We could have done this to Bush, you guys.

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

97 replies on “We Could Have Done This To Bush”

  1. Despite the fevered imaginations of some, it was fair to say Bush wasn’t going to hang around for more than eight years. Ol’ Hosni did for thirty.

    But – way to go Egyptians!

  7. (Sorry to have been rude, Jen – I do share the inspiration, but encourage you to resist drawing conclusions a bit longer. What I’ve read convinces me Mubarak waited to step down until the military told him the moment was ripest for them to take over as heroes. My sense is that the Egyptian people are in no less danger today under overt army control than they were yesterday under disguised army control. Let’s not call triumph just yet.)

  9. Jen,

    I dare you to step out of your liberal enclave and travel to the middle of red-state America and try this.

    In fact, I double dare you.

    Of course, first you will have to remove your foot from your mouth.

  10. NO WAY, We were too busy making fun of bush and not doing anything to do anything, Think back to that time, it was all Bush jokes and rolling over for “terrorism”.

  11. We could have, if he had declared a permanent state of emergency and stayed in office longer than constitutionally allowed. But he didn’t; he was voted in fairly and squarely (even went through the courts, which made it legal whether you liked it or not) and left office at his appointed time. What basis would there have been to protest? Forcing leaders out of office is a last resort after legal means fail (not after you don’t like the perfectly legal conclusions that don’t go your way).

  15. @10 Bush was not a popular president. You didn’t have to be in an enclave to see that.

    @12 The claim that Bush was elected “fairly and squarely” in 2000 is wildly revisionist history.

  16. The closest anyone came to doing that was the dude who threw his shoe at Bush, and that guy weren’t no American.

    But hey, Twitter wasn’t that big in 2004, so . . .

  18. @8 Totally. I agree that one man stepping down in Egypt does not ensure reform, and assuming it does could be dangerous. It’s just the symbolism of the many over the one that I’m celebrating. And knowing someone on the ground, and seeing her personal transformation, is powerful.

  20. As somebody who marched against Bush and Bush-era policies many times, no, I don’t think we could have done this. Bush was a disaster, but he was still reelected in 2004 and left at the end of his second term like he was supposed to.

  21. What? Come on. I know the courts played a questionable role in his election in 2000, but his victory in 2004 was admittedly solid. We voted, he served his terms, now he’s gone. America moves forward, now we have Obama, the democratic process survives.

    I’m glad you’re inspired, but come on.

  23. Even the right-wing crazies on Free Republic who are suggesting today that this be done to Obama are being slapped down by their own kind. Our Constitution works. Sometimes we get shitty leaders, but we don’t have to have month-long street brawls that shut down the whole country to get them out of office after 30 years. Grow up, Jen. There’s a lot of shit wrong with this country, but we’re pretty lucky to have stability and a regular chance to change course electorally

  24. Jen,

    Bush was unpopular? OK I’ll indulge you in that, but that does not further your ridiculous claim that people would rise up to over throw him in favor of Cheney.

    You must really enjoy the taste of your own foot.

  25. No, no, and no. This is the stupidest thing I have ever read from a Stranger writer, and really expect more from Ms. Graves.

    We have a system in the United States that disallows what happened in Egypt with respect to leaders serving just about forever. We do have free and fair elections, and while we complain about fraud and intimidation in pockets of the country, it is not nearly as widespread as it was in Egypt.

    We don’t ban political parties from participating (although some will say that the individual state rules for qualifying to appear on the ballot amount to as much).

    Ours is a system of ideas, and a system that allows anyone with the passion and know-how to enter elective office. People may be jaded by aspects of our government and political process, but we cannot, and should not, ever clamor to the streets and demand our elected – elected – leaders step down.

    Bush being there for eight years was a result of poor campaigning in 2000 (Gore should have been able to take N.H.), and a shitty candidate in 2004. It was poor organization, and the attitude of just giving up, that gave him six years of a Republican controlled Congress.

    What we could have done was a better job of ensuring checks and balances. Instead, we had low participation in areas that should be high Democrat performing. But to even suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should have taken to the streets and shut down the country because we didn’t like what we elected is complete bullshit, and as anti-American as any terrorist out there.

  28. “We could have done this to Bush, you guys.”

    What a terribly sexist thing for Ms. Graves to say.

    I would expect more from a far-left liberal at a free alternative Weekly.

    Ms. Graves does not value the political input of women when it comes to political uprisings. Shocking.

  30. I marched in just about every anti-war, anti-Bush protest in Seattle from 2003 to 2007, and I remember us protestors being snidely mocked in august publications like The Strangler.

    Where were you?

  31. Wow, this is shockingly ignorant.

    Interestingly, I saw a link just yesterday to a story about Tea Partiers encouraging just what you’re suggesting. Something tells me you would object in that case.

  32. Bwa haw haw!

    Jen Graves, you are the true stereotype of a naive, sheltered, Pollyanna, facts-of-reality-ignoring sheltered white Seattle “progressive” libtard.

  33. Dumbest Slog post of all time? I don’t know – she’s got some pretty stiff competition there. But it’s certainly the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long, long time.

  34. The problem is that Bush would use Law Enforcement and the Courts to clear any central meeting place. If the cops, local, state and Federal refuse direct orders to do the mass arrest and clear areas that would had resulted in many deaths, then a Egypt like protest in the US could had a chance. Combine with work stoppage and shutdown of the US economy.

  35. I definitely think that people power (mass mobilizations in the streets/civil disobedience/disruptions of business as usual/creation of alternatives) can be successful in the USA, but I think we also have to acknowledge the differences (cultural, historical, religious, ideological, etc.) between ourselves and other countries, in thinking about how to create change, and how such things have failed to create change (for example, we failed to stop the Iraq war, even with millions of the streets). We can have millions of people in the streets, but without them doing something more substantial than holding signs and chanting, and without them doing it for longer than one day (the way protests usually go in this country), it doesn’t do enough to disrupt business as usual. If we could get our shit together enough to have general strikes and other types of actions that disrupt corrupt political and business practices on an ongoing basis — a campaign, instead of a day of protest here or there, on a mass scale — we might be able to begin to affect things in the government.

    But even so, I think a lot of things need to be addressed before folks could really do anything like this…the fact that while we may not be the same as Egypt, we have a massive military apparatus that would have no problem with defending its own interests, let alone the interests of whatever administration, in putting down really troubling dissent. That we are a country with a history of cultivated amnesia about how injustice and oppression has been part of our fundamental development and existence as a nation. That we have such a skewed definition of politics (compared to other countries) that a centrist like Obama can even be called a socialist or extreme lefty without the accusers being able to be laughingly dismissed. That we live in a country with plenty of resources to provide health care and shelter to everyone, and we don’t do so because there is this refusal to believe ourselves a true community, where such a thing would be common sense (as in most European countries).

    All this is not to say I think a people-powered mass revolution can’t do anything or create massive change here. Just that we have to think of what would work in this country, with all its specific characteristics. I don’t think the USA is exceptional, just different, and thinking about how to create change here (as opposed to just thinking we can have a one-size fits all version of revolution) seems crucial, if we’re ever really going to address the major issues — militarism, poverty, unaccountable power, etc. — we have to, if we really want a better country.

  37. You guys! Stick to anonymous commenting, and you’ll go far!

    Being inspired when hundreds of thousands of people peacefully come together to ask for better government is human.

    Nobody wants Suleiman. Your Cheney references are birdbrained.

    For those who are asking where the fuck was I when protests were going on, you are right. (I never mocked any protesters, for the record.)

    The times to take to the streets (which is not inherently a barbaric or “clamorous” act, as @26 suggests—how do you suppose we might get reform on checks and balances if voting is not working? What is gained by demonizing peaceful organizing in public spaces that our rightfully ours to occupy?) would have been two: One, when the Supreme Court declared Bush president; two, when Bush declared an illegal war.

  38. We don’t have free and fair elections as there are effectively only 2 parties that collude at the party leadership level to maintain the status quo. The reality is that the dems and repubs are essentially the same
    – both support these senseless, unprovoked wars
    – both support repressive regimes (such as Egypt before today, Saddam …)
    – both support restriction of our rights via the Patriot Act
    – both support torture as a means to an end
    – both support the deprivation of legal and Geneva Conv. rights to detainees
    – both support the expansion of the executive powers beyond the constitution and reason
    – both collude to make the presidential debates unchallenging and predetermined
    – both follow the lead and dollars of big business at the expense of the citizenry

    I think Jen’s comment has the right idea but is wrong to focus on Bush. We should be inspired by the citizens of Egypt to peacefully turn back the US Gov to the will of the people.

  40. We did do this, with the 2008 elections. (Sure, Bush would have been gone anyway, but it was still a repudiation of his administration even if McCain was the direct loser.)

    The jubilation of the Egyptians does remind me of how I felt on election night a couple years back. But imagine if Bush had been president four times as long and every election was fixed and not just the first one. So, like November 2008 times a thousand.

  41. I’m concerned by that, Jen. No, we couldn’t have done that to Bush. We have fair and open elections and a Constitution that, by default, we all agree to uphold, and it protects us from a dictator. In turn we agree that every 8 years, no matter how much of a saint or a fucking nitwit the President is, his or her term will end. No, we couldn’t have done that. It would have meant throwing out everything that our democracy precariously balances upon. Egypt doesn’t have that. One of the few choices for ridding the populace of a dictator, is revolution. When we start thinking that revolution is one of our few or last options, that will be the time to buy that one-way ticket to South America.

  43. @39 –

    The thing is that voting does work. The key is getting people to actually vote. The people who make the decisions are the ones who show up, and sometimes that’s a frightening thought.

    Now, I am in no way “demonizing” peaceful organizing in public spaces, and encourage it. The anti-war protests (which I took part in some) served as an opportunity for people to see that it wasn’t just them that felt the way they did, and may have helped motivate people to actually go to the polls – because that’s what we do in America.

    That said, in 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq, our liberal base of Capitol Hill/U-District/Wallingford had a voter turnout of 40%. Sure, we were going to re-elect Jim McDermott, but what is the message that is being sent – we’ll complain, and that’s about it.

    But we don’t overthrow governments in this country. In fact, while just about everyone who has any respect for the law would agree that Bush v. Gore was improperly decided, and the votes were opposite of the traditional views of the respective justices, the U.S. Supreme Court is still the highest Court in the country.

    But what that decision didn’t do was say that GWB could be President for Life, or get all of his appointments, regardless of what the Senate believed.

    So, I stand firm in my opinion that your belief that we could have protested for weeks in order to overthrow the government is anti-American.

  45. This post is more crackheaded than most of what Mudede posts. But Jen is absolutely right! We should have thrown out Bush and Cheney when we had the chance!

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