The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency?


See January 2001 - January 2009

5: Bush and Condi's Excellent Gaza Adventure

The Bush administration can be described as a slapstick comedy with an unusually high body count: Picture the Three Stooges and the Keystone Cops duking it out with cruise missiles.

There is no better example of this than Bush and the State Department's wild adventures in the Gaza Strip in 2006. As Vanity Fair's David Rose reported earlier this year, the trouble began when Bush started stamping his feet and throwing a hissy fit about having elections in the Palestinian territories. Essentially, Bush's desire to be seen as a "freedom president" meant forcing various swarthy third-worlders to vote in elections that would presumably result in U.S.-friendly regimes around the world. After Hamas predictably defeated Fatah in the elections, Bush decided he didn't like democracy in the Middle East so much after all, and he had Condi Rice tell Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas that "America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections." Apparently, Condi believed that having an American-backed leader dissolve a democratically elected government would warm the Palestinians' hearts to American aims. Long story short: The U.S. government decides to bolster Fatah by sending them a bunch of arms. Word of these shipments leaks to a Jordanian newspaper. All hell breaks loose; Hamas defeats Fatah and proceeds to use the American-supplied arms it confiscated from Fatah against Israel. The entire ordeal was an amazing illustration of the administration's complete inability to anticipate entirely predictable outcomes. Or as Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, put it: "Since the takeover, we've been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise."

Epic, epic fail.

brilliance , sheer brilliance - how to describe , accurtely minus the actualy fighting the events of that summer.

When I opened this thread I was so utterly excited to finally be able to chronicle my thoughts about the worst W moments... Then I realized that I was being limited to just ten and all the wind went out of my sails!

Absolutely amazing. I cannot help but wonder whether the Republicans will serve another term in office. McCain = Bush so voting out the Bush administration while voting in the McCain administration = the same result, the happy - corrupt - evil family continues.

I pray that the majority of the American public will stop thinking along the lines of religion and propaganda nonsense and vote these criminals out of office. I also hope that once this is done that they get tried for crimes against humanity and be locked up as an example to others.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely and I struggle to see a difference between the current Zimbabwe crisis and the sham which is the Bush administration - the only difference I guess is that the Bush administration served to crush, kill and destroy many lives within and outside of America whereas Mugabe has only done this to his own people so is probably less evil.