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Archive for the 'George W. Bush' Category


Summary: Psychological assessments of U.S. presidents and presidential candidates, world leaders, and rogue or terrorist leaders conducted at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics.


Nov 8th, 2010

Summary: Matt Lauer interviews former President George W. Bush on NBC’s “Today” show to discuss Bush’s memoir, “Decision Points” … Psychological profile of George W. Bush by Aubrey Immelman of the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 8, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that a suicide bomber had blown himself up in a market in northwest Pakistan killing 12 people, including the mayor, who had turned against the Taliban; and that two U.S. pilots had been killed in a helicopter crash in Iraq.


Dec 14th, 2009

Summary: In the latest development in a political controversy that stemmed from the Bush White House’s failure to install a properly working electronic record-keeping system, computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush. The Bush White House e-mail archiving problems became publicly known in 2006, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed the irregularities during his criminal investigation of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on December 14, 2008, Aubrey Immelman reported that a federal draft report depicted the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq as a $100 billion failure doomed by bureaucratic infighting, ignorance of basic elements of Iraqi society, and waves of violence. The report, “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer.


Nov 27th, 2009

Summary: The Bush administration was “hell bent” on the 2003 military invasion of Iraq and actively undermined efforts by Britain to win international authorization for the war, Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, testified before an inquiry into the Iraq war. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 27, 2008, Aubrey Immelman reported that a suicide car bomber targeting an American convoy exploded about 200 yards outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing at least four Afghan bystanders, while in Iraq, the country’s parliament approved a security pact with the United States that allowed American troops to stay in the country for three more years.


Aug 21st, 2009

Summary: Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge claims in a new book that he was pressured by other members of President George W. Bush’s Cabinet to raise the nation’s terror alert level just before the 2004 presidential election. … One-year retrospective: On the 38th day of his campaign against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann for the Republican nomination as House of Representatives candidate in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman announced the August 22 kick-off of a second walking tour, this time a 50-mile campaign swing from Foley in the east to Paynesville on the western boundary of the Sixth Congressional District. … In line with his campaign focus on national security, he also featured a Newsweek interview with Gen. David Petraeus, in which the former U.S. commander in Iraq explained why vigilance was still needed in Iraq and why Afghanistan in some ways poses an even greater security dilemma for the United States.


Jun 25th, 2009

Summary: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused U.S. President Barack Obama of behaving like his White House predecessor George W. Bush and called on him to apologize for what he called U.S. interference following Iran’s elections. In terms of personal qualities, what are the similarities and differences between Barack Obama and George W. Bush? And how, specifically, do they differ from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Link to their psychological profiles, developed at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics.


May 22nd, 2009

Summary: When former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on national security delivered May 21, 2009, lambasted the change in security policy under President Barack Obama, he was not attacking the Obama administration so much as the Bush administration itself — considering he was essentially repeating many of the same arguments he had made unsuccessfully within the Bush White House as policy decisions increasingly went the other way in President Bush’s second term.


Feb 20th, 2009

Summary: Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, said at his trial that President Bush’s smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq had made him think of “the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women,” and enraged him. Al-Zeidi added: “After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction … I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him.”



Historians have ranked Abraham Lincoln the best U.S. president and James Buchanan the worst. Former President George W. Bush was ranked 36th out of the 42 men who had been chief executive by the end of 2008, according to a survey conducted by the cable channel C-SPAN.


Jan 19th, 2009

Summary: President George W. Bush presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, with economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly viewing his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges. Specifically, the number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father George H. W. Bush.