A conversation with Electrum

I, PORTLANDER: In a democratic presidential debate, one of the candidates, Mike Gravel, was asked why he should be trusted to run the country when he went bankrupt himself in the 70s and never paid them back. He replied, "if you want to make judgments about being greedy... I left the Senate no better than when I came in. I left the American credit card companies $90,000 out, and they deserved it."
In a poll after that debate, he was polled as having 0% support. His campaign has raised approximately $500.

ELECTRUM: At least he’s honest about how he feels.

I suppose that's something. So's Bush.

It will be interesting to see if Bush is honest about how he feels after his presidency is done and he is asked to explain his decisions. I think Bush is sneaky with hidden agendas.

No. Bush will never come clean. Bank on it.

I don’t think he could come clean, then he’d have to deal with hypocrisy.

I don't think he'd come clean because he doesn't really realize that he's President. He's like America's Peter the Great. He comes from such an absurdly overprivileged background that he thinks the presidency was given to him as an amusement for eight years. He doesn't have any problem with killing tens of thousands of people or costing trillions of dollars or handing our country to China, because he doesn't have to suffer the consequences of his actions. He's entitled, in his mind, to do anything he wants. He is the only person who matters. Hell, his own dad campaigns against him on a regular basis.

Prior to George Bush Senior’s Presidency he was a diplomat over in China for the US, and when he became president, he lifted the trade embargo with them. Now his son has sold American off to China, and the Chinese government has blue prints to our military ships because we are on “friendly” relations with them now.

When I was in 10th grade debate in 1994, the topic of the year was "should China receive Most Favored Nation status?" There wasn't a single student, after looking at the material, who would answer yes (except for a few kids who heard somewhere that you get better grades by being adversarial but never backed their points). The debate topic became which reason was the biggest reason not to give them MFN. A bunch of high school kids, two years into the Clinton era, had a better understanding of diplomatic consequences than our standing president.