Heh. Meadros. Not the first time we've seen that list (but always good to see it again). You are aware that pretty much everything on it is either just plain incorrect, deliberately skewed, or not something that had anything to do with him at all, right?
Just a couple glaring ones:
The US supreme court did not make a decision to declare Bush the winner of the election because any lawyers from anyone talked them into it (SOTUS doesn't really work that way, and certainly not in this case). The rules they followed are quite clear. By the laws of the US Constitution, Bush won the election. Popular vote count is not how we determine who beomes president of the US. The only point at issue was the electoral votes in Florida, yet despite a couple months of recounting, and no matter how they counted, nor how many times they counted, chads and all, the count for those electoral votes went to Bush. The Supreme Court was not so much declaring Bush the winner of the election but telling the Democrat political machine to stop trying desperately to interrupt the working of the federal government. The votes were tallied. Bush won. People need to just stop crying about it.
You can hardly blame Bush for the bankruptcies, nor the economic downturn of 2001. Most of those were dot coms that existed purely on paper to begin with, and went bankrupt because after 2000, folks finally realized that these companies didn't actually make any products nor any real money. The same thing would have happened if Gore had won.
You could, however, blame Clinton's administration for allowing the whole "day trader" thing to happen, which is about the only government economic decision that had any effect on the downturn in 2001/2002, since it destabilized the market by increasing speculative investment (which can be considered one of the causes for the dotcom bubble growing so large in the first place). But let's not put any common sense into this list...
One more: All the "guilt by association" stuff just doesn't wash. You can tell that this was done during the Enron scandal, since if it was more recent it would be talking about Halliburton instead. The simple fact is that people don't become president of the US by never knowing or doing business with anyone. At that level of politics you will almost by definition have connections of one type or another with the heads of nearly every major business, media, and interest in the country. You just can't avoid dealing with those groups along your political career. You could literally tie Enron to just about any elected politician at the federal level. That Bush had some dealings with them is irrelevant. So did everyone else.
It does remind me of the "study" that listed all the people that Clinton knew personally/professionally who died from one "mysterious" cause or another during his terms in office. Again, there were kernels of truth in all of them, and they were people he "knew" and/or did business with. But the sheer number of people that a president will have known or done business with on the way to the whitehouse ensures that just by law of averages a number of them will die while he's in office. Again. Lots of speculation and innuendo, but really just a whole lot of smoke when you step back and look at things rationally.
Still a funny read though.
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