Slashdot Mirror


George W. Bush Live From Facebook

tekgoblin writes "Facebook has just announced that George W. Bush is going to be present November 29th to answer questions about his new book, Decision Points. The discussion will happen on Facebook Live at 2PM PST."

22 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Question #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    After adding over $1T to the federal deficit to fund a sham war in Iraq that has cost over 4400 American lives (http://antiwar.com/casualties/) and over 100,000 civilian casualties (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) -- how do you sleep at night?

  2. Re:I hope it's moderated by Seriousity · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I would be more interested in seeing him squirm when asked more controversial questions, like questions about how it felt to lie in a coffin with a ribbon tied around his penis during the Skull and Bones initiation ritual (not joking, this is exactly what happens and has been confirmed by multiple sources)

    --
    This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
  3. The Question I'd Put to Him by Greyfox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Was your invasion of Iraq entirely to prove that you could do something your father couldn't, to depose Saddam Hussein?" If the answer to that was in any form affirmative, my follow up would be "At any point after you did so, did you realize that he didn't go that extra 20 miles back in the 90's because he realized what would happen if he did?" That's the one question I'd love to have answered from his administration. I can't imagine that the rest of his administration would put on such a dog and pony show and ruin their own careers to advance such a simplistic goal, but "We need a distraction from the fact that we haven't caught Bin Laden yet," really isn't that much better.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:The Question I'd Put to Him by Ephemeriis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Good question...

      But what makes you think you'd get anything other than a carefully sanitized political answer?

      I mean... It isn't like you're the first one to come up with this question. I've see in, and variations on it, asked countless times. And the answer has always been some vague form of "no".

      Now, I'm not certain that "no" is a lie... It may very well be that he had other motivations. But the vague and political nature of the non-answer always leaves me feeling like there's more to the story.

      I'd love to get a straight answer out of him. Hell, I'd love to get a straight answer out of just about any politician. But I don't think this Facebook interview thing is going to suddenly grant my wishes.

      --
      "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
  4. Re:I hope it's moderated by Kierthos · · Score: 3, Funny

    Exactly. Because the right never does anything loony, like comparing Obama to Hitler.

    --
    Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
  5. Re:I hope it's moderated by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stuff he can be indicted for is already in the mainstream press. He admitted ordering water-boarding of detainees. Water-boarding is inhumane and a form of torture. If the US recognised the authority of the ICC, he'd be in the Hague, not giving Q&A's.

    Yes, I do know I've just paraphrased my sig.

    --
    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  6. No softballs, please. by Renderer+of+Evil · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ask for his opinion about Farmville Subsidies.

  7. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by sco08y · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can't see this over the Internet, but I assume you've got a teabag tied on your ear and a "LISTEN TO ME" sign in your hand.

    Well, I definitely don't; I'm a Buckley conservative. But it's pretty funny to listen to liberals trying to claim the Tea Party is nuts.

    The Tea Party was formed out of anger with Bush on a broad but specific issue: excessive government spending, which was then compounded by Obama's actions. And it is far more bipartisan than establishment liberals care to acknowledge.

    Bush derangement syndrome started when Bush was a candidate; the NAACP ran an ad in 2000 claiming that electing him would be like dragging James Byrd through the streets of Texas. BDS is most prominent among the truther movements, and of course includes execrable characters like Julian Assange.

    There's really nothing to defend about BDS because there aren't really any coherent arguments. It's basically all the things the liberals claim the Tea Party is. I'll take the Tea Partiers, who are merely amiably chaotic, over people the left gets to hang out with any day.

  8. Re:I hope it's moderated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even without recognizing the authority of the ICC, the US has punished users of waterboarding (both Americans and captured foreign opponents) independently, and some of the legal precedent on the subject actually comes from crackdowns on certain rather dodgy police forces which had stumbled upon this most excellent method of closing cases...

    Furthermore Ronald Reagan, practically a saint among the right, was the one who pushed for the US ratification of the UN convention against torture, saying:

    "The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today. The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called 'universal jurisdiction.' Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."

    Even if we have not the slightest interest in giving the ICC the time of day, we have a legal obligation to prosecute torturers we find on our soil, and in some cases to extradite them to the jurisdictions where their crimes took place, assuming extradition agreements are in place.

    We can only assume that Ronald Reagan was actually a soft-on-terror deep-cover liberal...

  9. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everyone I've ever talked to who thinks the Tea Partiers are nuts know absolutely nothing about them and are just parroting the MSM and each other.

    Are there nuts among the Tea Partiers? There are nuts in every political movement, but I'd like to see a comparison of the fringe content of any Tea Party Rally with any similar liberal protest or gathering. In comparison, they are probably very tame.

    BDS is real and amazing exercise in mouth-foaming bigotry and childish petulance coming from people who otherwise claim to be tolerant. There's nothing wrong with disliking President Bush and what he did, even strongly. That's not only your right, but your duty as a concerned citizen if you feel that way.

    What amazes me on a daily basis is the sheer level of mindless, childish, unchecked rage expressed at the man. I would imagine the hooded thugs at Klan rallies would just shakes their heads sadly at one of their own acting the way too many people act regarding President Bush (along with Sarah Palin and a few others targeted by the left for derision and scorn.)

    As strongly as people feel about President Obama, and there is as much _strong_ feelings against him as there ever were for President Bush, I've never heard anyone wish physical harm on him. I've never heard of people in the media fantasizing on the airwaves about his assassination or any of the many other reprehensible things that were directed towards Bush, and seemingly accepted as perfectly reasonable by people I would think are above all that.

    Disagreement, dislike, protest, and harsh criticism are all legitimate and honorable actions to take in politics, but the unbridled hatred I've seen directed against President Bush (or any politician, or any _person_ for that matter) has no place in civilized society.

    --
    You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  10. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sorry but you are way off. Just look at the candidates of the Tea Party. It is not just a minority in the Tea Party that is nuts. They let people like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell represent the party. You don't let yourself represent by a whacko if you are not totally out there too. You cannot argue that the majority is well informed and reasonable if they allow Sarah Palin to be their spokesperson.

  11. Re:I hope it's moderated by imogthe · · Score: 3, Informative

    I beg your pardon? Waterboarding is not torture? I'm sorry, but by any definition you care to mention being exposed to "simulated drowning" is torture. If you read up on the practice you'll find that it's slightly more serious than someone splashing a bit of water on you. For extra points go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding and become enlightened. Yes, it doesn't involve cutting people's hands off, breaking legs, setting fire to their eyeballs or anything of a more graphical nature. However, calling it "not torture" is ignorant at best.

  12. Re:I hope it's moderated by tehcyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny, waterboarding is the only form of "torture" that Marines do to each other on weekends for fun. Not even remotely kidding. I was in the Marines, and I have friends who waterboard each other for fun.

    There are people who eat broken glass, inject their cocks with cocaine and headbutt iron posts for fun, that doesn't mean it is a legitimate treatment for political prisoners.

    --
    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  13. Re:I hope it's moderated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    "During the Spanish-American War, a U.S. soldier, Major Edwin Glenn, was suspended from command for one month and fined $50 for using "the water cure." In his review, the Army judge advocate said the charges constituted "resort to torture with a view to extort a confession." He recommended disapproval because "the United States cannot afford to sanction the addition of torture." Yet President Theodore Roosevelt defended the practice. "The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method: the water cure," he wrote in a 1902 letter. "Nobody was seriously damaged." A Punishable Offense In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. "All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators," writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier. Cases of waterboarding have occurred on U.S. soil, as well. In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions. The sheriff and his deputies were all convicted and sentenced to four years in prison." From here.

    As for it being torture or not, there are a couple of convenient tests(The first is Erich "Mancow" Mueller, talk radio host, attempting to refute critics of waterboarding, the second is Christopher Hitchens writing about his experience with trying it).

    There are certainly even nastier ways of hurting people(which, in part, is why waterboarding is so popular, none of that pesky physical evidence) but it is apparently way less fun than it sounds, especially if it can be repeated over and over, in combination with sleep deprivation, isolation, and the like...

  14. Re:I hope it's moderated by Jawnn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny, waterboarding is the only form of "torture" that Marines do to each other on weekends for fun. Not even remotely kidding. I was in the Marines, and I have friends who waterboard each other for fun.

    I don't know which is more pathetic; your friends' idea of fun, or your complete lack of understanding of what torture really is all about. As others have observed, anything your friends do to you utterly lacks the requisite psychological dynamic that truly qualifies something as torture.

  15. We're supposed to be better than that. by Lilith's+Heart-shape · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've read Musashi, Sun Tzu, and Machiavelli. All of them claim that the end justifies the means. However, we claim as Americans to be better than that. We claim to believe in that every human being possesses certain inalienable rights by virtue of his humanity. We cannot espouse such an ideal while also claiming that in war the end justifies the means. The two are contradictory.

  16. Re:I hope it's moderated by Chelloveck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It isn't torture when the good guys do it to the bad guys. Then it's simply "aggressive intelligence gathering". Come on, have you learned nothing from Jack Bauer?

    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  17. Re:I hope it's moderated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you one of those who have managed to ignore the steady stream of FBI and other professional interrogators who claim that torture is, at best, no more effective that conventional techniques and, at worst, actually directly counterproductive, along with causing you to stoop to your enemy's level?

  18. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by icebraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, it's odd how people feel strongly when someone starts a war which hundreds of thousands of people. What's up with that?

    I mean, I don't especially appreciate any of your last presidents, Obama included, but G.W.B. was more than simply a bad president.

  19. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by machinder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then you're not paying attention. Threats on the president's life have skyrocketed since Obama took office. Right wing politicians fantasize about "second amendment remedies." There was a national day of prayer for his death.

    You're wilfully remaining ignorant if you truly believe that there was more venom directed agains Bush than against Obama.

    I know that Americans tend not to care what the rest of the world thinks about your country, but most of us think your tea partiers are nuts. Here's this wishy-washy, do-little centrist president, and you lot are going on and on about his socialist communist tyranny? And you invite open racists from European nationalist organisations to speak, but then claim the Tea Party isn't racist. Your infrastructure is crumbling because no one has the political will to use tax dollars to fix it, but you're Taxed Enough Already? We all think you're nuts.

  20. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Your problem is that you throw the word "liberal" around way too much as if it was some kind of insult. To begin with, there's nothing in GP's post that even indicates him as a liberal. He could just as well be a libertarian, for example.

    not everyone who disagrees with you is either nuts or evil.

    An advice you should consider applying to yourself.

  21. Re:Cue Bush Derangement Syndrome by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even if Pelosi were a "dingbat", that has nothing to do with how crazy are Palin and O'Donnell. No one can make Palin sound like a Rhodes scholar.

    Meanwhile, "dingbat" Pelosi has successfully managed the House Speaker office for 4 years. You say she's a "dingbat" because you disagree with her. But you just demonstrated that your logic and evaluation skills don't qualify you to accuse someone else of being a dingbat.

    You're just like the rest of the Teabaggers: you exploit an audience's fairness in letting you speak to say anything, no matter how nonsensical, to attack your enemies. Right down to accusing in one sentence your enemies of precisely what you just did yourself in the sentence before it. Nuts and evil.

    --

    --
    make install -not war