The real President visits the UK

[DarkHoarse]

This week sees the state visit of President George W Bush to the UK. Please vote on the question as to whether or not you approve. I have tried to incorporate a bit of light and shade into the way the questions are phrased, as an attempt to reflect the fact that this is a very contentious issue. But please feel free to expand with comments as well as voting.

I don't expect this forum to give us any "don't care" votes, but who knows...?

[Josh Lyman]

my biggest problems with bush is the shady way he got elected , if michael moore is correct in his book " stupid white men " then the wrong man is in the white house !!

[Admin]

No, but not stong enough to protest.

Right office, wrong man. I've always disapproved of George W's presidency because the election results three years ago where, at best, questionable.

The Florida recounts should never have happened. That was the equally the fault of the ballot sheet makers and electorate. But the recounts were not needed because of Bush's brother Jeb being the governor of the state. From the outset, I suspect, Florida was Bush's before the first vote had even been cast.

My problems with his visit:

It's a state visit. State has little significance in reality, but on paper it sounds greater. And Bush just ain't good enough.

Wrong time to visit. Not only does Bush need extra security, the threat of a terrorist attack on our homeland increases. Perhaps nothing will happen, but to an extremist, Bush and Blair together sounds like a real good opportunity. Killing two birds with one stone.

I believe this visit was arranged years ago, even before 9/11. That does not mean it couldn't have been canceled since. I'm sure people on both sides of the Atlantic are adult enough to understand why, and not take it as an insult.

Protesters. I have nothing against protesters so long as they have a valid reason for protesting. Too many people I spoke to who were protesting the Iraq war said they were doing so 'just because...".
Not good enough. Obviously, most protesters now have a good reason: Bush went to war and cocked it up.


Here's what I'm wondering. If you are licenced to carry a firearm in America, is that licence valid here. And if not, have all the security men applied and received for firearm licences, and are they all psychologically capable of using a gun whilst maintaining good judgment?
There's no way I'd want to go near 700 possibly volatile gun carriers. And Jack Straw is correct - if they shoot anyone they face the British legal system.


And, finally, just for fun: the JFK murder anniversary. 40 years on, this'll be a conspiracy theorist's wet dream. With Bush being a Texan, too, a place of death for many, including a President.....

[Flamingo]

Im fine with us keeping allies, but I have problems with the morality of the visit. There are hundreds of FBI agents and secret service agents who will be here carrying guns with license to use them. Should they really be allowed to overpower and overrule the Met and shoot at people who have the right to protest as its their country? And does anybody know the MI5's position in this?

I also agree with mr. President about the whole terrorist attack thing, the violence thats going on in Iraq at the moment and the Saudi Arabia attacks should surely show its not the right time to visit, Al Quaeda s still strong and wants to get at both Blair and Bush so why give them a perfect opportunity?

[spike]

Mr said:

Here's what I'm wondering. If you are licenced to carry a firearm in America, is that licence valid here. And if not, have all the security men applied and received for firearm licences, and are they all psychologically capable of using a gun whilst maintaining good judgment

Some of Bush's guard have been granted immunity from prosecution. That is scary.

BTW, did anyone see Michael Moore on Frank Skinner last week?

Frank: You're quite mean about Bush in your new book.

Moore: Yes.

Frank: This is your chance to apologise.

Moore: No.

I can't unfortunatly go to London due to lack of funds but I am taking part in a virtual march (like the one Martin Sheen endorsed before the war). If you are interested in joining click owos.info/bush_visit/bush.php here.

[Lemon Lyman]

I don't have a problem with state visits as a whole - they make the UK the UK with all the pompt and circumstance - there has been far worst than Bush honoured in that way.

They got the timing completely wrong, is it right for us to see all that money spent and the luxury when there are still young men being killed in Iraq.

Sorry but I don't agree about stopping it because of the increased security threat - we cannot be seen to be giving in to the terriost such as Osma Bin Laden and Saddem Hussen. If anything this is a sight to them that life carried on.

And lets remember without the Americans approx 60 years ago we probabley wouldn't be having this conversation (I know they were late coming but they came eventually)

[DarkHoarse]

The first thing I want to say (because it ties in nicely with Lemon Lyman's final point above) is that to be anti-Bush is certainly not the same as being anti-American or anti-capitalist. Yet that is precisely what many objectors to Bush are accused of in these times. America as a nation and as an idea is pretty much the best hope we've got, and it's lazy and facile to regard the whole country as reflecting its leader, or (as some do) to regard it as universally philistine or hawkish. And, although the jury is still out, capitalism is pretty much the best system we've got as well. But in all my lifetime I have never seen anyone less fit for high office in a democracy than George W Bush.

The background reasons (allegations regarding the election, intellectual flaws) are pretty well documented and I won't go into detail here. What further proves the point is the way in which he appears to have used Sept 11th and transformed the political climate since. We now live in times where to make perfectly valid arguments against the policy of the leader of the free world is to be accused time after depressing time of being (take your pick) anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro-Saddam, pro-dictatorship, an appeaser, a "cheese eating surrender monkey" (the French), etc etc. There is a climate of paranoia which has at times (a satirist couldn't make it up!) threatened the very principles of free speech and democracy which he so often claims to be defending (see, for example, the treatment of the anti-war group the Dixie Chicks in the US).

Now, there was a perfectly valid moral case for going to war against Saddam. A case as strong as that which was accepted, pretty much without protest, 4 years ago when NATO launched air strikes against Milosevic. And surely only the most raving anti-American would argue that it was better he stayed than went. What is truly sickening is that, instead of playing up the moral case he used the two gossamer-thin arguments of the "link to Al-Qaeda" and "WMD". And Blair - who, whatever you think of him politically, is clearly Bush's intellectual superior - stakes his reputation on a "special relationship" with a nation represented by, well, by what?

By, if some (e.g. Moore) are to be believed, business interests who will profit from Bush's war; and, if historians are any guide, the "military industrial complex" which has always profited from American wars. And never before has their agenda seemed so totally in line with that of the incumbent President. Now I certainly don't hold with those extreme conspiracy theorists who reckon Bush allowed Sept 11th to happen in order to push forward this agenda on behalf of big business and oil barons etc, but I do believe he has maximised it as a political/military opportunity, and that this - not a "war on terror" - strikes me as his prime objective. The rhetoric just sells it to the electorate.

That's why the whole thing stinks to me. Not America, it's always been flawed but essentially a force for good. But Bush, and the way he appears to have used an unprecedented atrocity to turn a moral imperative into a political crusade. One in which not to be with us is against us, where everything is black and white, good and evil, us and them. To make a complicated world that simple requires a true... you fill in the blank.

And if the enemy in Vietnam was so hard to defeat partly because they were so hard to find, how the hell do you win a "war on terror" anyway?

I'm not that big a fan of our pomp and circumstance either, but even our Head of State is preferable to the one she will be welcoming.

[spike]

Even polistcal analysts are amazed by how Bush managed to turn the post 11/9 (sorry, 9/11) sympathy for America into the situation that they are in on a world stage now. It takes someone very, very "special" to do that.

I still say that Bush disproves Darwin. But that's just me.

If the Democrats do the right thing and endorse a Dean/Clark slate for the election then said elections are the Dem's to lose.

Yes, you read that right.