're just wrong.

You're not giving Trump enough credit here. He's trying hard to catch up to W's body count and he's at almost 3 1/4 years.

At the risk of sounding like I'm defending W, you can't blame the Iraq War solely on him. A large part of the push for war was good old fashioned American blood lust and revenge fueled policy. The Iraq War doesn't happen without broad support from us as individuals and institutions. W and his administration provided flimsy cover for what we wanted.
 
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Can't forget Cheney.

I remember thinking during Dubya's presidency that Cheney was the most loathsome and crass individual to serve in high office since Nixon, and, out of several worthy candidates, the worst member of the Bush administration. Man, had I only known what was coming down the pike.
 
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