#bush administration

[girls--complex]

Drawings of puppy Vader & kitty Palpatine that in my opinion reflect the insanity of our times

[dadsinsuits]

Robert Gates

[deadpresidents]

Considering how bad of a speaker and campaigner he was how the hell did Dubya win any of his elections??????

George W. Bush was a poor speaker but he was a GREAT retail politician. Bush's team would carve out three or four policies and Bush was laser-focused on message discipline. He might say some goofy things or throw some malapropisms in there along the way, but he stayed on message, got his points across and he connected with the people who supported him. He wasn't as qualified as his father (or pretty much any other President since World War II besides Trump), but he wasn't as aloof as his father or brother. In fact, he was even somewhat likable and had a charm to him, especially in small groups. Just ask Michelle Obama! Because of his name he was always going to raise tons of money from the big business types who always supported Republicans, but he also raised a ton of money through small fundraisers in 1999/2000 because he went everywhere in New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina and people genuinely liked him. People also tend to forget that Bush pretty clearly won two of the three debates against Al Gore in 2000. And there were such low expectations for him in the 2004 debates against John Kerry that holding his own against Kerry was equivalent to a victory.

The problem people had with running against George W. Bush is that people always underestimated him (or, in Bush's words, "misunderestimated" him). Bush was smarter than people thought he was and he worked harder than people expected him to, and most people didn't realize that until he'd served two terms and started two wars. I remember Bill Clinton making those points. Clinton said, "Bush really connects. It's a mistake to underestimate him," and told Al Gore's campaign managers in 2000 to be careful because "compassionate conservatism" was a "genius slogan." Clinton had one of the most brilliant political minds in American history and he said, "I always thought Bush was a good politician. I never thought he was dumb. There's a difference between not knowing certain things and being dumb. But I never bought that. Not ever, not for a minute. I never believed it."

[bushcheney]

W. Bush Administration Pride PFPs I made. Honestly, I couldn't care less what anyone does with these.

[sumarex]

Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump...

THEY ARE ALL PUPPETS!

US Democracy is FAKE.

US Government serves to a billionarie elite that has been using its power to overcome other nations around the world.

If nowadays we have Trump in charge, that is because the others made the path for him.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[lovepurplequeen]

Fuck Dick Cheney forever and ever until the end of time. Cheney did not deserved to die with his family by his side, he deserved to die in a prison cell for war crimes.

Also Kamala Harris aligning herself with Dick Cheney was a massive mistake. Talk about the Democratic party establishment inability to read the fucking room.