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[–] 163 points 4 months ago (18 children)

It's hard to remember how much we hated Bush II back in the day. The fact that he is now just lumped in with the other surviving presidents today for me is the real demonstration of just how much worse Trump is.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago

    Bush II should have swung besides Saddam, but trump has dashed any hopes I have for holding GWB accountable for pissing away the future of the middle class to murder the shit out of people on the other side of the world.

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Man, its wild how much i miss conservatives of yesteryear.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago

    During Trump I, I maintained that Bush Jr. was far worse due to the deaths and destabilization from invasions, Guantanamo, mass surveillance, unauthorized drone strikes, and on and on.

    Not halfway through Trump II, he has definitely far surpassed Bush Jr. 😭

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Or it is proof that over time you start forgetting how bad it was and it will unfortunately be the same with Trump.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    It's hard to keep perspective over the decades. I was more passionate back then, and he really did some horrible things, but I don't remember feeling like he was so, I don't know, disgusting of a human being as Trump.

    Time will tell I guess

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    I think Bush was bad but a lot of the bad stuff he did was somewhat reversible (ICE existed , plus it's not his fault that ICE is now used as a papers-please. There was PATRIOT but we reversed it so it's actually a great example of what I mean.) and relatively short-term. Reagan, meanwhile, made a giant hole in the infrastructure that is still ingrained within everything US today.

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    But ICE was literally created by the Bush admin along with the rest of the DHS, and the Patriot Act wasn't reversed so much as disseminated into earmarks attached to various spending bills so it's actually even harder to get those freedoms back. Even our current immigration system is descended from Bush era policy, including the fucking wall.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (1 child)

    ICE wasn't created, only transferred and renamed from the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Treasury. There had to be an agency enforcing the era where we used a fucking ocean instead of the fucking wall. (There was a prosperous time of much freer immigration in between but my point is of course it was always a thing.) Finally, of course, ICE never and never intended to barge into cities and homes under the Bush like Trump did, nor did he forever change politics for the worse and blow up education and welfare and economic equality like Reagan did.

    Could you source what you said about the PATRIOT Act's sunset provisions?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    INS was basically an entire different agency with an entirely different directive. That was also a time when our immigration system was bifricated. So there were, in fact, several agencies, who all had a specialized directive. DHS changed all of that. Not to mention the budget increases.

    I grew up 200 feet from a HUGE Border Patrol station in southern California, and about half a mile from the Mexican border. Just because they weren't coming into the city centers and making big show about it doesn't mean that they were terrorizing people all over border regions for a loooong time. Murder, rape, racketeering, etc have all been extremely common, and they pretty frequently destroy water and food stashes that good samaritans have left for folks, which has led to uncountable deaths.

    Source it? No. I'm not going to show you the last 20 years of federal legislation that removes your freedoms systematically. My point was that we are not in a better place now than we were then, and the place where we are now has everything to do with where we were then

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    To me there's no comparison. Bush Jr. is responsible for a million Iraqi civilian deaths. As much as people wish it were so, Trump doesn't hold a candle to that (yet).

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Sure, but the question was, who is more hated? I do not think that globally at the moment the population thinks about, let alone actively hates, Bush Jr these days.

    Yes Trump has his core base, but man, it really feels like if you don't love him, you hate him.

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