Petition Gets University Officials To Reconsider Giving Bush A Humanitarian Award

[alp227]

This is from Addicting Info, not The Onion!

When you think back on George W. Bush’s presidency, “humanitarian” is probably not the first word that comes to mind. After all, the man was the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths, including almost 5,000 American troops. His failure to pay attention to his daily briefs and other intel quite possibly allowed 9/11 to happen. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other sites was anything but humanitarian. His approval rating as he left office was the lowest of any sitting president at 25 percent.

Nevertheless, officials at the University of Denver decided that Bush deserved a humanitarian award for “improving the human condition.” Your reaction was pretty much the same as a substantial group of students, faculty and alumni of the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. They spoke out in an online petition:

“Former President George W. Bush left behind a legacy of human rights abuses, including the torture of detainees in extraterritorial jails, preemptive war, domestic surveillance programs and other egregious actions that deleteriously impact the human condition. As students, alumni, faculty, and supporters of the Josef Korbel School and the University of Denver, we urge you to choose an alternative recipient of the 2013 ‘Improving the Human Condition Award’ who better represents a humanitarian spirit, a commitment to human rights and human dignity, and whose contributions and leadership have truly resulted in positive change.”

[NV Whino]

1. Good god!

The stupid just gets worse.

[dkf]

2. Lol. It's amazing how blind some can be.

[marions ghost]

3. Dubya a humanitarian

that he was even considered for such an award by a university is alarming. Let him build his own monuments and give himself awards like tyrants always have. The scumbag deserves nothing but derision.

Good job, objectors.

[xocet]

10. That school is Condoleezza Rice's alma mater...

Summer 2010
University of Denver Magazine

Facing Forward, Looking Back
Alumna Condoleezza Rice opens up about DU, 9/11, the George Bush legacy and more.
By: Tamara Chapman

As the nation’s 66th secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice (BA ’74, PhD ’81) logged more than a million miles and visited 85 countries. By the time she left her post in January 2009, she had confronted everything from the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem to the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.

...

DU: There are critics and historians today who say the Bush administration will be ranked as one of the worst in history. How do you feel about that?

Rice: I’d say they’re not very good historians if they’re making those judgments now. I think about all the times that today’s headlines and history’s judgment didn’t turn out to be the same. In fact, I kept four portraits of secretaries of state near me: Thomas Jefferson, although to my mind he’s a little bit overrated as a founding father. Alexander Hamilton is my favorite founding father. I kept George Marshall, certainly the greatest secretary of state. But I also kept Dean Acheson. When Dean Acheson left office, people talked about who lost China. Now Dean Acheson is known as the father of NATO and he laid the foundation for victory in the Cold War, in which I was lucky enough to participate in 1990 and 1991. And I kept William Seward. He bought Alaska, and at the time it was Seward’s Folly and Seward’s Icebox. I think we’re all glad now that William Seward bought Alaska from the tsar of Russia—for $7 million by the way.

So I give no credence to any historian who is ready to make those judgments now. They ought to read their history and realize that it takes a long time, especially for consequential events, to play out the string. History has a long arc, not a short one, and if, in fact, the Middle East is a place that, instead of Saddam Hussein, finally has an Arab democracy in Iraq, that will be a fundamentally different Middle East than we found. If, in fact, al-Qaida is defeated, that will be a fundamentally different situation than we found. And if the president’s efforts to deal with the scourge of AIDS and malaria and poverty in Africa, something for which he is fondly remembered on the continent, if there are fewer orphans as a result—there are currently 2 million people under treatment with antiretrovirals; there were 50,000 when we started—history will judge our administration well.

...

http://blogs.du.edu/today/magazine/facing-forward-looking-back

[marions ghost]

11. THAT explains it

thanks for the info.

[xocet]

16. You're welcome. n/t

[HiPointDem]

20. and named after madeline albright's father, who mentored rice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Korbel

it's a cozy little world.

check out the family tree:

guggenheims (mining), mccormicks (manufacturing, publishing, & other misc), pattersons (publishing), medills (publishing), hannas (politics)....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Medill_Patterson_Albright#Family_tree

[ForeignandDomestic]

4. You must...

You must have to have blood on your hands to get Humanitarian and Nobel Peace awards these days.

[Mr. David]

5. U of Denver should be ashamed of thinking of giving Bush anything.

But it is heavily Republican influenced, so I'm not surprised.

But glad that DU (Yes, it's also University of Denver's shortened name) has changed its mind.

[orbitalman]

6. I have to wonder what kind of people...

in charge of educating our students would pull such a stunt. They are in the wrong business and need to be removed.

[The Wielding Truth]

7. And as the Katrina victims were dying, he partied. Humane? H..., NO!

[AtomicKitten]

8. Katrina DEFINITELY cancels out any

good works he did on AIDS in Africa.

His response or lack thereof to Katrina was disgraceful.

[Dawson Leery]

9. The University of Denver is not a place to attend school.

[HiPointDem]

21. ?

[SeattleVet]

12. He certainly deserves it, but only if...

you define 'humanitarian' as having the same connotation as 'vegetarian'.

[ctsnowman]

13. What

a freaking joke.

[locks]

14. Denver Post on University of Denver

Thanks for the post. Sunday's Denver Post has a diatribe of an editorial written by Vincent Carroll against the "left-leaning college faculty intent on proclaiming their moral superiority." It is not difficult to have moral superiority over the Bush administration. Vincent Carroll, long-time columnist, was recently appointed Denver Post editorial page editor. Lots of complaints about the appointment but he wrote that he would not turn the editorial pages to the hard right. Since he's always written from that direction we doubted that he could tell the truth. Today there are two letters both decrying DU for the disgraceful way it is treating Bush, none in defense of the students and faculty protesting this stupid decision to honor Bush for "improving the human condition."

Both letters praise Bush for his work in Africa against AIDS. We can all agree on that but why not mention only that action, which is about .0001% of his presidency, if you insist on having him raise money for your university. I am sick of the rebranding of figures like Bush, Reagan, and Cheney by the media and the rewriting of history by some of our finest universities who get most of their money from billionaire barons who want to name their buildings and departments.

[LiberalAndProud]

15. It's a mixed bag, isn't it?

Kurdish Iraqis might well support this award, as would "more than 5.1 million men, women and children worldwide." (PEPFAR)
http://www.pepfar.gov/funding/results/index.htm

As much as I despised Bush while he was President and opposed his unholy crusade in the ME, he managed to do at least one thing right.

[Spirochete]

17. Oh, for fucks sake!

Let's give him the Nobel Peace Prize too, while we're at it...

[blkmusclmachine]

18. Next thing you know, Dubya will get a Nobel Peace Prize.

I understand they're giving them away nowadays.

[Cleita]

19. For what? For killing what he and his ilk considered disposable people? n/t

[jmowreader]

22. It's an award for doing humanitarian things...

and not an award for demonstrating what not to do.

[Initech]

23. Yeah that would be like giving Alex Rodriguez an award for being drug free.

[chknltl]

24. He deserves this award: