Top 77 Bush Administration Quotes

I was in the trade field as White House fellow in the first Bush administration.

Two European nations emerged with credit from the Iraq disaster: France and Germany. Both had the courage to withstand the Bush administration and oppose the U.S.-led invasion.

The last six months of the Bush administration lost four million jobs and the first six months of the Obama administration lost another four million before any initiatives of the president could take action.

From the Bush Administration to the 9-11 Commission, there is an urgent and universally recognized need to change the broken formula through which Homeland Security grant money currently is allocated to our first responders.

It now becomes clear why the Bush Administration has been vigorously opposing congressional hearings. The Bush Administration has been engaged in a conspiracy of silence.

After getting driven into the ground by the policies of the Bush administration, the economy is creeping up. It’s doing that because people are sticking their shoulders to the wheel. Community banks are doing a lot of lending to small businesses and keeping them going.

At the insistence of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed legislation that required the Postal Service to prefund, over a 10-year period, 75 years of future retiree health benefits.

The Bush administration is the most diverse in history because the president fills jobs on the basis of a person’s capabilities and qualifications, not on the color of his or her skin.

The Bush Administration and the Congress have to stop ignoring this crisis in international trade. The longer we ignore it, the more American jobs will move overseas. It’s just that simple.

Since the beginning of the Bush administration when we were attacked, September 11th, we’ve not had any major terrorist attack in this country. We’ve had individual crazy people, of normally, they look more like me than they look like Middle Easterners.

I was fortunate, I guess, to be part of some good fiscal discipline in the Bush administration. The budget I put forward was a balanced budget.

I grew up on EC comic books and ‘Tales From the Crypt,’ which were all loaded with humor, bad jokes, and puns. I can have that kind of fun and make these comic book movies but, at the same time, talk about things I want to talk about – whether it’s consumerism or the Bush administration or war.

Many conservatives were openly angry with the Bush administration over enormous government spending and the chaos in Iraq. I don’t see as much independent thinking on the left, where President Obama is rarely criticized by his acolytes.

During most of the Bush administration, human rights and democracy in Egypt were on the front burner.

Officials in the George W. Bush administration later criticized the cruise missile strikes that were ordered by President Bill Clinton in Afghanistan in 1998 as only ‘pounding sand.’

The Bush Administration claims there is a Social Security crisis only to distract Americans from its serious mismanagement of the federal budget.

The Erdogan government’s first major step outside of the U.S. alliance was during the Bush Administration, when it wouldn’t let Washington use Turkey as a launching ground for U.S. troops entering Iraq in 2003.

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

After spending three or four years interacting with the Bush administration, I realized they were not taking any actions to deal with climate change. So, I decided to give one talk, and then it snowballed into another talk and eventually to even protesting and getting arrested.

I was not a fan of the Bush administration, as I think many of us were not.

Say what you will about Americans, but one thing they are not is passive. The Bush administration may have pushed through the Patriot Act weeks after 11 September, but, as the American public got to grips with how the law was affecting their individual rights, their protests grew loud and angry.

The Bush administration did stop filling the reserve in 2002 when it helped the oil industry. Now they should do it to help the consumer.

The Bush administration also was not straightforward about the intelligence it had, releasing tenuous information that fit its goal of attacking Iraq. I feel deceived.

If the Bush Administration cannot ensure Americans that they will be safe from the flu, how will they protect our country against a possible bio-terror or chemical attack? The American people deserve better.

I’m not apologetic with respect to the policies of the Bush administration. I think we basically got it right.

I don’t believe that the Bush Administration had something to do with September 11th. I do believe that there were a lot of warning signals, but I don’t think they were ignored on purpose – Bush just wanted to go to the ranch for a month.

What happened to the Bush Administration regarding terrorism is that they regarded it as a secondary issue, and associated with Clinton. One of those Clinton issues.

It’s now clear that from the very moment President Bush took office, Iraq was his highest priority as unfinished business from the first Bush Administration. His agenda was clear: find a rationale to get rid of Saddam.

Put simply, the Bush administration policy in the Middle East is continuing to fail.

It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it’s in the Bush Administration.

The issue of what my role in the – in persuading the Bush administration to go to war has been greatly exaggerated.

The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

I would say to my colleague that the misery index, inflation and unemployment, when added together is the lowest it has been in the last series of Presidents, even going back to Jimmy Carter. So I think the Bush administration is doing a good job.

I watched the Bush administration overreact to the Clinton administration, who believed they did too much nation building, sustaining other countries, and that’s why we never put the commitment on Afghanistan and Iraq that should have been in there under their policy leadership.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, let’s all be friends in Washington philosophy.

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.

People don’t realize that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, harder on whistleblowers than the Bush Administration. Part of the reason is that they know that the response will be more muted because the traditional constituency supporting whistleblowers just happen to be the same constituency as Obama’s.

Make no mistake about it! There is an organized movement against organized labor and it’s called the Bush Administration.

The Bush administration actually started out with an open mind towards Iran, by all indications. In fact, early in the administration, the White House tasked the various agencies of government to do an inter-agency review of Iran policy, as it did with Iraq policy and most of the big areas of the world.

The Bush administration staunchly opposed legislation which would preserve overtime pay for all workers.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we’re inching towards a police state.

The Bush administration opened several lines of attack against the rule of law and the integrity of an independent Justice Department. The scandals are so famous that they’ve been reduced to shorthand: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, NSA, Attorneygate.

In 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration decided against bombing Zarqawi’s camp in northern Iraq because it might derail plans to depose Saddam Hussein. By focusing on Zarqawi in his speech at the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell inadvertently spread his fame throughout the Arab world.

Caring for our veterans is the duty of a grateful nation. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and congressional Republicans have not lived up to this duty.

The Bush administration and its ‘we’ll liberate you by invading your countries’ doctrine is thankfully behind us. It is up to us to fight for our rights inside our communities.

The inattention of the Bush administration to the threat from al Qaeda had results. Shortly before 9/11, Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, turned down FBI requests for some 400 additional counterterrorism personnel.

The Bush administration doesn’t particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad.

I urge the Bush Administration to rethink its priorities. We can’t talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities.

Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American President for Africa. But it’s empirically so.

I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn’t understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.

In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in ’08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

Increased funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program is a priority for the Bush Administration, and I am pleased that many families in North Carolina will benefit from this increase.

A Bush Administration will, I believe, enjoy a better relationship with the new Congress, although President-elect Bush will be faced with real challenges in getting along with the Congress.

It is criminal to put our servicemen and women in harm’s way and to put the lives of so many civilians on the line for the misguided frustrations of the Bush administration.

I had no difficulty as Secretary of Defense moving from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

Certainly, the Bush Administration will rely in the first instance on its friends, since it would be both illogical and counterproductive to reward its adversaries.

Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn’t take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.

Did you loathe and detest the Bush administration? If so, you’d probably say its ideas were horrible and their execution worse. Did you not loathe and detest the Bush administration? In that case, you might say its ideas were pretty good – only the execution often left something to be desired.

When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government, the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.

The Bush administration said today there is a lot of support for us to attack Iraq. Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Chevron, they’re all lining up.

For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the ‘Global War on Terror.’

I don’t think I’m an angry person. I think I’m a person who’s angry. I’m angry at the Bush administration; I’m angry at the right wing media. And by that I don’t mean the media is right wing. I mean, there is a part of the media that’s not the mainstream media. That’s Fox, that is ‘The Wall Street Journal’ editorial page.

Because the Bush Administration will set no timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, both chambers of Congress acted to make sure our troops will not be left in Iraq indefinitely.

Once again, we see the Bush administration paying for its failed policies by cutting funds to vital public services and jeopardizing more American jobs.

Before Katrina, you didn’t see criticism of the Bush administration in the media. Here they are, stealing elections, enacting illegal wars, huge crimes against humanity and democracy, and you didn’t even see criticism. It wasn’t until Katrina that people started to come down on them.

I believe the American people spoke loud and clear to the Bush Administration in yesterday’s election that they disapprove of the current direction in the war in Iraq. As a result, the President wasted no time in dumping Secretary Rumsfeld.

At a time when our moral standing in the world has been weakened by a rubber stamp Justice Department that placed the Bush Administration above the law, we now need someone who is objective and independent. And, make no mistake, Eric Holder is independent.

The Bush administration does not desire to see Islam practiced in its pristine purity.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.

I think the recovery hasn’t been stronger because the hole that was dug for President Obama by the Bush administration was far worse than anybody could imagine, first of all.

The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans have failed to bring up comprehensive energy reform or any piece of legislation for that matter that would lower gas prices, opting instead to give massive subsidies to the oil and gas industry.

The first year of the Bush administration we used up all of the surplus and ended up just with the Social Security and Medicare surplus, and each year worse than the year before.

There were not that many people who were willing to come out and stand up for Muslims or stand up against the abuses of the Bush administration. That was post-9/11, so I think there was a lot of fear at the time about exactly what that meant – were they unpatriotic if they stood up?

The overtime rule was frankly diluted in 2004 by a regulation put in place by the Bush administration.