In a new PSA featuring every (adult) former president, the COVID-19 vaccine takes center stage. The message: Don’t be a dick. Get the vaccine. Or at least that was my takeaway. Only one ex-president did not participate, indicating (again) that Donald Trump needs more than just a psychiatrist. He needs someone to...
GeorgeWBush
George W. Bush was clearly the worst president ever … up until recently, that is. The past three Republican presidents have been George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. I hated them all, but the first two were like enduring a mildly cruel hazing ritual, whereas the last was more...
I’ll never understand why people think Republican presidents — and Republicans in general — are good for the economy. We have decades of economic data that say otherwise. When it comes to the economy, Republicans are like loud, stumbling drunks who keep insisting they’re okay to drive. Every Friday and Saturday...
in an ad of how Presidents used to talk about the military It offers video of three Presidents talking affirmatively about the military Reagan George H W Bush (who received the Distinguished Flying Cross as the youngest Navy Pilot in WWII) George W Bush ALL REPUBLICANS and the closing text...
buy contrasting previous Presidents with Trump on their reaction to crises Clinton on OK City bombing, Olympic Park bombing G W Bush on 9/11 Obama on Sandy Hook massacre, Mother Emmanuel AME shooting Charleston contrasted with Trump on Charlottesville and Kenosha just video clips of each President speaking after the...
This pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? From today’s New York Daily News cover story: One by one, former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton stood tall Thursday at the Atlanta funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis, honoring the life and legacy of the fearless Congressional...
To be sure, I am not a fan of George W. Bush, no matter how many candies he hands Michelle Obama. But if Bush was a big, jagged kidney stone that took eight years to pass, Donald Trump is a large cache of unexploded Korean War ordnance lodged in my...
Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Thursday expressed regret that he “used the words I used yesterday” in warning Supreme Court Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch of the public backlash their reproductive rights rulings will produce. While Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) proclaimed, “There is nothing to call this except...
If there’s one thing Donald Trump is good at, it’s shouting the same outrageous lies over and over again. As a former reality show host whose most discernible skill was fake-firing people who weren’t actually employees, Trump understood the value of a catchphrase. “You’re fired!” may have been the “What...
Furious over the Dow’s 1,900 point plunge over the past three days, President Trump held a press conference Wednesday to try to calm markets. Echoing the comments of his National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow that “we have contained” Coronavirus and the American economy is “holding up nicely,” Trump declared...
I’ve always thought of myself as a good person. And for the most part, I suppose, I am. I’ve done some bad things, of course. I’ve been ferociously drunk, loudly munched Corn Nuts during somber moments of silence, sung the unabridged 17-minute version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” off-key while baked out of...
I don’t know about you, but I initially opposed both of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 wars — the Iraq campaign especially. Following the attacks of 9/11, a pitched battle arose between hawks and doves, with the former attempting to seize the moral high ground and ultimately winning the hearts and...
Writers, bloggers, commenters, and pundits nearly exhausted the dictionary in the runup to the president’s July 4th Trumpapalooza™. With his tanks, parades, flyovers, and personal address, Donald Trump’s appropriation of America’s Independence Day rightly earned descriptions ranging from inappropriate, disgusting, and self-serving to grotesque, Orwellian, and masturbatory. But word that...
The United States was the world’s lone “hyperpower” when President George W. Bush launched his disastrous and unnecessary war with Iraq in 2003. An economic and military hegemon unchallenged by any single enemy or collection of rivals, the U.S. could and did act with impunity in swiftly toppling Saddam Hussein’s...
The Washington Post published an alarming story yesterday on risky loans big banks are making to cash-poor companies and the devastating effects this mountain of corporate leverage could have if the economy starts to wobble (as it appears to be doing more and more lately). If that sounds eerily like what happened during...
Last week I wrote a diary arguing that Donald Trump, harebrained idiot, almost certainly lied when he said this during his speech in the Rose Garden on Friday: “This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me,” Trump said. “And they all know it. Some of them...
Trump doesn’t just lie. He makes up entire conversations that never happened. And he does it all the time. The latest? He claimed today during his press conference/harrowing public mental breakdown that “some” former presidents have told him they should have done what he’s currently doing — i.e., shutting down the...
The passing of President George H.W. Bush this week presented Americans with an opportunity to reflect on a life lived in service to the United States. A child of privilege, at age 18 Bush nevertheless volunteered for the military after Pearl Harbor. A bomber pilot who survived after his plane...
George W. Bush gave a touching eulogy for his father today, and in its own way it was truly wonderful. His affection for his dad seemed genuine, and who wouldn’t want their son to send them off with such a muscular, yet tender, tribute? But one line in particular stuck out...
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made a not-so-bold promise about the stewardship he would provide for the American economy. “I can tell you,” he guaranteed, “after a period of four years, by virtue of the policies we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down...
I don’t care how many Werther’s Originals he hands Michelle Obama like a half-in-the-bag Wilford Brimley. He’s George W. Bush, and he’s terrible. How do I know? ISIS used to be a schlocky Saturday morning TV show that aired after Shazam! And before he took over, my 401(k) was worth more...
Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving...
When Senator John McCain was laid to rest on Sunday at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the nation lost one of the giants of American public life. For six decades, McCain served his nation as a naval airman, a military liaison to Capitol Hill, a congressman, a...
During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump gave full-throated support for resurrecting the Bush administration’s regime of torture for terror detainees. But Trump’s brand of state-sanctioned sadism promised to go much further. Trump warned he would seek reprisals against the kin of suspected terrorists, “because they may not care...
When it comes to the culpability for the dismal state of American politics and the accelerating erosion of our governing institutions, failure has a thousand fathers. At the top of the list of the usual suspects is Donald Trump, whose presidency of staggering incompetence, unsurpassed corruption, and lying at the...
As President Obama faced the looming re-election campaign in the spring of 2012, he issued a stern challenge to those critics of his approach to the Iranian nuclear program. “When I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk but when...
With apologies to Benjamin Disraeli, there are three kinds of lies Republicans are telling about their tax plan: lies, damned lies, and f**king lies. Constraints of space and time preclude listing them all, but here is a handful of the GOP’s most farfetched falsehoods. For example, earlier this month House...
In recent years, “red state socialism” has become the hallmark of American federalism. That is, even as supposed GOP budget hawks loudly (and wrongly) decry “out of control” spending by Uncle Sam, less well-off Republican-controlled states generally benefit from a one-way flow of federal tax dollars made possible by wealthier...
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” With that phrase, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States ensures civilian control over—and accountability for—the American military. While the power to declare war rests with Congress, responsibility for America’s...
We must never forget that a President exploited the tragedy of 9/11 to spread fear, lies and war in his State of the Union address. Remembering is the only way to keep it from happening again. Thankfully, Obama has resisted the urge to use his platform to push for a large...