Just watched the Boy Boy video on George Bush’s Masterclass, and they made me think about which U.S. President was actually worse.

  • Spacemanspliff@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I feel like while bush was a much worse president then most people realize, with some of his policies and things like the patriot act still in effect and gumming up the works, trump did more damage in erroding the facade of democracy and empowering fanatics

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Exactly: Bush pushed through evil policy that eroded rights and committed war crimes and such, but Trump attacked the very structure of the government.

      • Spacemanspliff@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Bush was bad in the way most world leaders and governments are, trump was impeached twiced and faced no consequences.

      • aard@kyu.de
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        1 year ago

        It’s pretty clear from all the responses here that the view is massively different depending on if you’re from the US, or not.

        I’m not from the US - and Bush massively and irrevocably messed up a lot of things for me. And I’m just in the EU, not directly getting bombed by US military.

        With Trump the consequences were pretty much all inside of the US, any fallout we felt over here were still from the Bush era, or to some extent Obama. Given all the damage that was done by those two maybe the structure of your government over there is shit and should be attacked - my hope from over here was that the whole Trump situation would lead to finally stuff getting fixed. It won’t be pretty for you guys - but from the outside I’d rather have someone incompetent like Trump mess up your stuff until the pain is big enough to actually do something than someone halfway competent break things on a global scale again.

      • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I believe so. However, the NSA’s mass surveillance programs still are authorized under section 702 of FISA which is another Bush era law.

    • PosadistPotatofish@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      There’s no comparison. Bush has a much higher body count and was a more effective imperialistic mass-murderer. He certainly did his part to empower fanatics – the wAr oN tErROr got all those racist bloodthirsty chuds baying for blood. As for eroding the facade of democracy, I don’t know what you can call stealing the 2000 election and then ramming through unpopular wars other than proof that America has never been a democracy.

      Bush did immense permanent damage – the millions dead by his policies and the aftershocks will never come back to life.

      Trump just rode the wave.

      People who think Trump was as bad or worse than Bush are just telling on themselves that they don’t think nonwhite people living outside the imperial core are fully human.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Which is a good thing. Liberals pretending Bush wasn’t so bad, is what is going to allow fascism to win.