No. They do favors for other politicians, do favors for their constituents, and do favors for donors. They are serial toadies. Who they emphasize on that list depends on the dimensions of their constituency, the properties of their constituency, and their degree of exposure.

1. Hunter Biden’s father was never the President and his misbehavior was manifest nearly 20 years ago, when his father was just a member of Congress (and well known clown).

2. George W. Bush was 42 years old when his father was elected President. Not precisely a finished product, but of an age where your established virtues and vices tend to abide. Much the same was true nine years earlier, when his father was merely a retired businessman who had served some time in Congress and in the Nixon-Ford Administration.

3. There have been rumors in the media that Chelsea is unpleasant in office situations. Thus far, her most notable feature has been dilettentishness. She has lots of assets, but has never built a career doing any one thing and has landed at age 39 in the regrettable position of superintending her parents’ main grift. (In a previous era, she’d have been expected to look after her family and sit on the board of this and that).

Americans got here because they are slaves.

Period.

It’s not because of “we can blame politicians”. Politicians mostly obey the Deep State factions. They aren’t as powerful as the media led you to believe.

There are many good things about Bush II, although not the usual surface ones.

The Deep State also used him to shield against 9/11 collusion accusations. Some people actually think Bush Ii did a false flag on 9/11.

But they don’t know as much as I do about the Deep State back then and the connections to 9/11.

They would have gotten up to see what had happened and what they could do about it, if only to serve their own egos.

Bush II’s ego is in a very strange place, given his father’s connections to Skull and Bones as well as the other factions in the Deep State. Having a President as a father can do a number of things on you. Look at Hunter biden and Chelsea. Bush II came out pretty good in comparison.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness: The Madness of Progressive Projection

In sum, had Trump just lost the election, the illegal use of the intelligence agencies by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s administration would have been an insider topic of pride. A now defeated and humiliated Trump would never have been charged with collusion and obstruction during the 2016 campaign. Instead, he would be written off a naïf who never understood leftwing warnings analogous to Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D.-N.Y.) later admonition, that Trump was being “really dumb,” given that, “You take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Or Samantha Power’s postelection smirk, “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”

The only Trump “crime” was in his winning an election he was not supposed to win, which then “pissed” off the wrong people and of course amounted to acting “dumb” with the intelligence agencies. So after the election, prior illegal acts were redefined as legal, and legal ones as illegal.

Even more than that was the enmity between the CIA and the FBI over counterterrorist activities, primarily on the part of the CIA, which failed to notify the FBI that known Al Qaeda terrorists had entered the U.S. I suggest you read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower for more details.

As for President Bush’s failure to jump up from his reading to second graders and run screaming from the room, that is just silly. What did you want him to do, duck into a telephone booth, change into his Superman suit and leap into the sky?

Actually, the banks received bridge loans, which they paid back in full within a few years. Not all of them required these funds to stay afloat (JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo were still sound and both Goldman and Morgan Stanley could still raise capital from private parties).

Remember, if all the top 25 banks and financial institutions (like AIG) had had their equity investors lose their money, there would have been other banks, with other leaders, ready to lend money. Most economists still support the bailout. I don’t, and only did for about a week. For 100 billion $$, up to 10 million people could have gotten up to $10,000 loans from the gov’t, to keep their property. No big recession, maybe. Saving the people and starving the Too Big banks would have been better than saving the banks and letting the people lose their homes

Again, the equity investors of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Bear / Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG did lose their investments. Lehman’s creditors also took large haircuts.

For all the chuffering about a ‘bailout’, the only institutions which actually were bailed out were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the auto industry components. Neither the Federal Reserve nor the Treasury lost money on their other transactions. (AIG was the only one on this list which wasn’t a Democratic Party client, BTW).

I have no clue how you got the idea in your head that a severe recession was avoidable through allowing a wave of bankruptcies.

Garner had a brief turn as director of the Provisional Authority, supposedly to address a humanitarian crisis. When did he ever have some ‘plan’ that wasn’t implemented?

I have no clue whence comes the retrospective enthusiasm for leaving Iraq as a failed state a la Somalia, or what definition you all are using when you say ‘failure’. South Vietnam was a failure. Iraq today is well short of that.

Once Clinton accepted the intelligence wall to NOT allow connecting the dots, Bush is not very responsible for 9/11; actually Clinton & Dems & anti-police / anti-intel folks are more responsible. (Art +1)

There were 16 UN Sec. Council resolutions against Saddam. Once Bush 41 & Powell decide to leave Saddam in power after his invasion of Kuwait and the fast Desert Storm, Iraq was going to be a mess. Plus Carter’s acceptance of ousting of the Shah of Iran by: humanitarian democrats, socialists, communists, and Islamists, which then allowed the most ruthless of these, the Islamists to take over in ’79. (I still recall anti-Shah protests, and my thinking: and what comes after??)
Bush failed to follow Gen. Jay Garner’s plan – go in, take out Saddam, then leave. Instead, he tried to “nation build”, getting “voting democracy” before establishing market capitalism. This is a small fail that Obama avoided when taking out Gaddafi. Nation building was noble/ naïve failure. There were no “good” choices.
(Art +0.5, M +0.5)

The post-Lehmann Brothers fiasco was to protect the rich banksters from losing money after betting so much, included lots of borrowed cash, that house prices would always go up. Bush didn’t stop the boom, but neither did the Dems; in fact, the Dems wanted more gov’t support for even more non-creditworthy folk to buy houses. Dem’s (& Obama!) court victory in 1995 under Clinton, to stop bank lenders from being careful in lending helped set of the house construction boom & the liar’s loans & the excessive increase in house prices and loans on those houses. Bush and especially his ex-Goldman Sachs Treasury Sec. Hank Paulson were accepting millions of over-leveraged homebuyers losing vast portions of their small wealth, but unwilling to accept the millionaire rocket scientist bank investors losing their shirts by the big banks going bankrupt.

Remember, if all the top 25 banks and financial institutions (like AIG) had had their equity investors lose their money, there would have been other banks, with other leaders, ready to lend money. Most economists still support the bailout. I don’t, and only did for about a week. For 100 billion $$, up to 10 million people could have gotten up to $10,000 loans from the gov’t, to keep their property. No big recession, maybe. Saving the people and starving the Too Big banks would have been better than saving the banks and letting the people lose their homes.

The lousy recession after Obama was elected was more his fault, and high taxes and high regulations of the Dems, rather than Bush.
(Art +0.5, M +0.5 )
Total: Art 2, Mike 1

My expert opinion freely offered here is worth at least twice what you paid!

Thanks to Neo for a fine note about Trump not being allowed to be President.
We need good critiques of all Presidents, based more on facts, and consistent criteria. Rule of law, when applied to opinion, means same criteria for judging all.