Some More News - Some More News - George W. Bush Was A Bad President And Guy

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Hi. Let's look at the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, an eight-year period filled with so many failures that we need two episodes to cover everything. Part Two coming next week!Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Thomas ReimannProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #GeorgeWBush #whatsappstatusOver 2 Million Butts Love TUSHY. Get 10% off TUSHY with the code SMN at https://hellotushy.com/SMNBeat the holiday rush and save up to 40 percent off Christmas bestsellers at http://1800Flowers.com/NEWS. If you’re 21 or older, grab 25% off your first INDACLOUD order plus free shipping with code SMN at http://indacloud.co! For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting http://auraframes.com to get 35 dollars off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames – named #1 by Wirecutter – by using promo code MORENEWS at checkout. Pluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, good friend. My goodness, we've had a lot of life together. I've been doing a lot of reflection here at the end. Of the year, I'm not dying. Well, we're all dying. But anyway, here's a news. Some news, in fact. Remember when shows like this were fun?

What I mean is that making fun of politics specifically used to be kind of fun. It's hard to do puppet jokes about mulls. puppet jokes about multiple political assassinations, but we try. You should like us and subscribe to us because we try. But like, remember George W. Bush? Sure, he was a divisive president,

but he was a fun, folksy guy who was genuinely charming. He was our great big dummy, the guy we all loved to imitate, regardless of whether you were a fan of his politics. It's just a fun voice to do. You know? My news long for the news days when we used to make fun of truthiness and stratagery and other Bush misspeakitudes.

I mean, look at him! Look at his little tie! He used to give us gifts every single day, like an advent calendar of celebrated mediocrity, things like forgetting popular aphorisms in the middle of reciting them, or getting shoes flung at his head for reasons I forget, or being portrayed by Will Ferrell. Yep, those were the days that I'm definitely remembering fully. Adorable Bush, wouldn't hurt a fly. One moment, sorry.

I'm now hearing that he wouldn't hurt an American fly. Heard a lot of things overseas. Oh, oh, right, Katrina, forgot about that. Well, other than, I'm sorry, how many executions when he was governor? Reminder, George W. Bush was a terrible president. Well, then what did he say? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You shut that down today.

Block his text as a red flag. Sorry, I got to go, I'm at work. Hi, I'm here. I'm present. So George Wubba Bush, not to be confused with George Haba Wubba Bush, He's been on my mind lately, and not simply because of Cheney's recent death. Oh, he's waterboarding the Angels now. See, there are a lot of current events that are either reflective of or due to the presidency of GWB,

something that we are about to devote two whole episodes to. And for this first episode, we'd like to simply remind our older audience and educate our younger audience about what things were really like during Bush's time in that roundish office. And no better place to start than his rise to power. Because while it doesn't get mentioned nearly as often as Trump's nepotism, the Bushes are one of the oldest political dynasties in America, similar to the Cokes or the Clintons or the DeLuises. George Hubba Bush was the head of the CIA

and served as Ronald Reagan's vice president until he took over the big chair in 1989. Dubia is Bush Sr.'s oldest son, who conquered the Texas Rangers, and ruled Texas as its governor beginning in 1995. He was then appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court in December of 2000 after a violent mob of Republican operatives halted a recount in Florida,

where his brother Jeb was governor at the time. Really, I bet some of you forgot or didn't know about the violent mob part of that story. It's an absolutely wild moment in history that just does not come up that often at all. More on that later. Like, the general badness and unjust nature of every aspect of his presidency is something we're all aware of. But for some reason, many of the details about W have been cute washed over the years.

I blame Michelle Obama and no one else! Get her! So let's talk about Bush, the Nepo baby, turned governor, turned president in our first little segments. Yes, we're doing segments. Growing a Bush. I love segments. They're like chapters for videos, and I get a little rest to do stuff, like tweet.

So as I foretold, George W. Bush skated through his entire pre-White House life on the strength of his last name. Wobalicious is like a little clone of his dad. He went to Yale, he joined the armed services, he got into the oil industry, and then he ran for public office. And Bush, Sr. pulled more strings for his baby boy than Jepetto. Although he would have tried to waterboard Monstro, and all hell would have broken loose. He likes water, you fools!

Don't do that. Okay, when Bush entered the armed forces, he received a cushy gig in the Texas Air National Guard that allowed him to shadow dodge the Vietnam draft like a breakdancing ninja, the freshest of Shredder's henchmen. Despite scoring a 25% on his aptitude test, which is the lowest possible score you can get without failing, he beat out thousands of other applicants and was sworn in as a pilot the same day. That's what you call a generational talent. After receiving an honorable discharge to go to Harvard Business School, Bush fondled his way into the oil industry during one of its most volatile periods in history.

By the mid-80s, his company's Spectrum 7 was millions in debt. But that green last name of his allowed him to leverage a favorable buyout from a major Dallas-based firm called Harkin, oil, and gas, which figured having a Bush on their board would be attractive for investors. Everything those Bush's touch always seemed to work out. Oh, everything works out for the Bushes specifically. We'll see. Bush would go on to purchase a share of the Texas Rangers,

which put him in half a million dollars in debt, in an early display of the decision-making that would come to both define his presidency and title his memoirs, Dubia sold over $800,000 worth of Harkin shares in order to pay that debt, triggering an insider trading investigation. But that investigation didn't yield anything conclusive, which I'm sure had nothing at all to do with his last name or who his dad was.

Oh, unrelated, but maybe super related, his purchase of the Rangers was facilitated by the previous owner, Eddie Childs, who just so happened to be a family friend of the Bushes. Way too many articles like to point out that Childs used to call Bush young pup, so they were close enough that the man had given him a terminally uncool nickname that everyone knew about. So yeah, nepo baby, which is fine, sometimes. But perhaps there's a difference between forcing your dad out of acting retirement to star in your indie drama and using your powerful political family name to turn a major baseball team into play things

like your Captain Cisco on the holodeck, especially since this was all leading to an even more powerful position. In a Time Magazine interview published in 1989, the year he helped acquire the team and the year his father was sworn into the White House, Bush said that he needed something on his resume if he wanted to be governor

or else people would just assume that his dad had done everything for him. Interesting. Which definitely, it wasn't the case at all with the Rangers. He just committed some, Light insider trading, allegedly, and borrowed money from a bank where he once sat on the board of directors. That was 100% gumption and 0% being shielded by your dad, the president of the United States of America. Pulling yourself up by your silver spoon straps.

Indeed, his ownership of the Rangers and the subsequent construction of a new stadium were both held up as positative contributions Bush had made to the community. But if you noticed, we said he bought a share of the team. Bush was actually a minority stakeholder in the team rather than its owner, and the stadium was constructed with nearly $200 million in taxpayer money. Furthermore, Bush's investment partners were allowed to recoup all their construction expenses by tacking a $1 surcharge onto tickets, so they basically got a stadium for free. What a bailout!

Definitely don't think too hard about that bailout word. It certainly won't come back to haunt us. How much money were the taxpayers allowed to recoup? You may be asking, and shame on you for doing so, you ridiculous person! You know Texans never saw one dime of return on that investment. It all went to the team's incredibly wealthy owners, including the president's son, George W. Bush. That's the guy this video's about it. That's fun. So even though he blatantly got Texas to pay for his governor's resume, Bush was seen as an

energetic and personable disruption to the establishment democratic leadership. It's hard to believe now, but Democrats had previously held both the governorship and the state house, but began losing their popularity in the mid-1990s. So next comes, Bush the governor, the Bushinator, they called him. Both on the campaign trail and after he took office, his primary platform was a tough-on-crime stance that derived downright villainous glee from the idea of punishing criminals. It's like the movie Death Wish as political policy, which is essentially Texas. But it wasn't always. That actually started with Bush. He handed out the fewest

pardons of any governor in the state since the 1940s, and at least one person was executed every two weeks while he was in office. He loved killing people. Equally as much as he loved jailing kids. He eliminated drug treatment programs for inmates, instead vowing to use that money to build more prisons for children. That's not a joke. He specifically ran on building more juvenile detention centers to get these criminals off the streets and openly defied the idea that juvenile offenders should be treated with anything less than the harshest possible punishment. After all, if you rehabilitate them early, who will he get to execute as adults? During his campaign, Bush met with Texas officials to outline his more child jail stance, and in that meeting,

a juvenile probation officer actually pushed back, arguing that these kids need rehabilitation and, God emperor forbid, some compassion. And reportedly, Bush got very angry at this officer. To quote a 1994 article in Texas Monthly, he does not respond well to criticism. Bush then responded with, quote, they'll start changing once they realize they're going to get punished every time they screw up. George W. Bush, the man who has never faced a single consequence, angrily said that in public. This mediocre man skins his dick raw to the idea of jailing children. And so does the state of Texas, apparently, or at least it did in 1995, because Bush beat the incumbent Democrat by almost eight points. Shucks. As governor, Bush did increase

overall funding to public education. But under the condition of adding weird penalties to schools who standardized test scores fell below a required minimum. Stuff like bonuses for administrators were linked to how well their schools were ranking. The result was improved test scores at the predictable expense of actual learning. See, for example, experts found that reading samples on the tests had gotten noticeably easier, with shorter sentences and less complex words. Because, of course, they did that. That's what happens if you make schools hinge their test scores on getting money. They'll simply make the tests easier every time because they have to.

It's almost identical to Bush's all-or-nothing approach with juvenile offenders. It's a punitive measure that completely ignores and devalues the lives of the children in question. Scratch that. It doesn't just devalue them. It assumes they are inherently worthless. How else do you describe a public education bill that it? obliterate schools if their students aren't performing well enough. That leaves so many children behind, my dude, my dude, be a, oh, my dude, my dude, but George, it fundamentally misunderstands

the point of school in the first place, and of course, continues that weird, angry war on education that began with Bush's spiritual Uncle Ronnie and has only grown weirder and angrier with the GOP's new guy. We take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making. In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the Federal Department of Education once and for all. Oh yeah, we got them, folks! After 45 long years, the GOP has defeated education. Once and for all, the nightmare is finally over, and Bush helped.

So to recap, Bush went from a year. to Vietnam Summer Camp, to Harvard Business School, to Oil Tycoon, to Major League Baseball quasi-owner, to Governor of Texas, all through almost no direct action of his own. He's like a wealthy slinky, a precious little slinky on a gilded staircase. And of course, we know his next stop on the Mediocrity Express, the goddamn White House for some reason. Gonna need a new segment to deal with this. Starting to steal.

I'm good. I'm present. So the 2000 election is where the modern GOP started rearing its angry little head, when it began to transition from dog whistling and secretive power consolidation to a Hiborian fighting pit where plausible deniability is meaningless because everybody is wearing the same snake guts. Because yes, as we pointed out in our Reagan videos, this is a long time coming, but Bush Jr. marked a clear evolution, a vital stepping stone on the way to hell. The race between Bush and Al Gore, the incumbent vice president, was extremely close, although Gore had clinched over half a million more actual votes than Bush. It all came down to the state of Florida and its 25 electoral votes, as it too often does, almost as the it's been designed that way. On election night, several major news networks were calling Florida for Gore based on exit

polling. Republican operatives began furiously calling these networks and demanding that they retract their reporting, insisting that the state was still in play. And by the next morning, Florida's secretary of state Catherine Harris had called the state for Bush. Harris, incidentally, was co-chair of Bush's campaign in Florida and was a Republican appointee of Florida governor, Jeb Bush. Bush, W's younger brother.

Jeb was supposed to be recused from any involvement with his brother's presidential campaign, but was later revealed to, of course, be an incredibly active part of his brother's presidential campaign right at the end during the recount that was about to, spoilers, kind of happen. So thanks for that, Jeb, anything you wanna add?

Please clap. No, thanks. So after election night, Bush's victory ultimately narrowed to a margin of just a few hundred votes. That's not even enough signatures for a Snyder cut. Point being, it was close enough to justify asking for a recount. So it was not without good reason when Gore and the Democratic Party successfully sued the state of Florida,

both because of the narrow margin and because of a potential error in the counting machines caused by partially punched ballots, which were called hanging chads, which today is one of the top searches on Steam. There was also some confusion over the physical layout of the ballots in some districts, specifically in our current president's own Palm Beach, which had potentially resulted in thousands of Gore supporters, accidentally casting

their vote for a third-party candidate with zero meaningful support in the state. Of course, at the time, the Republican narrative was that the Democrats were just sore losers, dragging out the outcome of a presidential election for over a month because they couldn't admit they'd lost, which is adorable now that we know what a sore loser really really looks like. But at the time, this messaging worked, and many Americans just accepted that explanation. Democrats had lost and were whining about it. Of course, the flip side of that is this was also the first time that the difference between the popular vote and the electoral vote was discussed so openly on the news, specifically that there could be such a big disparity

between the two. But the recount was stopped before it was finished, and the Supreme Court effectively declared Bush the president. But wait, I hear you asking, why was the recount stopped? Very good question. Because the answer is fucking unreal, or rather, it's painfully real. The recount was stopped

thanks to the human ducktails villain that is Roger Stone, along with a whole bunch of other honkies. But yes, Roger goddamn Stone was there. Also present, future Bush assistant and long-time conservative activist Matt Schlapp, a man whose last name sounds like weird knock-off booze, someone hands you in a hurry.

You see, when the Miami-Dade County canvassing board was doing their hand recount of election ballots, Republicans put out a telephone campaign, encouraging people to go protest the building they were in. The result was this. Republican protesters chased after them, demanding to see the process. Let us in!

Let us in! Play it upson! You got to go. Let us see! More! Boy, that looks familiar for some reason. This became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. Stone and other Republican operatives sought to obstruct the recount

until the deadline to certify the state's electoral votes had passed, which escalated into people shoving and punching their way into this building in order to scream at the people trying to do their jobs. After all, the Republican Party had successfully painted the picture of the recount being done behind closed doors and with no oversight, which was not true. So they worked their followers into a frenzy over false cheating accusations, which resulted in Democrats being physically attacked for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Arrest him! Arrest him! Republicans even accused a Democrat of stealing a ballot. Arrest him! He put in his pocket and I started yelling, this guy's got a ballot. This guy's got a ballot. Police escorted Joe Geller from the building for his own protection over what turned out to be a training ballot. So familiar. Anyway, the canvassing board was forced to stop their recount, specifically citing these riots as the reason. The babies won. All the GOP had to do was convince its supporters that they had to stop the steal, trademark copyright all rights reserved,

and a bunch of fleshy dupes showed up and started punching up the place. Pretty sure there's a word for using violence to obstruct and thwart democratic processes, and that word is terrorism. Kind of feels like maybe that recount deadline could have been adjusted to however long it takes to count all the votes, especially once the violent obstructionist mob entered the picture. But I'm not Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My dad's boss wasn't the president, and neither was my dad or me. So Bush was awarded the presidency by the Supreme Court,

and also by his little brother and his dad. Cool. If all of this sounds a lot like the January 6th riots, that's because it was, just on a smaller scale, a test run, if you will. Had the recount been allowed to continue as ordered, it's entirely possible it would have confirmed

that Bush had indeed won the state of Florida. Although, according to multiple independent analyses looking at the votes that were discounted, Gore probably would have won. But the GOP bullied their way instead through physical violence and aggressive but flimsy legal action. And a lot of those people just happen to be the same freaks who would help unleash the same kind of blind, stupid rage against the free transfer of power just 20 years later. In fact, three people on Bush's legal team that argued to stop recounting the votes, three of them, are now Supreme Court justices. Boy, the times they aren't a change in.

The 2000 election was a dress rehearsal for the GOP's current authoritarianism wow strategy in which they're speed running the Roman Empire by completely skipping bread and circuses. Actually, that's happening next summer. Can't wait. So that brings us to Bush's time as the president. Starting in January of 2001, solid year.

I'm sure it'll be smooth sales for America after this. But to find out what happens next, you're gonna have to watch some ads first. The suspense! Put in your votes now about what you think Bush's next adventure will be. So, bro.

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fuck you then, I guess. Why would you vote for 9-11? Anyway, we were just discussing George W. Bush's rise to political power, leading to his inauguration as president in 2001, a year that did not turn out like the Space Odyssey, with the exception of a couple monoliths turning the human race into crazed animals.

So I guess this is that part, the part where we talk about the stuff. You know the stuff. Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. The war on terror, the torture, and the truthiness. That's the stuff. Never forgot.

Who could forget? Something that gets lost in many discussions of 9-11's effect on America is that Bush initially had an entirely different presidency planned. He famously received news of the attacks while reading a story. story to school children in Sarasota, Florida, presumably to determine how much of their funding to revoke before sending them to prison. This was already meant to be his most taxing event of the day. That's why they scheduled it so early before lunch. Instead, he got 9-11 and that's going to throw anyone off their game.

If you study the clip, you can almost seize and tear yourself log off for the rest of the day. More importantly, you see Dubya, the folksy dummy, completely disappear from his face. for the rest of the time he is in the classroom. But I guess I'm going to say something in Bush's... In Bush... In Bush's defense... ...in Bush's defense. As much as the clip has been mocked, nay, celebrated over the years.

There honestly wasn't much else for him to do at that moment, but wait. Sure, he could have jumped up and ran screaming out of the room like Tom Green abandoning a bit. but it was a day of mass confusion and hysteria. This happened years before social media of any kind. YouTube and Twitter do not exist. Facebook is but a twinkle in the eye of a furiously vibrating prep school in-cell. And Tom from MySpace is still living an impossibly charmed life as a hymbo computer hacker free from the public eye.

Really, look him up. That guy's life is incredible. That's all to say that on September 11th, there was no such thing as second-by-second updates from people on the ground. Information about what exactly had happened, and what was still happening, came out at a trickle that entire morning. Most of us saw the second plane hit live on television because we were watching for updates on what had happened with the first plane. The other huge factor in our collective bewilderment was the fact that America was just not prepared for an attack like this. Terrorism was a low priority.

Most Americans didn't believe it was much of a concern before 9-11. Airport security at that time was designed to be as minimally invasive as possible to get people through the terminal with the least amount of hassle or delay. Twenty years later, we treat airport security like the spaceport in total recall. Seems we may have overcorrected a bit in our grief. Probably only on that one thing, though. Everything else we did was perfect. Point is, Bush actually did okay for the first few days. Sure, all he really had to do is stand there and not poop a demon.

out of his mouth, but he did it. He didn't poop a demon out of his mouth. Great job. Unsurprisingly, he reached the highest approval point of both of his terms in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, with roughly 86% of adult Americans supporting him. We all came together to work through our feelings of fear, rage, and confusion, but we were primarily united by revenge. And luckily for Bush, the guy who loved him.

executing inmates, revenge was something he could do. I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. Yeah, we were pissed off, and not without reason. Of course, if you've seen any gritty revenge movie, you kind of know where it's heading. But at the time, 77% of Americans supported retaliatory military action immediately after the attacks, even if it costs thousands more American lives. In other words, the country was so angry that it was ready to sacrifice more people than it had lost on September 11th

to get revenge for September 11th. It's the death wish policy. And we only got more Bronson when anthrax was mailed to newsrooms and congressional offices around the country just a week later. were under attack. And with the anthrax, it wasn't clear by whom. By that point, Jack Bauer had already waterboarded Scott Ian and the rest of the band to death, so it was anyone's guess. To date, the only person implicated has been a single American research scientist. But at the time, it didn't matter. The United States was invading Afghanistan by October. Not because Afghanistan did 9-11, mind you, or even the Taliban. Specifically, what happened is that a terrorist organization

called al-Qaeda did 9-11. They were largely based in Afghanistan, which was run by the Taliban. Bush demanded they extradite Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and in response, the Taliban asked for evidence that they did 9-11. And in response to that,

we invaded them. Meanwhile, the rest of the country was being inundated with unchecked rumors about the next attack. Everyone my age has a story. I remember being a freshman news dude sitting alone in his dorm room, checking AOL in.

instant messenger for the latest on the gas attack that was definitely going to take place at a major shopping mall on Halloween night. Our head writer saw a SWAT team come to his workplace because someone found a small amount of powder at the Joanne Fabrics next door. The Joanne Fabrics was under terrorist attack. But the lines got blurred as the War on Terror dragged on. After all, terror is a nebulous enemy, and it's hard to fight an enemy you can't even define. And within a short amount of time, the enemy became Iraq. Because while Bush himself didn't plan for any of this, his cabinet included warhawks like Dick Cheney,

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. Don't worry, Paul, death's rigid specter stalks you yet, as it does us all. Bush and his little A team didn't, asshole, the little asshole team, didn't just want revenge against al-Qaeda for 9-11. They were more concerned with future attacks.

originating from other Middle Eastern nations, and they were convinced Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq, including nuclear and chemical weapons. They also tried like hell to implicate Hussein in the 9-11 attacks, which he had nothing to do with. Together, they convinced Congress and the American people that Hussein was an imminent threat to continued life on Earth, but more importantly, in America.

You see, Americans wouldn't be safe until Saddam was wiped out like a misspelled birthday cake. Keep in mind that when I say they were concerned and convinced of these things, I'm doing them a lot of favors. Cheney had already been the Secretary of Defense under Bush's father, so he had a bit of a history with

and interest in Iraq before 9-11. It sure seems like 9-11 was just an excuse to do some stuff he already wanted to do, like calling out of work the same day GTA-6 comes out. Weapons of mass distractions. So yeah, the United States began an unprovoked invasion of Iraq based on suspicions that the country had been building up weapons of mass destruction over the past decade, which turned out to be mostly hearsay and wishful thinking when it wasn't blatant lies.

For example, Bush's little box of angry boy generals were so mad that intelligence reports weren't adding up to the imagined final fight boss encounter that they would use their own communication line to secretly share information that contradicted intelligence agencies and push their own agenda, which would then trickle into the administration's talking points whenever they gave comments on the situation. They literally had their own group chat to circumvent their own intelligence reports, like some kind of Mike Waltz. Bush told the American people that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium and had been amassing a huge stockpile of biological weapons, even though the CIA specifically told him they had no information on the scope of any

such program. Colin Powell testified before the U.N. that the United States had solid intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. But the thing about weapons of mass destruction is they're kind of hard to hide, like a cache of exotic animals in Mo's Tavern. Whether you're looking for nukes or chemical weapons facilities or the infrastructure and resources required to enrich uranium or build a warhead, there shouldn't be this much guesswork involved. Remember, they tagged Saddam for trying to buy uranium, and even that was based on forgeries. He didn't even successfully purchase it, and the CIA flagged his ass based on fake documents. That's like getting arrested for a Photoshop of you buying oregano. Sure, you could play an elaborate shell game if you

weren't under surveillance, but America had been nanny camming Saddam since the early 90s. Again, Cheney had a history there. The CIA probably had pictures of every time he littered, so moving WMD's completely undetected would have been a tall task. Not impossible, mind you, I'm just suggesting that they wouldn't have had to lie so much if the weapons had actually been there. But the speculation and scaremongering were enough, as they usually are. The majority of Americans were convinced not only that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was close to obtaining nuclear weapons, but that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to al-Qaeda and had to been involved in the September 11th attacks. He wasn't. And the U.S. sent troops into Iraq on March 19th,

2003. And Saddam's army quickly collapsed because, of course, it did. The U.S. military is a meat grinder. We funnel nearly a trillion dollars into defense every year. Only $900 billion, pathetic! Get those numbers up. No force in history could withstand a full assault from the most well-funded anti-life engine ever created. That's what Darkside was out looking for when he got his ass kicked by David Thuleas. It's all in the Snyder cut, folks. You gotta just watch it, okay?

But for some presidents, it's not enough to know we have this unbeatable monster. They want to see it kill a bunch of people just to prove to themselves and the world that America is tough. It's bloodthirsty. It's this. So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed

in the water, whether they're on the boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hexeth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little. Like I'm really having a difficult time ginning up sympathy for these guys. Sorry, that was a fun little glimpse into the future and current day. Anyway, by May 1st, Bush was the toughest cowboy of them all, posing on an aircraft carrier with a huge mission-accomplished banner hanging behind him. Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Hmm. Did we, though? So it seems the celebration was a little premature because here we are over 20 years later, and the United States is still kind of sort of invading Iraq. See, one thing that Bush's advisors and others, opposed to the war, kept stressing, was that no thought was being given to the long term. You can't just invade a country, topple its government, and then go home. Well, you can, but it's a bad idea.

Leaving a power vacuum after removing a guy like Saddam Hussein is going to result in worse Saddam Hussein taking control. The version from Hot Shots, Part D, who was part dog. Now, Bush and Cheney and the rest of his hawkish cabinet didn't want to think about any of that, because that's what happens when you put stubborn, incurious, racist, in charge of everything. It doesn't matter if Iraq doesn't have a government. They're not real people over there anyway. The mission accomplished photo op was specifically about silencing those critics

and trying to convince the public we'd just scored a major victory in that everyone would be coming home. As that victory stretched into months and then years and then decades, that mission accomplished banner became more and more embarrassing. But when you tally up all the lives that have been lost as a result of the Iraq war since the day Bush posed in front of that banner, embarrassing, no longer feels like the right word. It might be closer to evil. What a dummy, am I right? Look at him, dodge that.

So fast. What a champ. Hey, fun fact, the guy who threw that shoe was then jailed for nine months and tortured. fun times. Anyway, back in May of 2003, Bush had just declared victory in the Iraq war and was trying to take off and leave his friends in charge. His administration created the coalition provisional authority to serve as Iraq's temporary government. But rather than staffing it with civil servants with relevant governing experience, Bush stuffed the CPA with political loyalists and cronies with no idea what they were doing. At the top of this list,

was Paul Bremer, a businessman with ties to the White House, no governing experience, and absolutely no knowledge of the Middle East. To be F and B, he was a former diplomat and assistant to the, we have to assume, unproblematic, Henry Kaisinger, Henry Kisinger, where that is, okay, as well as a foreign service officer who had been stationed in Afghanistan. But you'd never know that by listening to him speak on his first day. day as Bush's presidential envoy to the CPA, he wondered aloud why U.S. soldiers couldn't just shoot looters. As they drove into the city, Bremer made a decision and promptly announced it to his new staff.

I did one thing that wasn't very smart, which was suggest to the staff meeting that I thought we should shoot the looters, that our military should have authority to shoot the looters, which they did not have at that time. His point was you only needed to shoot a few of them to make that point, and the looting would stop. This wasn't very smart to do because somebody on the staff immediately told the press that I had suggested shooting the looters and we had a problem.

Oh, see, he admits that wasn't very smart to shoot the looters because that would be bad press. That clip is from a frontline episode called Losing Iraq, and there are many, many, many stories around Bremer that resonate with that powerful Doge energy. This new, inexperienced maver shaking things up by boldly suggesting some of the stupidest ideas known to man and then shouting down the seasoned experts trying to tell him otherwise.

So Bremer and the CPA were an unchecked disaster. Of course they were. Within a year of Bush's May 1st victory lap, Iraq exploded with economic chaos and violent insurgency that the provisional government was simply not equipped to handle because it was stuffed full of people who'd voted for Bush rather than people with experience in governing or infrastructure. In order to crush the insurgency, the U.S. used Abu Ghraib, a notorious prison where Saddam Hussein

had carried out weekly executions, not bi-weekly like in Dubbius, Texas, where freedom reigns. Under U.S. control, it became a prison for Iraqi civilians, many of whom were held without charge and were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Within months, the prison was full of thousands of of people, including women and teenagers, because the military would just conduct big sweeps like a bunch of racist shrimp trawlers. Very ice of them. The cruel treatment, hideous torture and inhumane conditions to which detainees were subjected in Abu Ghraib became one of the biggest scandals of Bush's presidency. Specifically, photographs of U.S. service people abusing and humiliating detainees were released to the media, and those images continue to haunt us. They're

referenced in children of man. More importantly, it actually fueled the insurgency in Iraq rather than help get it under control, as the wanton abuse of a civilian population tends to do. By the end of Bremer's brief stint in power, billions of dollars were unaccounted for and corruption was rampant. In stark defiance of Bush's mission accomplished banner, and as a direct result of the CPA, the Iraq war officially dragged on for eight years, killing 4,500 U.S. soldiers, and well over at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians. In reality, the Iraq war hasn't really ever ended. We just stopped calling it that. We have troops there now.

All, or at least partially, because George W. Bush put people in charge who were just as unqualified as him. Oops! Wait, sorry, I mean... Oops. that oopies, I mean oopsies. I'm just like the president. What a lovable war crime to me. Well, not because of war crimes, just because I talk funny, slum blimes. By January 2004, less than a year after convincing the American people that toppling Saddam Hussein's regime was a matter of life and death, the Bush administration admitted to Congress that none of the intelligence

pointing to Iraq's possession of WMD's was accurate. Oh, fudge! The most charitable interpretation of the facts is that they drew irresponsible conclusions from insufficient evidence, but they specifically ignored the evidence they didn't like. They documented that they didn't like it and were choosing to ignore it in favor of dubious information that supported their conclusion. They found alternative facts, if you will. But the why is more complicated and wrapped up in the politics of previous decades. As I said, there's a history here. Bush's A-Hole team of Warhawks, like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were all members of a neo-conservative movement that felt the United States

should use the immense unchecked power it held in the wake of the Cold War to essentially bully the rest of the world into peace. Peace being a relative term here, meaning maximum profit for America. Hussein had suffered a decisive defeat during the Gulf War in the early 90s, but his regime remained intact, and he had rejected U.N. weapons inspectors in the late 90s. So it wasn't like there were no signs Hussein might be up to no good. He was always up to no good. But in the aftermath of 9-11, Bush's cabinet saw Iraq as their proving ground to enforce American dominance. They reasoned that by knocking out Hussein's regime, a democratic nation loyal to the United States would form in its place. And from that foothold,

the entire Middle East would be under America's purview, eventually transforming the entire region into obedient allies. It sounds like imperialism, because it is, but like the Iraq War, we just stopped calling it that. Meanwhile, anyone who didn't share this viewpoint was siloed out of Bush's inner circle, particularly anyone who questioned any of the magical thinking involved with the invasion strategy. For example, it was the official viewpoint of the Bush administration that a pro-American democratic government would naturally arise in Saddam's place and that coalition forces would be welcomed as peacekeepers and liberators. They also firmly rejected the idea that the aftermath of an invasion might be exponentially more costly

than the invasion itself. In other words, the Bush administration literally believe that they could take Saddam out and leave, and that eventually everything else would just kind of figure itself out. They'd be able to start cashing their Middle East 2.0 checks right away. As the alternative facts began to seep into his speeches and into his administration's press releases, Bush and his cabinet essentially goaded Americans into war. So, yeah, mission not really accomplished.

But that photo op was just a prequel, a phantom menace of cruel stupidity, prefacing the creation of an entire alternate reality that would come to define the Republican Party. After all, you can't get in trouble for breaking the vase if you refuse to acknowledge that the vase is broken or indeed was ever in the house, or that vase is a word in the English language. It's toddler politics, amplified by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. When you break it down, it's all the same type of obstruction. From the Brooks Brothers Riot, to the bad intelligence, to the victory photo op, it's all designed to buy time until they no longer feel like they have to explain themselves.

So I guess it worked. Mission accomplished! Despite all the chicanery involved in dooming the country to another forever war that they ostensibly admitted to lying about, Bush Handley won re-election in 2004, easily defeating Senator John Ketchup, the most boring human shape to ever run for office. However, it also didn't help that conservative political action groups cobbled together what was then one of the more despicable political ads in history. Swiftboat Veterans for Truth released a series of attack ads featuring interviews with Vietnam veterans who had served on Swiftboats, as Kerry had, making outrageously insisting.

claims about the senator's war record. Specifically regarding the three Purple Hearts, Silver Star, and Bronze Star he had been awarded for his service. Yes, the party of the man who avoided being sent to fight in Vietnam by scoring a 25% on his pilot's aptitude test was attacking the service record of a decorated veteran, a literal war hero. Now, the Vietnam War draft was fucked up, but I wanted to highlight how very Trump this moment was. a guy who used his money and name to get out of fighting in Vietnam, somehow getting away with talking down to actual veterans about their actual experience there. And everyone just letting him do that.

Of course, it helps when Bush himself gets to have this cake and fuck it too, because while these attack ads are running, he's able to go on TV and denounce them at the same time. That means that ad, every other ad. Absolutely. I don't think we ought to have five, twice. I can't be more plain about it. And I wish, I hope my opponent joins me in saying, condemning these activities of the 527s.

It's the, I think they're bad for the system. Ah, see, it's those damn 527 groups on both sides, you see. Bush would go on to praise Carrie's record, but ultimately stopped short of specifically calling out and condemning these Swiftboat ads. At least not until they stopped airing. By the way, exactly none of the members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had actually actually served on the boats that were under Kerry's command, and their claims were either contradicted by other records and eyewitness accounts or by other statements of their own. But it didn't matter. As we now have learned, swift boating is an extremely viable tactic,

if you want to, say, claim the potential vice president lied about his rank with no substantial evidence. So, yeah, Bush won re-election. And now with 9-11, the invasion and the election all in the rearview mirror, Wobelicious probably thought it was finally going to be smooth sailing. At long last, he'd get to finish the rest of his pre-September 11th itinerary. He was going to incarcerate some middle schoolers and buy the Florida Marlins and call it a term. Just stand where he was told to stand and run out the clock. What more could go wrong? Well, let's do another ad and then find out what more went wrong.

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Bush has been reelected. He's fought the war on terror. He's fought the war on Democrats. And he's probably pretty tired of all the doing stuff. Who knew being president was so hard? And here comes Hurricane Katrina. And listen, this should be a, pardon the pun, breeze for Bush.

After all, Bush had sounded the alarm to provide hurricane relief to the the state of Florida when a trio of storm struck his little brother's kingdom in the months leading up to the 2004 election. He requested three multi-billion dollar aid packages from Congress and was personally on-site to deliver water and ice. Surely he can do that again. Certainly there's no difference between Florida, a state run by his brother that he needed

to win that year's election and New Orleans, a predominantly black city that swings blue, certainly he'll pull through for them. George Bush doesn't care about black people. Kanye was right about that specifically and not so much a lot of other things. Just days before the category three Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Bush received reports from his advisors and FEMA officials that the damage could be catastrophic, particularly if the water levies in New Orleans that were long known to have been at risk were to fail.

He faced timed state officials in Louisiana and Mississippi, Mississippi from his ranch to let them know that the federal government was fully prepared to assist both during and after the storm pledging every resource at his disposal. Time makes liars of us all, but none so quickly as George W. Bush, because when the storm hit and the levees did indeed break, like Led Zeppelin foretold, those resources W. promised never materialized. In fact, disaster recovery for Hurricane Katrina was a humanitarian crisis. that immediately spiraled out of control for the exact same reasons that the CPA in Iraq did. Bush didn't take the problem seriously and put his bozo cronies in charge instead of people with experience.

Why should political loyalty be a factor in managing disaster relief is an excellent question. Well, it was an excellent question before. The guy. Katrina didn't hit New Orleans directly, but the resultant severe flooding and high winds were enough to collapse the city's aging infrastructure. Despite the promise he made to be at the ready

with supplies and assistance, Bush was on a speaking tour through the Southwest during the first hours and days of the storm. As the city was flooding, Bush was doing a photo op at a naval base in San Diego, even though he'd been told the situation was worsening. There are literal storm clouds above him in all of the footage.

Flood waters killed 100 people and forced survivors to clamor to safety. Hold the road, let him pull to the boat. Bush once again decided to carry on with his schedule, flying to San Diego for an event at a Navy base. We had a big debate about whether he should go and speak to the troops in San Diego. We felt like we're still at war.

There's one thing that the president couldn't be criticized doing is speaking with the troops. Oh, sure, got to avoid that criticism by ignoring the deadly hurricane, Eventually, he finally got the message and hopped on Air Force One to fly back to the White House. He did do a flyover of New Orleans to peek out of his window at Americans desperately clinging to their rooftops amid rising water on his way back home. So that's something. No, really, they even took a picture of him doing it like he's looking at lions on safari. We covered a lot

of these details in our episode about FEMA, but the gist of it is that the agencies in charge of rescue, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief had just undergone a massive restructuring under the Homeland Security Act, which had shuffled FEMA under the umbrella of the newly established Department of Homeland Security for some reason. This left the agency with an unclear chain of command or procedure within the department, resulting in delays to critical supplies and assistance. Not that it helped much once that leader emerged, Michael Brown had been appointed the head of FEMA a year earlier after serving as the agency's general counsel and briefly working as an assistant city manager in a suburb of Oklahoma City. And he was almost cartoonishly bad at his job. No,

really, a fox in a farmer's disguise would be offended at how boldly unfit he was for his position. As we mentioned in our FEMA episode, his biggest experience with authority was as the supervisor to horse judges. A horse judge judge, judge. He heard. he is telling Paula Zahn at CNN, the federal government had no idea thousands of evacuees had been stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center for days without food or water. And I'll tell you, you just learned that the folks at the convention center didn't have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off?

Paula, the federal government did not even know about the Convention Center people until today. Oh, listen to him. talking down to that reporter about how big of an idiot he is. Here he is repeating that claim while Ted Cople tries to get him to say whether 5,000 or 15,000 people are stuck there needing aid. It's either 5,000 or 15,000. Do you know? Actually, I have sent General Honorary of the First Army to find out exactly the truth of what's down there, because we first learned at the convention center, we being the federal government today. And that he says the number is around. 25,000.

Okay, so it sounds as though the mayor who said 15 to 25,000 was closer in touch. Wild how TV used to look just like that. All pixelated in junk? Perfectly preserved. Anyway, all of these journalists should just be grateful they got the interview in the first place, okay? You can't be looking a gift horse judge judge in the mouth. Brown's petulant anger at being confronted with his own inexcusable ignorance is nascent Trumpism on display. Also, he was lying.

by the way. The news was already reporting on the people stranded. Also, also, leaked emails later revealed frantic messages from one of the only FEMA employees on the ground in New Orleans that was alerting Brown to the dire situation at the Superdome and that many people were near death. I'm actually going to quote some of this email because it's severely messed up. Quote, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water and hundreds still being rescued from homes and direct quote, estimates are many will die within hours. Brown responded to that email about all the people who are going to die within hours with two sentences. Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak? New department, who dis? Stacks of other

emails that didn't receive responses reveal that Brown didn't bother to make any tweaks to increase food or supplies from FEMA. Even as officials told him, Mississippi was only receiving 60 trucks of ice and 26 trucks of water instead of the 450 trucks of each that they required. He was even warned that inadequate supplies could lead to riots, which of course they did. Now, in the interest of the fair and balance sharing of blame, Katrina was a disaster on every possible level. Local and State entities dropped the ball into the sewer. Evacuation should have been conducted much sooner than they had been, and the infrastructure in New Orleans in particular was badly in need of repair and reinforcement. But again, the guy responsible for it all, the person the president

of the United States had placed in charge of handling disaster relief efforts in just this kind of situation was an obvious boob who seemed irritated that whatever it was he was supposed to be doing hadn't already been done for him. That's the George W. Bush way. That's the Donald J. Trump way. That's the American way. And I want to thank you all for... And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.

The FEMA director's working 24. Please clap. Brownie did an even hecker of a job by resigning 10 days after that, by the way. Oh, also, it was all pretty dang racist. Desperate people on the ground grabbing what they needed because Brownie hadn't tuned in to CNN to see that they needed supplies that day, were frequently referred to by the media

as finding supplies if they were white and looting if they were black. And the Bush administration was frothing at the mouth to send in some troops to combat those desperate, starving and actively drowning American citizens. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco told the country in a press conference that her national guardsmen were locked and loaded

and ready to shoot looters. saying, quote, these troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will. Shoot looters? What do you think this is? Iraq? In response, unofficial majority white militias made of civilians and police

began to form in order to defend property against violence and looters, the reports of which were being way overblown by the media. Gunshots fired into the air. air to signal rescuers, got reported as ungrateful hooligans opening fire on rescue helicopters. Career fabulous war profiteer and future homicide victim Chris Kyle bragged on the news about sniping no less than 30 looters from his perch atop to Superdome, a fucked up thing to want to brag about, and a claim that was also debunked as total and absolute horrid shit by officials on the ground. Two unarmed people were shot dead by one of these roving gangs for alleged looting.

I'm sorry, wait, correction. Cops. The roving gang was cops. One of the victims was developmentally disabled and was shot in the back and stomped on by the brave militia members. I'm sorry, cops as he died. In another infamous incident, a man named Henry Glover was searching a strip mall for supplies for his infant child when he was shot to death by five police officers who then burned Glover's car with his body inside.

Guess how many of those cops went to jail for the actual killing? Are you guessing? Zero. Exactly one cop received a jail sentence and that was specifically for destroying Glover's body, which was apparently more illegal than his actual murder. Boy, why does all of this sound so familiar? As I've always said, time is a flat circle.

Classic Cody line. I invented that. Overall, the bungled half attempt at crisis management took the greatest toll on black residents and nearly half of all those who had died were older than age 74. Despite all this, Bush's first stop in the Gulf Coast after Katrina hit

was a predominantly white Republican district. The predominantly black areas, which had been the hardest hit, were not a priority for him whatsoever. Not like Florida had been a year prior, where FEMA's response had been quick and thorough. So, Bush normalized, placing his idiot friends in charge of extremely important operations, denying objective reality when it was inconvenient, and awarding disaster relief based on political loyalty. He wanted nothing more than to not have to do anything at all, and he still gave that his best shot.

But stuff just kept happening as it has an annoying way of doing when you're the leader of an entire country. And so this whole video, everything you've remembered or learned so far, is all leading to a conclusion that I really need the young people to retain. Here it is, our final segment.

George W. Bush is an asshole. He's an asshole. A bad president and bad person. If you're young and nostalgic for the innocent days of the 2000s, don't be. It sucked. Except for seeing Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man in theaters, it sucked. Rubba Dubia's everlasting image is that of a gentle dummy. But he had objectively one of the worst presidencies of the modern era

and was in charge of several high-profile blunders that cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And then some. Next week, we'll be doing a part two, talking about the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, and spoilers, it's bad, it's Reagan bad, but for this episode, it needs to be stressed that for all the depictions of Bush as this bumbling fool, his actions were that of an angry and mean man, a Trump type. Like, why didn't more of the parodies focus on his contempt for governing?

Remember when he campaigned on building more juvenile detention centers, claiming that the problem with juvenile offenders, is it they've had it too easy, or when he tried to reshape public education to strip resources from students who don't score well on standardized tests? Why didn't more political cartoons focus on his deliberate intentional cruelty to children? Children have a specific race and socioeconomic standing. Instead of portraying Dubya as an amusing dummy, why didn't SNL begin with the cold open of Will Ferrell, leading kids on a tour of the White House, and shoving hummus up the rectums of the ones who get his questions wrong.

Clooney would have hosted that episode, and yes, that was a method of torture we did, by the way, which we will talk more about in the next episode. George W. Bush was a bad man. No, you don't want to have a beer with him. I mean, he famously quit drinking for one, but more importantly, that's not at all what he's like. Even the Bush's a dummy attacks from the left

usually portrayed him as foxy, endearing even. Assault of the Earth, God. you could have a chat with at a barbecue. And maybe you could. If you have enough money, George W. Bush is a cold, cruel, angry elitist who cannot abide criticism and has never attempted to hide his contempt for governing

and, by extension, the American people. He's an asshole, a deeply unlikable man who is almost identical to Trump, down to the love of golf. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Thank you.

Now watch his drive. Oh, he's so funny though! And that lovable goof portrayal helped him get by. He got a Bush impersonator to speak at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. He was never angry about it. So, no, George W. Bush is not a cute old man who paints pictures of his dog and weird portraits of himself in the shower. He's a cruel aging millionaire, a retired inquisitorial torturer, and a child-hating former statesman. Who paints pictures of himself in the shower.

shower. But who doesn't? I mean, I've made six shower paintings. They're all terrible. Covered in water. Can't keep the paint on there at all, really. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Anyway, Cliffhanger! Here's some... Not yet. Previously on some more news. It's the end of the episode? Well, next time I don't give a preview.

I just say... Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to it or watch it on YouTube twice a week on this channel. You can listen to this show. It's a podcast.

Some more news on the podcast place. We got merch in a merch store. You can buy it. It's up on the screen. And this is blank. But, and so is my mind. Bye. Bye.

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