What's up with the asterisk next to Bush's name?

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

I've noticed a few folks on DU doing it, and I was curious why. Is it liked the proposed asterisk for Barry Bonds holding the most homeruns in a single season record?

[TheCowsCameHome]

1. Whenever I see it I think of

a puckered asshole.

Ideal symbol for *W*.

[madokie]

9. That wasn't what I origanilly was thinking but it sure will be from now on out..

Damn I'm happy I didn't have a mouth full of coffee when I read that. :rofl::woohoo::clap::applause:

[spanone]

2. selected, not elected

[babylonsister]

3. Bwhahaha! Not quite.

He didn't and doesn't deserve acknowledgment or respect, so that was a shortcut-that and various and sundry other nicknames he's earned over the years so people could show how they feel about him.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

4. Selected by the Supremes.

[Hokie]

5. It goes back to 2001 on DU

After the appointment of Bush by the Supreme Court some people started adding an "*" to W's name to indicate the illegitimacy of his presidency. It comes from the "*" that was added to the baseball record book after Roger Maris "61*" home runs by commissioner Ford Frick because Maris broke Babe Ruth's record 60 but had 162 games vs. 154 games that Ruth played. You might remember the movie 61* that was made about the home run chase by Maris and Mantle in 1961 on Babe Ruth's record.

For several years a lot of people referred to Bush as either Bush* or just *. I think Doonesbury also picked up on this.

[Maeve]

14. Yes, Doonesbury depicts Dubya as an asterisk

At one time wearing a Stetson (all hat and no cattle), later wearing a Roman helmet(for imperialism) and the helmet has gotten battered and dented--as the wars go, so goes the helmet.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. This is the correct origin....

...and was widely discussed at the time. It antedates Trudeau, who may have picked it up without knowing the Maris reference -- he doesn't mention it.

[foo_bar]

18. it goes back to Doonesbury in 2000

DU didn't exist until the following year. (per http://www.hail-to-the-thief.org/archive/24.html)

[bertman]

26. I wonder if Trudeau knows that Kurt Vonnegut penned the * as a symbol for"asshole"

in one of his novels?

[foo_bar]

27. perhaps, but dubya might have been portrayed as a wide open beaver

Plus the Breakfast asterisk had 8 spokes IIRC, which has its own unicode character ( ✳✳✳ ) distinct from the thingee above the 8 key ( *** ) and the math operator kind ( ∗∗∗ , the Dubya footprint).

[bertman]

28. LOL. Foo_bar, that's great. I never knew there are three different types of assholes,

I mean asterisks.

Thanks for that.

[jeff30997]

6. I prefer asshole *

[Le Taz Hot]

7. He was not elected president by the people, Gore was.

He was appointed by the Supreme Court. Just think, what if the will of We The People had been carried out that day. We would be seeing NONE of this Depression.

[crikkett]

11. maybe we wouldn't have seen this depression but we wouldn't have seen

the housing bubble either...

I think if Gore had been inaugurated the dot-com bust would have been his recession. It would have been bigger and longer... from 2002-2005 80% of new jobs in Silicon Valley were created by the Real Estate market.

Enron et al were gaming California's energy market during the Clinton Administration.

[JackRiddler]

19. "None"? You're quite the optimist about capitalism, I see.

Gore championed NAFTA.

Rubin (of Goldman-Sachs) shepherded the Glass-Steagal repeal into law, then took a reward at Citibank.

All parties celebrated Greenspan for his genius.

The Democrats made no sustained move to impose regulation on the debt and derivatives markets, or warn about the obvious.

Obama and McCain both voted for the recent "bailout" heist.

No one in power wants to restore progressive taxation on the rich quite yet, as this would "dampen stimulus" (i.e., trickle down doctrine still applies).

[Le Taz Hot]

21. Okay, that was probably a little too optimtistic

on my part. You are, of course, correct in all your points. But I'm pretty confident in saying that Gore would not have gone into Iraq which has been nothing but a fiscal shithole from the beginning. I think his response to Katrina would have been far superior in that I think by now, a good portion of New Orleans and outlying areas would have been at least on the road to rebuilding -- unlike the disaster it is now. I don't think he would have engaged in the drunken deficit spending that we've seen in the last 8 years. I don't think he would have completely trampled our Constitution and I'm pretty sure torture would not have even been an issue. We also would have had an intact C.I.A./F.B.I. for the REAL war on terror instead of Cheney's shadow military (NSA & Blackwater).

For the reasons you stated (at least the ones I could understand) and more, although we probably would be facing a pretty severe downturn, I don't see that we would actually be headed for Great Depression, Part Deux as we are now.

[JackRiddler]

22. Okay, all that is possible too...

It's hard to imagine things would not have been better with Gore instead of Bush, starting with Iraq. I won't even go into 9/11. This still ignores:

Capitalism will always generate injustice, power imbalance and, inevitably, crisis.

There is a ruling class (the rich) and a secret, parapolitical state (the spooks). These sectors are where agendas are hatched regardless of what a president does. No US politician has addressed the problem of hidden power.

[Uben]

8. Oh, I thought that was representative of......

....an a$$hole. I like that thought better.

[livvy]

10. He doesn't deserve the respect of using his given name.

My preferred name for him is the lying weasel, and you'll notice people on this board use a wide variety of terms of endearment for he who shall not be named.

[Mira]

12. Here is the Doonesbury explanation:

...... the view of Garry Trudeau, who portrays Bush in ''Doonesbury'' as an asterisk in a Roman helmet..... the view of Bush as a basically limited and shallow person .......a simpleton for his simplicity...... a man who isn't there.

Whenever the empty helmet floats over the asterisk, that's the idea.

I think that's what started it.
Let us change over to the *W* puckered asshole explanation.
Because no simpleton who isn't there could have wrought such destruction.

[Cirque du So-What]

13. I use the asterisk to avoid the proper surname

If necessary, I'll employ syntactic gymnastics to avoid using his given name. Mostly, however, I use some colorful nickname. Over the years, I've pretty much settled on 'Chimpolini' as my favorite.

[rox63]

16. Whenever I see * on the news

I'm tempted to yell out "There's a poo-flinging monkey on my teevee!"

[UTUSN]

17. Shrub even adopted it for himself on one of his Wiccan trees:

[a kennedy]

20. I use * because I can't ever bring myself to type his name.....

:puke: :puke: :puke:

[undeterred]

23. Its the name too awful to be spoken.

It would be like showing a penis on television.

[EconomicLiberal]

24. That's an insult to penises everywhere... n/t

[surrealAmerican]

25. ... and here I was, thinking it was just to mess with ...

... search engines, so the feds wouldn't notice what we were saying about him.

[Rhiannon12866]

29. Kind of. Throughout history, whenever there's a list of former presidents,

an asterisk will always appear by George Bush*'s name because of the unorthodox way he assumed the office, selected by the Supreme Court, not elected by the American people... :-(