Too little too late

[ColoradoGuy]

CG, you know I respect your point of view as highly as most in this forum. I agree with what you said up to this point, and I'm not going to give you "flack", but from this point we part company. I agree with virtually all the criticism levelled at this joke of a president by other posters in this thread, too many to quote. He hasn't achieved a thing in his life on his own merit, and he's been an abject failure at every position handed to him on a silver platter, including the one that enabled him to take this country into an unnecessary and illegal war on cooked intelligence and drive us nearly to financial ruin.

I don't believe the draft-dodging dumbass Dubyah puppet did or said anything in office that wasn't dictated to him by Cheney, Rove, Mummy, Pappy and the rest of that evil and imperious cabal. I believe he's been instructed to lay low since so as not to be a clear and painful reminder that he and his party got us into all these messes, and lest he stick his silverplated foot in his mouth. I don't believe he has a "responsible" or "sincere" bone in his body. I don't believe his airport junket was anything more than a PR move to try to redeem his ruined image.

If he really wanted to show "remorse" as you speculate, maybe rather than greeting troops arriving home on a happy two week leave, he would visit some soldiers with severe brain injuries or limbs blown off at Walter Reed Hospital. Or maybe he could welcome some flag draped caskets arriving at Dover AFB. You know, the ones he wouldn't let the press take pictures of while he was in office. Maybe he could take a page from your Congressman, or from what this guy did his first year in office.

You're right about this:
The reality is this is the first war in American history that has not been paid for, at least in large measure, where Americans have not been asked to personally sacrifice - another legacy of the Bush/Rove/Cheney administration. Instead, we have defrayed the costs adding to the monumental debt burden of future generations, and for what? Things would likely be very different if average Americans felt the actual pain of sacrifice or were allowed to see beyond the controlled and sanitized media coverage. Like you, my heart goes out to the fallen and the families of the fallen. Only they, the Iraquis, and the Afhanis have any understanding of the true cost of these mad exercises.

Like a good boeuf bourguignon, I allowed your post to stew for a while before I replied and I have to say I don't think we disagree except regarding our philosophies of the nature of good and evil.

You want to say that President Bush is evil to the core and I take a slightly more pragmatic stance: while it might appear that way, we cannot know that. I don't believe any of us are 100% anything, but certainly our choices or circumstances could lead to an assertion of such by others or a personal belief that reinforces the statement. And -- to further my point -- if we cannot know an individual's entire make-up, we cannot judge a single act using the context of the whole as a measure.

Locke believed humans were inherently good, Hobbes thought otherwise. Is one completely correct and the other completely wrong? It's easy to say 'of course not', but I don't know. It does move a lot of philosophy books through used-book stores and fuels quite a few over-caffeinated late night sessions near college campuses.

I guess I wrestle with two conflicts: I don't subscribe to moral absolutism [holding that regardless of context, an act is either good or bad] and I have even more issues with moral subjectivism [holding that individuals are 'good or evil' based upon opinion].

Rejecting moral absolutism allows you to make the point that even if President Bush went to the airport, it was not good-intentioned and therefore, the goodness of the act is invalidated. I can buy into that rationale. You and I can agree that even a "good" act can be morally wrong if the intentions are nefarious. But here's the rub: I cannot know his mind or suggest a sequence of events that led up to his trip to the airport with any kind of authority. And, to be honest, I doubt you can tell me about those, either. Despite that, I think you're still comfortable making the argument because you rely on moral subjectivism.

Moral subjectivism allows you to make the inference that since "everyone" knows President Bush was an ineffective leader, a poor excuse for a human being, etc., his "good" act of going to the airport must be discounted. On this, I have to disagree. Opinion shifts with time. A case in point is our Forum discussion on VJ Day. At the time we dropped the bombs in Japan, Americans were all 'huzzah!' about ending the war; now, for whatever reasons, we tend to downplay the significance of the day. Just like good wine, the harshness of our opinions soften with time and the complexity of situations (as we understand them) deepens. You and I do agree that little of what happened during the Bush presidency was original thought or personally conceived and perhaps history will allow a more sympathetic view of a man trapped in public office, unable to act on his own.

I'm not saying that President Bush deserves any kind of special dispensation for his presidency just because he went to the airport that day... I am saying I don't think it's fair to apply a moral subjectivist paintbrush to the event. When I wrote my second post in this thread, I said:

I never thought I'd ever come to the defense of President Bush, but I guess there is a first time for everything.

As I think everybody knows, my personal opinion is that George W. Bush was a terrible president, but I'm not quite ready to write him (or anybody) off. I read a great blog entry recently that questioned how we determine a good or bad president and if you have the time, you might find Richard Adams (from The Guardian newspaper) worth reading. I still stand by the three examples I gave in my second post as evidence that not everything he did was wrong or evil and since we've already established my rejection of moral subjectivism, I'll leave it at that.

We can agree to disagree, maxcok and your post doesn't diminish any of the respect I have for you. In fact, I appreciated it because reading your viewpoint gave me a chance to reflect on why I felt the way I did. (I think that's the way informed debate is supposed to work.)

 

[TomCat84]

They have try and repair Zippy's image so his fat brother can make a run at the the presidency.

Shame, too- our country would have been in a lot better shape if Jeb had been president. I disagree with much of his policies, but Jeb is unquestionably the smarter and politically astute of the two.