This is a follow-up from the post below re. bush's man-date and his shakey logic that gave him the idea that he and his butt-buddies were "pardoned" by his reelection.

Juan Cole says:

Bush doesn't seem to know the difference between getting a mandate to lead and getting a mandate to continue failed policies. Those Americans who voted for Bush often did so, according to polls, despite worries that Iraq wasn't going well. They didn't put him back in to just keep on making the same stupid mistakes. They put him back in in hopes that he had been seasoned by the errors and was committed enough to the project to see it through properly.

As I said in a letter of response to people on the other side of the political spectrum who were having there fun after the bush victory in November, "you have not earned any mandate but a request for change!"

Here is that entire letter (minus any personal stuff), I thought it was well written WRT everything else I write:

On now to the victory of your president, I do not believe this a victory. I never believed that John Kerry was a great candidate and only supported him as the lesser of two evils. Although I have much more respect for John Kerry than I have for your president or any of his women or men, I only supported him as to have a wider ledge to stand on. My goal is to marginalize the obviously greedy and neoimperialistic actions of the Republican party supported and enabled by those of you who respond to fear mongering, who crave power and dominance and who embrace the belief in a supreme deity and the words of a fictional book. Have no illusions, another four years of your president offers a clear target and will defiantly generate plenty of political ammunition to use against him as he inherits his own presidency. He no longer has the tragic events of September 11th or the previous presidency of Bill Clinton to use as a scapegoat. Your president now gets to lose the occupation of Iraq on his own, to speed-up his pending environmental disaster and to take on the responsibility of his enormous deficit. To be blunt, this is a war. Much like the war on drugs or your war on terror, it is a war that is perpetual and it cannot be won and it will not end. It is a war that will not be limited to or settled in cycles of democracy or in political discourse.



Today your president made this statement in one of his hilarious attempts at speaking; “[n]ow that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule.” My response is this; you do not have the will of the people but a divided nation. You won, yet you had the largest number of people vote against an incumbent president ever. You won, but you have a positive approval rating of less than half of the country. In your narrow victory you earned 54% of the electoral votes which is the lowest of any incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson in the beginning of the 20th Century. Your margin of victory was significantly less that 4 million votes, which is the lowest margin of victory for any incumbent president since Harry Truman and then only 50 million people voted. In the same speech, mentioned above, you spoke of a mandate, you have not earned any mandate but a request for change.


Best regards from the reality-based community,



Geoff D. Miller
College of Charleston, SC
Student of Physics and Political Science

I hate this man!

Mr Bush said there was no need to hold any of his officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgements in pre-war planning or managing the aftermath.

In an interview in Sunday's Washington Post he said that his re-election was an "accountability moment".

The publication of the interview comes as Mr Bush prepares for the start of his second term on Thursday.

The newspaper asked Mr Bush why no-one had been held responsible for wrong information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or mistakes made after the US-led war.

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election," he replied.

"And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and they chose me, for which I'm grateful."