Grading Bush

[Tonio]

Instead of giving Bush an overall approval rating, I'll grade him in several areas:

D for his conduct during the 2000 election fiasco (Al Gore gets a D-)

C for his tax cut proposal (The Democrats' counter-proposal gets the same grade)

A- for his handling of 9/11 (The minus is for using the word "crusade" early on. That word only convinces Muslims that Bin Laden is right about us.)

B+ for the Iraq war, but C- for the diplomacy that went into building the coalition.

C for John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. Although I think the critics who screamed "Fascism!" were being ridiculous, I have my concerns about both.

 

[Kyle]

Graded on:

2000 Election: D (For not hiring a better campaign manager and kicking Al's ### on some of the more ridicules things of the Clinton/Gore Administration)


Tax cuts: C (For not coming to some compromise and working toward ridding the hill of other Democrats, when compromise would no longer be necessary)


9/11: D (For not turning the entire Middle-East into a glass-floored, self-lit parking lot and finding out if all these damn nukes actually worked)


Afghan and Iraqi wars: B ( Too slow in dropping the hammer on them both. Too many got away or at least escaped a televised execution)


John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act: D ( Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Babs Streisand weren't arrested and hanged, for being left-leaning, bedwetting, Pinkos like the Lefties kept implying) I had my hopes up.

 

[demsformd]

2000 Election - F; more people intended to vote for Al Gore in the election in Florida. I mean come on, Buchanan receiving 4 times more votes than average in a Jewish precient? Yeah, that can't be true. Also, after he won, the man acted like he won by a landslide. After Kennedy won in 1960, he moderated his positions because he understood that the electorate was divided. Bush continued ahead as if he even had won the popular vote.

9/11 and War on Terror - A; Bush has done some great stuff here. Can't really say that turning from Afganistan and ignoring Syria, etc so that we could blow up Iraq was the best course of action but still I supported the President and his Iraqi position.

Tax Cuts - D; cutting taxes during a deficit while continuing to spend liberally and preside over the largest government build-up since the Great Society is not the best thing to do. Bush has shown that he is a spender...I would like to call him a "red-inker and spender."

Iraq: B; should have gotten more support definitely since it was an effort to rid the world of the oppressive Hussein. But he was still right to do it even if the French and Russians didn't support it. Now, though, Bush has shown that he will be very disrespectful of nations that did not help us, which is something we cannot afford in our continued fight against terrorism.

Ashcroft and the Patriot Act: D; This act is very very unconstitutional. Holding American citizens without charges, surveliance without a warrant for American citizens, overbearing measures to create a state of Big Brother is not at all in agreement with the ideas of this nation.