"President" George W Bush plans to visit Great Britain this month. Predictably, a row has erupted, as the (Amjerican) Secret Service apparently asked for large areas of London to be cordoned off to provide security for the President - something not even accorded our own Queen or Prime Minister. Furthermore, Governor Blair has appealed to people not to "embarass" him and his betht fwend by protesting over the War in Iraq. Yankee Poodle went to town, riding on a crony, "Get lost! George Bush - "We want you out! "And F*** Off Phoney Tony!"70 responses total.
:)
I don't see why you have to be so stubbornly British, twenex.
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Bush should go on a two-day trip to London and Paris. In Ontario, that is.
No wonder Bush so rarely makes appearance outside the U.S. He can't control the opposition's exposure to the media outside his own jurisdiction.
Nah, he's just chicken.
Bush goes exclusive =================== Peace protesters planning a march to mark the US president's state visit next week say police are planning to seal off large parts of central London. Campaigners are planning a "Stop Bush" protest march through central London on 20 November, but say the Metropolitan Police are trying to block them. As President Bush and his wife are due to stay at Buckingham Palace, there has been speculation much of the Mall and Whitehall will be closed off along with parts of the City. Scotland Yard says it is not revealing details of road closures yet for security reasons, but says it will facilitate lawful demonstrations. But the Stop the War Coalition says it will not accept any route that avoids Parliament. It follows a row between the Metropolitan Police and civil rights campaigners over the use of anti-terror powers against protesters at an arms fair in September. Campaign spokesman John Rees told BBC London: "It seems as if they (the police) are going to comply with the White House's request to create an exclusion zone in central London during George Bush's visit. The president's last visit was met with some protest "And they have told the Stop the War Coalition they won't agree to a route that goes through Parliament Square or Whitehall." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3259005.stm ===================================================================== Why does he want to goto London? If he wants to meet the queen and his pet dog, can't they be summoned to the whitehouse? And he can always address the British parliament over videophone. This will save them from embarrasing protests too.
> It follows a row between the Metropolitan Police and civil rights > campaigners over the use of anti-terror powers against protesters at > an arms fair in September. arms fair?
it was like a guns and bombs bring and buy sale...I really hate been British some times!!
Btw, the australians did bow to the demand on an exlcusion zone around their parliament for Bush.
re #2: probably because: 1) I'm British; 2) I'm stubborn! ;-P
re: 9: Heh. re: 11: Not surprising. John Howard (The Australian PM) makes Thatcher look like a bleeding-heart liberal.
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Please jeer at him as much as possible while he is there. Preferably everyone in England should jeer continuously, day and night, so long as he is present, so that no TV cameras can show anyone not jeering. Except the Queen, I guess. I don't suppose she's even capable of jeering.
ROTFLMAO. No, really. right on. It wouldn't be seemly for the Queen to be caught jeering. I bet she thinks he's a jackass though /grin.
The Queen should privately take President Rove aside and inform him that if he doesn't clean up his act, he'll NEVER get Mr. Bush elected.
You think the Queen wants to help reelect Bush?
Good point...
I'm sure expressing a preference for or against a political candidate would come pretty close to jeering in the Queen's book. The Queen will be correct, so the rest of the country won't have to be.
Yeah. Hooray for Lizzie. The country'll be a very different place when she's gone *sniff*.
I expect Bush to completely ignore the protesters. He's focused on getting re-elected, now, and there are very few people in Britain who are eligible to vote for him. ;>
Really? Darn, and I was all set to vote for that Dean guy. Oh well...
It's not about him recognizing or ignoring them, it's about the media giving them exposure while they're covering him.
Actually, it's about them being able (or not) to gain direct access to the President to peacefully protest, whether or not he or the media take a blind bit of notice.
re #14 .. GEEZE!!! janc, clinton haters were never *taht* rabid! wtf has gotten into you? didn't get enough of a tax cut? no children tax rebate? / po
It's easier to hate someone who's actually incompetent than it is to hate someone whose personal life is a bit slimy.
This is very true.
Problem is, bish is not (imnsho) incompetent. He just doesn't do wht you want done. He does what I want done. I never wanted any country to oppose the president when Clinton was president. He was a slimey assed rapist as far as I was concerned, but he was the president. AS leader of our country, he deserves better respect
Like the respect Clinton gave the (admittedly totally useless) John Major when he visited the US, by watching the baseball instead of meeting the PM? Since our position is that our way, rather than his way, of running the country, is the right way to do it, we're right in saying he's incompetent of running the country the way we want, which is the same as our saying he's incompetent, period.
I hadn't heard that. Anopther reason to believe Clinton was incompetent.
Clinton was pretty well-liked overseas, though. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good way to judge a President, but it was true. He was a much better diplomat than Bush. Partisan politics aside, what I see a lot in the Bush administration is a lack of central leadership. Different parts of his administration squabble like children and we end up with no coherent policy. Bush just isn't strong enough to rein them in, most of the time. I also fear that political calculation is starting to overcome good judgement when it comes to Iraq. We really, really can't afford to leave before the job is done, but it's starting to look like we're going to pull out in time for good election year visuals of troops coming home and leave Iraq to the terrorists.
I judge Bush incompetent. He appears to think and speak only cliches, seemingly provided for him. The result is no appearance of consideration of the long term consequences of any of his declarations. He also lets his neoconservative administration change previous policies, often in secret, with damaging consequences. We see this in many arenas - energy, environmental, military, economic, and others.
"Speak...cliches"? "Stumble over cliches", do you mean? "The problem with our imports is that most of them come outside the country" "These weapons have been deceiving us for decades" (on a British interview) The problem with your President is that he's in office.
You forgot my favorite: "They want to run Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."
re: #34: Hehehehe. I really laughed at that one.
I meant "speak only cliches". His grammatically and syntactically correct statements are nevertheless still cliches: "Bring them on" (they did). "We will prevail", etc.
I think the world mostly forgave Clinton for his sexual escapades. Bush at his best seems clueless and at his worst an idiot. Bush really makes you wonder who's running the show in the world's largest and most powerful economy. Scares you too, coz US policy and actions affect a large part of the world. And he's certainly turned the sympathy US had of the world after 9/11 into hatred by botching the whole Iraq thing.
Well, I disagree. I think Bush is showing himself to be intelligent and capable. He just doesn't do things the way you want them done. Whatever sympathy he the U.S. had after 9/11 ... what sympathy? And what would you suggest we do? The U.N. is showing itself more and more to be the whore of the underpriveleged adn the shelter of the incompetent. If they don't have enough sense to realize that terrorism is growing because they aren't doing anything to stop it other than passing resolution after resolution because they can't do anything else because their ranks are filled with terrorists in the making.
I don't know if Bush is unintelligent. I'm willing to allow that he might be a fairly bright man. But, as he said himself during his campaign, he's not much for studying policy or history. This willful ignorance has caused a lot of problems. Remember when he accidentally changed our Taiwan policy with a poor choice of words in a speech, leaving the rest of his administration to backpedal furiously and try to explain away his remarks? Remember when he declared we were on a "crusade"? He just doesn't have any desire to understand the important but subtle parts of his job.
Not to forget his remarks about gays being "sinners" and how we should not judge them blah blah blah.
I don't think theat the world necessarily forgave Clinton for being an adulterer. I think it's more that the world recognizes that a man can be a philanderer, but still be a good leader, whereas a man who chooses not to read books about policy and history and then chooses to try and make both is, well, if not stupid, then plainly ignorant. The world did have a lot of sympathy for the Us after 9/11,. bruce. You don't get Arafat giving blood for the unfortunate every day; nor is it an everyday occurence for the Palace to summon a foreign country's Ambassador and play their national anthem at the Changing of the Palace Guard. It took the Palace a week to lower the Royal standard at Buckingham Palace to show respect for Diana after she died, for Christ's sake, even though the public had been demanding it for a week. I'd say the fact they changed the anthem spontaneously and with no hint of a request from the US authorities shows enormous sensititivy to America's sorrow. Most people in Britain today still feel that way, even Bush has gone a long way to eroding that sympathy because of his actions over Iraq, steel sanctions, the environment, etc. - though of course there will always be that hardcore of Anti-Americans, just as there will unforunately always be a hard core of anti-Semites.
Re #38, Umm ... I hate to start the debate all over again. But the so called *coalition* has backtracked on the WMD issue. Going from WMDs to programme for WMD development. Also, a clear lack of evidence linking terrorism and Saddam Hussein. Now the US/British administration is trumpeting the democracy item. Both Bush and Blair publicly lied about the threats and now are hiding behind their intelligence services by making the intelligence community the scapegoat. The UN definitely isn't a perfect organisation. However, the US isn't helping the situation by undermining it. The US uses the UN when it needs it and throws it in the dustbin when it doesn't. So much for multi-laterism. As for US's concern for terrorism, we have been facing terrorism for almost two decades now. US support has only been on paper. Infact, the US is now actively funding and arming the Pakistanis. As for repressive dictators, the US doesn't have any trouble dealing with dictators in Saudi, Oman, Pakistan, Egypt, UAE, Jordan?? While these dictators violently suppress political opponents and violate human rights they are friendly to the US. As against this, Saddam Hussein didn't favour the US. Why these double-standards?? The US even used its veto in the UN to block a resolution condemning Saddam's use of chemical weapons to slaughter Kurds in the late 80s. As for WMDs, it was interesting to hear an ex-chief of US armed forces point out that the bulk of WMD threat comes from tonnes of unsecured nuclear-grade uranium in Russia and former Soviet states. Many of these states border Europe. http://nuclearno.com/text.asp?4501 An estimated 20 tons of highly enriched uranium currently is stored at such locations in about 40 countries, from Russia and other former Soviet republics to Libya and the Congo Republic. Don't you think this threat dwarfs any alleged WMD *development* programme by Iraq? Iraq under Saddam Hussein was anyday more sane that the Congo republic!! Don't you think so? I am not putting up a theory here of why the US attacked Iraq. All I am saying is do your fact-checking before you trust what your government tells you. Maybe what the US does is demanded by realpolitik. And thats perfectly understandable. But I wish they would atleast get off the high moral ground.
I've long since stopped caring whether or not Bush is incompetent or not. It doesn't really matter to me whether he's just a puppet or an active participant. Either way, the things that he and his administration are doing to this country are very disagreeable to me.
I think that what he is doing is made worse by the fact that he is an incompetent puppet. Why that matters is because it suggests what disagreeable things he will do in the future.
It's also possible grounds for impeachment on the grounds the Constitutionm sets forth, rather than on the fact that a couple Republicans don't like the fact that he's been caught doing somethin g many politicians on both sides are probably at anyway.
Re #42: Lots of interseting stuff in that post, sj2, thanks for entering it. We Americans could use more exposue to how the world views us.
I agree that sj2 makes some good points
Hehe, well!! You can always count on me for bashing the US ;)
I watched the Queen's and Bush's speeches on TV. The queen had several paragraphs on each page she read: Bush had fractions of sentences on each of his, so had many more pages. I guess that without a teleprompter he could not read his text at arm's length. Does he not require glasses at any distance?
I think the important question is, can he read?? ;) Bush has a peculiar style of reading. He reads a sentence or two and then looks at the crowd. The look on his face says I read out something which I don't know means what. Mostly its some cliche upon which the crowd rises and claps. Bush's facial expression changes to that relief at this point. Also, he won't have the priviledge of addressing the British parliament unlike his predecessors. It seems the Blair government developed cold feet on the event after Bush got heckled by a couple of green MPs in the Australian parliament.
he has a learning disability. please try to be understanding of his sad condition.
and yuo flyu planes too?
It is refreshing to see the swell of whining from the liberal bastion of grex worthies. Life is tough living under a Republican president, ain't it. Of course, we were so much better off under Clinton...
I think you will have to define liberal first. Another interesting thing to note was Fox's almost complete lack of coverage of the Anti-Bush protests in London. An estimated 100,000 people turned up for the protests and Fox missed it?
re: 53: Yeah, you probably were. Of course, since Fox never reported it, you probably missed that
The only thing I watch Fox for is Red Wings hockey or Pistons basketball, or the occasional Detroit Lions attempt at football.
Re 53: Yes, things are so much better now that flag-draped coffins are coming back from a foreign land on a regular basis once again.
Re #54: I'm your man: liberal (adj). 1. Possessing or manifesting a free and generous heart; bountiful. 2. Appropriate or fitting for a broad and enlightened mind. 3. Free from narrowness, bigotry, or bondage to authority or creed, as in religion; inclined to democratic or republican ideas, as opposed to monarchical or aristocratic, as in politics; broad, popular, progressive. illiberal (adj.). 1. Not liberal; not generous in giving; parsimonious. 2. Narrow-minded. 3. Lacking breadth of culture; hence, vulgar.
re52 lol, i fly planes about as good as you spell, wino.
is it because they were expecting a million.
Re #58, thanks Rane :) Count me as a liberal.
gotta love politics.
Re #57: Yes, things are better because no one is allowed to film them. Out of sight, out of mind...
hi there, I write from Europe.That visit of GWB to the british islands was very funny, but pay attention, the Queen is furious !! Her garden was destroy by the americans: http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/content_objectid=13652625_method=full_ siteid=106694_headline=-GROUND-FARCE-1-name_page.html They were many things said on radios and papers too. Like that one: much people stressed the fact the visit was kind of historical: first US president to do official visit to the queen ? Well, that's wrong: the president of the USA couldn't come, he was busy and sent Bush instead (ie. Al Gore _is_ the president...:-)) At many places on the internet (at least in german, spanish, french and more...) a word of Oscar Wilde came often: "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." uff! Poor George !!
actually president cheney is running things, kemosabe
From his undisclosed location? (I've always suspected the "undisclosed location" is a cardiac ward in some hospital.)
re 64: Al Gore resigned the presidency...well conceded it.
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well, with a little help from the Supreme Court, after much ado about something... BTW, is there no longer a debate about the possibilities to re-evaluate the electoral system (ie. Electoral college) by changing/amending the constitution ? In Europe we are going to be more and more interested about the inner of US politics.We try to avoid WW3 :)
Right now there doesn't seem to be any political will to change the electoral college. When it comes to Constitutional amendments, generally it's hard to get interest in anything that doesn't ban flag burning or gay marriage.
You have several choices: