Bush is Time's Man of the Year

[Wishfire 2]

I saw this on AOL frontpage.

 

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.ad...219081809990001

 

There was also a poll to see if people agreed with the results. When I looked at it, here where the results...

 

Do you agree with TIME's choice for Person of the Year?

 

No 52%

Yes 48%

 

Total Votes: 20,320

 

I wonder how many of the NO's were people who voted for him, and how many of the YES's were people who didn't?

[cptwright 1]

well cant read it, not an aol member. but i dont dislike him like a lot of people, but i dont think i would go so far as man of the year.

[Wishfire 2]

It didn't occur to me that you had to me an AOL member to see the article, so here it is...

 

(Dec. 19) - Eagles rather than doves nestle in the Oval Office Christmas tree, pinecones the size of footballs are piled around the fireplace, and the President of the United States is pretty close to lounging in Armchair One. He's wearing a blue pinstripe suit, and his shoes are shined bright enough to shave in. He is loose, lively, framing a point with his hands or extending his arm with his fingers up as though he's throwing a big idea gently across the room.

 

"I've had a lot going on, so I haven't been in a very reflective mood," says the man who has just replaced half his Cabinet, dispatched 12,000 more troops into battle, arm wrestled lawmakers over an intelligence bill, held his third economic summit and begun to lay the second-term paving stones on which he will walk off into history. Asked about his re-election, he replies, "I think over the Christmas holidays it'll all sink in."

 

As he says this, George W. Bush is about to set a political record. The first TIME poll since the election has his approval rating at 49 percent. Gallup has it at 53 percent, which doesn't sound bad unless you consider that it's the lowest December rating for a re-elected President in Gallup's history. That is not a great concern, however, since he has run his last race, and it is not a surprise to a President who tends to measure his progress by the enemies he makes.

 

"Sometimes you're defined by your critics," he says. "My presidency is one that has drawn some fire, whether it be at home or around the world. Unfortunately, if you're doing big things, most of the time you're never going to be around to see them [to fruition], whether it be cultural change or spreading democracy in parts of the world where people just don't believe it can happen. I understand that. I don't expect many short-term historians to write nice things about me."

 

Yet even halfway through his presidency, Bush says, he already sees his historic gamble paying off. He watched in satisfaction the inauguration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

 

"I'm not suggesting you're looking at the final chapter in Afghanistan, but the elections were amazing. And if you go back and look at the prognosis about Afghanistan -- whether it be the decision [for the U.S. to invade] in the first place, the 'quagmire,' whether or not the people can even vote -- it's a remarkable experience."

 

Bush views his decision to press for the transformation of Afghanistan and then Iraq -- as opposed to "managing calm in the hopes that there won't be another September 11th, that the Salafist [radical Islamist] movement will somehow wither on the vine, that somehow these killers won't get a weapon of mass destruction" -- as the heart of not just his foreign policy but his victory.

 

"The election was about the use of American influence," he says. "I can remember people trying to shift the debate. I wanted the debate to be on a lot of issues, but I also wanted everybody to clearly understand exactly what my thinking was. The debates and all the noise and all the rhetoric were aimed at making very clear the stakes in this election when it comes to foreign policy."

 

In that respect and throughout the 2004 campaign, Bush was guided by his own definition of a winning formula.

 

"People think during elections, 'What's in it for me?'" says communications director Dan Bartlett, and expanding democracy in Iraq, a place voters were watching smolder on the nightly news, was not high on their list. Yet "every time we'd have a speech and attempt to scale back the liberty section, he would get mad at us," Bartlett says.

 

Sometimes the President would simply take his black Sharpie and write the word freedom between two paragraphs to prompt himself to go into his extended argument for America's efforts to plant the seeds of liberty in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

 

An ordinary politician tells swing voters what they want to hear; Bush invited them to vote for him because he refused to. Ordinary politicians need to be liked; Bush finds the hostility of his critics reassuring. Challengers run as outsiders, promising change; it's an extraordinary politician who tries this while holding the title Leader of the Free World. Ordinary Presidents have made mistakes and then sought to redeem themselves by admitting them; when Bush was told by some fellow Republicans that his fate depended on confessing his errors, he blew them off.

 

For candidates, getting elected is the test that counts. Ronald Reagan did it by keeping things vague: It's Morning in America. Bill Clinton did it by keeping things small, running in peaceful times on school uniforms and V chips. Bush ran big and bold and specific all at the same time, rivaling Reagan in breadth of vision and Clinton in tactical ingenuity. He surpassed both men in winning bigger majorities in Congress and the statehouses. And he did it all while conducting an increasingly unpopular war, with an economy on tiptoes and a public conflicted about many issues but most of all about him.

 

The argument over whether his skill won the race and fueled a realignment of American politics or whether he was the lucky winner of a coin-toss election will last just as long as the debates among historians over whether Dwight Eisenhower had a "hidden-hand strategy" in dealing with political problems, Richard Nixon was at all redeemable and Reagan was an "amiable dunce."

 

Democrats may conclude that they don't need to learn a thing, since 70,000 Ohioans changing their minds would have flipped the outcome and flooded the airwaves with commentary about the flamboyantly failed Bush presidency. It may be that a peculiar chemistry of skills and instincts and circumstances gave Bush his victory in a way no future candidates can copy. But that doesn't mean they won't try.

 

In the meantime, the lessons Bush draws from his victory are the ones that matter most. The man who in 2000 promised to unite and not divide now sounds as though he is prepared to leave as his second-term legacy the Death of Compromise.

 

"I've got the will of the people at my back," he said at the moment of victory. From here on out, bipartisanship means falling in line: "I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals."

 

Whatever spirit of cooperation that survives in his second term may have to be found among his opponents; he has made it clear he's not about to change his mind as he takes on Social Security and the tax code in pursuit of his "ownership society." So unfolds the strange and surprising and high-stakes decade of Bush.

 

For sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality to match his design, for gambling his fortunes -- and ours -- on his faith in the power of leadership, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year.

 

 

12-19-04 08:54 EST

[HRH The KING 0]

Bush is Time's Man of the Year

 

:unsure:

 

Well deserved.

[VaBeachGuy 12]

Time's Man of the Year really doesn't mean anything.

 

Adolph Hitler was Time's Man of the Year, Gorbachov (I don't think that's spelled right) was Man of the Year, Bill Clinton was Man of the Year...

 

It's just the one person that made big news that year, not really a "celebration" of that person.

[HRH The KING 0]

So, are they mocking him by giving him this "award"? :unsure:

[italiangirl 0]

No, it's not mocking him at all.

 

Most consider it an honor.

 

 

 

George W. Bush

 

 

For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year

Edited December 19, 2004 by italiangirl

[VaBeachGuy 12]

So, are they mocking him by giving him this "award"?  :unsure:

290628[/snapback]

 

No, it's not mocking. Hitler was named Man Of The Year in 1934 (I think) which was before any of the horrible things that he is now known for. I think that at that point he had done some good things within Germany itself.

 

I don't really think of it as an "award", it's more just recognition for a newsworthy year.

[Matt 0]

Well you're right VA, Hitler recieved Time's Man of the Year award because at the time (before he revealed his terrible plans for genocide) he was a great leader for is country, he created a huge amount of jobs and a fantastic economy. That's why Adolf Hitler recieved the title.

 

I really don't think Bush deserves it, I truly don't understand why they've given him such a prestigious title.

 

(Just so people don't get confused I'm not endorsing Hitler in any way, I think he really was one of the most evil men in history.)

[Gary Phaserman 0]

I really stopped caring about TIME Magazine's Man of the Year after Last Year. I thought it was big that they named the American Soldier as Man of the Year, but then they turned it into an Anti-Iraq War rant. But, if there is any honor in winning this award, Congrats, Boss.

[sea trooper 0]

Bush is Time's Man of the Year

 

Ha! :unsure:

[WEAREBORG4102 0]

Congratulations Mr. President!!!

[Takara_Soong 4]

Here is the criteria for choosing the Time Person of the Year:

 

TIME's choices for Person of the Year are often controversial. Editors are asked to choose the person or thing that had the greatest impact on the news, for good or ill—guidelines that leave them no choice but to select a newsworthy—not necessarily praiseworthy—cover subject.

 

from Time website

 

The Canadian edition of Time calls it the Newsmaker of the Year which seems a more appropriate title. The following is taken from Time Canada's website and I hope you will read it. It is a fascinating and disturbing story.

 

Newsmaker of the Year: Maher Arar

 

Click For Spoiler

Who is Maher Arar? We all know the basic contours of his story. In 2002, U.S. officials detained the Canadian software engineer at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. They alleged that he was linked to al-Qaeda and secretly deported him to Syria, where he says he was tortured. When Arar was freed more than a year later and the public got a glimpse of him, he seemed to be a likable, hard-working family man caught up in a monstrous international screwup. Was there more? Simultaneously, officials, most of them anonymous, were leaking information and dropping hints suggesting that Arar was a security risk with something to hide.

 

Well, if Arar is a terrorist, he is unlike any other. In contrast to other suspects dispatched to harsh justice, Arar did not vanish into oblivion in his Middle East cell. Nor, after his release, did he recoil from public view. Instead, Arar, who has a modest home in Ottawa, has stepped into the spotlight as a vocal proponent of human rights in Canada, a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11. To this day, it has not been revealed why Arar was detained. And no one has pushed harder to shed light on his case than Arar. “I have nothing to hide,” he said in late 2003. “I want a public inquiry.”

 

Arar got his wish. His perseverance—not to mention the absence of evidence against him—helped prod Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan in January 2004 to create a commission to investigate the matter. There is more at stake than just learning the truth. The commission may come up with a new plan for overseeing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is accused of botching its end of the case. Arar has launched two gutsy lawsuits in 2004 targeting some of the most powerful people on the continent, including U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

 

Whatever the outcome, Arar has forced Canada to rethink how it balances human rights and security concerns. His struggle has revealed troubling details about how Canada’s police and intelligence agencies share information with foreign governments. And his case is a disturbing reminder of America’s outsize role in the world, particularly since 9/11, and has prompted fresh debate on the harsh powers of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act. Before Arar’s situation surfaced, Canadians largely felt that security excesses were a “distant, complicated” problem, says Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International Canada. “It wasn’t until Maher came home that Canadians realized that this is also about us.”

 

For taking on the national-security agencies in two countries and for stepping courageously into the public realm despite the cost to himself and his family, Maher Arar is Time’s Canadian Newsmaker of the Year.

 

Who is Maher Arar? He doesn’t fit the mold of public hero. A man of slight build, unassuming character and average looks, Arar is strident yet soft-spoken. Before his detention at J.F.K., he was an apolitical workaholic who was obsessed only with making ends meet and spending free time with his family. “Engineers by nature are machines,” he says. “They work 9 to 9. They do what they’re told to do.” But it wasn’t a bad life. The Damascus native, now 34, immigrated to Canada with his family in 1987 and became a citizen four years later. By 1997, he was making a decent living in Ottawa amid the city’s high-tech boom. Two years later, while his wife Monia Mazigh was completing a Ph.D. in finance at McGill, Arar took a job at the MathWorks, a Boston-area computer company. In 2001, wanting to be near family and friends, he returned full-time to Ottawa and started a consultancy specializing in wireless technology.

 

That life came to an abrupt end on Sept. 26, 2002, when Arar was pulled aside while passing through J.F.K. after a vacation in Tunisia, where most of his wife’s family lives. He was detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he says U.S. authorities questioned him for 10 days. Then, in the middle of the night, he was put into shackles and spirited away via Jordan to Syria, a country he hadn’t been to in 16 years— despite the fact that he was a naturalized Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport en route to Canada.

 

Arar ended up in a dark, 1-m by 2-m cell he calls the “grave” in the Syrian military intelligence agency’s Palestine branch in Damascus. He was held there without charge for 10 months and 10 days. During his first two weeks, he claims, he was interrogated about people he had known in Canada, sometimes for 18 hours at a time, and tortured. One punishment, he says, was repeated lashings with a 5-cm black metal cable on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips. The mental ordeal was also brutal, he said in November 2003 at one of the most dramatic press conferences ever televised in Canada. “The second and third days were the worst,” he told the world that day. “I could hear other prisoners being tortured, and screaming.” During his first week in prison, he says, he falsely confessed that he had received military training in Afghanistan.

 

Many would have crumbled emotionally under such duress, but Arar hung tough. Finally, almost a year later, on Oct. 5, 2003, the Syrians released him, saying publicly that they considered him “completely innocent.” When Arar made it back to Canada, Amnesty International’s Neve was among those who met him at the airport in Montreal. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind,” Neve declared at the time, “that he has been through a horrific ordeal.”

 

Arar now faced a dilemma: whether or not to go public with his story. He says most members of his family, who grew up in Syria under the oppressive rule of Hafez Assad, advised him to get on with his life and not cause problems for relatives still in Syria. But there was also the opposing pressure of many unnamed sources who were leaking stories to the media alleging that Arar was not the innocent he claimed to be.

 

In the end, Arar says, he decided he had a “responsibility as a Canadian and as a human being to talk about it,” and not just for his own sake. “There are people who are being tortured now as we speak,” he says. “There are people who are being jailed unjustly.” Mazigh, who ran unsuccessfully for the New Democratic Party in the 2004 federal election, says she supports his decision, but it has been a rough period. Going public, she says, led to “total confusion about our feelings, about our relations, about our new life.” Her husband, she says, is “absolutely a different person” from the one she met and married a decade ago. Others close to Arar describe him as distraught, stressed out. Mazigh works full-time at n.d.p. headquarters in Ottawa, while Arar, unable to find a job, stays home most days helping care for their young children. He spends hours each day responding to the various political and legal issues that affect his case, his reputation and the broader cause he has agreed to defend.

 

Canadians have warmed to these media-awkward souls, Arar and Mazigh, partly because they are so typical—a young couple, both professionals with Canadian university degrees, struggling to raise two children. Canada’s Muslims and Arabs, especially those who are from “problem countries” with suspected links to terrorism, can easily identify with them, says Riad Saloojee, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations—Canada. Among Arar’s many supporters, the perception is that what happened to him could happen to almost anyone else. Muslims “live in the shadow of Arar,” Saloojee says. “There has been a loss of confidence in the Canadian government as to its commitment to the citizenship of Canadian Arabs and Muslims.”

 

Arar’s case points to the risks inherent in America’s dominant role in the post-9/11 world. It appears that U.S. officials triggered the entire episode, but they have offered little in the way of explanation and refuse to participate in the Canadian inquiry. Arar may get some answers if his U.S. lawsuit survives its first major challenge—a motion to dismiss the case on technical grounds. If the case moves to the discovery phase, says Steven Watt, one of Arar’s U.S. attorneys, “that should enable us to get our hands on documentation that would definitively show what the U.S. involvement was in his removal to Syria, and the extent of it, as well as that of Canada.”

 

However it turns out, Arar’s crusade—particularly in view of the support given it by Canadians—has already had an impact on how security agencies handle cases like Avar’s. Americans are now more careful about how they process and share sensitive information, in part because they don’t want foreign agencies to stop cooperating with them, says Chris Sands of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. That more cautious attitude helps explain why President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Paul Martin in January worked out a bilateral agreement on deportations. Speaking to reporters in Monterrey, Mexico, at the Special Summit of the Americas, Bush promised the Prime Minister that “there will be prior notification prior to any consideration of deportation. We owe it to the government to be forthcoming and forthright.”

 

But there is room for improvement. University of Toronto history professor Wesley Wark, an authority on Canada’s security issues, expects the Arar commission to recommend a reduced role for the r.c.m.p. in counterterrorism investigations. The Arar case is just one of several forcing the issue. Parliament has begun a mandated review of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act, which gives the r.c.m.p. more latitude in carrying out national-security surveillance. And the Martin government has promised to create a standing parliamentary committee on national-security issues. “We have all these singular and autonomous things going on, and they may well come together and have a certain kind of synergy and impact,” Wark says.

 

At least two cases with eerie similarities to Arar’s could grab headlines in 2005. If the men involved go public with their cases, they may offer evidence to substantiate an emerging theory that Arar’s was hardly an isolated incident and help answer one of Arar’s most pressing questions: Have Canadian law-enforcement officials used foreign agencies to interrogate Canadian citizens? One case involves Toronto resident Ahmad Abou El-Maati, who says he plans to file a lawsuit against Ottawa for reasons that, for the moment, he won’t disclose. Like Arar, El-Maati was of interest to Canadian security agents, ended up in a Damascus prison and believes that Canadian officials cooperated with Syria in his ordeal.

 

As for the Arar inquiry, it is slowly moving forward. So far, most of the “public” proceedings have actually been held behind closed doors. But the commission is challenging government lawyers to make more of the first summary of the deliberations public. While Paul Cavalluzzo, the inquiry’s lead counsel, concedes that there is “an inevitable tension” between the commission and the government, he believes that the inquiry will ultimately shed light on Arar’s situation. “We’re quite satisfied that we are getting to the bottom of this story,” he says. The full story could be a shocker. Among the heavily censored documents made public so far are several in which r.c.m.p. officers said Arar was “no threat” to Canada and only a “peripheral subject” of an investigation code-named “A-O Canada.” In an April 30, 2003, memo, an unnamed r.c.m.p. official—apparently fearing a repeat of an embarrassing 1996 case in Pakistan in which Canada helped secure the release of a Canadian, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was later identified as an al-Qaeda suspect—seemed to be trying to scare off politicians from working to secure Arar’s early release from Syria. One of Arar’s lawyers, Lorne Waldman, says these revelations are just the tip of a bomb that will explode after more extensive disclosures are made. “It’s quite a story, and the final chapter hasn’t yet been written,” he says.

 

Arar intends to be there for the telling. He says he feels that events are moving ahead as if by divine design. “The fact that I was released is a miracle if you consider that, in my opinion, no one wanted me to be released—the United States, Syria, Jordan, even some elements here in our own government,” Arar says. “That tells me that at the end of the road, there’s something that is going to affect Canadian society for a long time.”

 

Arar may be right about that. But the outcome is far from certain. To avoid embarrassment and perhaps to avoid jeopardizing ongoing cases, powerful forces on both sides of the border will fight hard to keep secret much of the information that could explain why Arar ended up in a Syrian jail. If they succeed, we may never know much more about Maher Arar.

 

But Arar will have achieved one important goal. He will have given the country reason to care about the outcome—and perhaps even the desire to ensure that what happened to him can never happen to anyone else. —With reporting by Joan Bryden/ Ottawa and Chris Daniels/Toronto

[Capt_Picard 0]

If it has to be a newsworthy person why not that guy that won all that money from the game show... I can't remember his name or the show's name, but didn't he get like 2 million or somthing?

[WEAREBORG4102 0]

If it has to be a newsworthy person why not that guy that won all that money from the game show... I can't remember his name or the show's name, but didn't he get like 2 million or somthing?

292641[/snapback]

 

Ken Jennings.... :(

 

All hail King Ken!

[Wishfire 2]

After reading the article on Arar, I'd say that HE deserves to be Time's (United States) Person of the Year. While Bush was in the news a whole lot this year, that's to be espected; it was an election year. I don't think that should count, because any major candidate would get a lot of news coverage. Mr. Arar, though, it not a polititian. He's just an everyday person, trying to provide for his family. He an ordinary person who was put into extraordinary cirmustances, and now he's standing up for his rights and the rights of other people mistreated like he was.