I actually agree that war was a disaster, but he was held accountable to the electorate and won an election after having started the war. How much more accountable do you want? Every single voter in America had the opportunity to express their opinion and together they chose to keep him in office.
Corporations absolutely are held to account. The US is holding hearings on the tech giants at the moment. Apple is in court over the App Store. Microsoft got smacked down over anti-trust. Banks and google have been fined billions of dollars.
Theres a reasonable case that these sanctions were not sufficient, but that's just an opinion. Other people's opinions differ. Sorting that our is what democracy is for, but we cant always expect it to produce the results you or I personally prefer.
We might be in furious agreement on a couple of points here. I've been choosing my words fairly carefully - I want some sort of justification of the idea that the government or anyone in it is somehow accountable for anything.
If accountability means everyone sort of shrugged and moves on over the single worst barrage of decisions I've observed in US politics in the last 30 years then either it isn't accountable or being accountable is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure the government is unaccountable by design - it does whatever the polity wants that day, and then there aren't any meaningful consequences if the idea worked out or not. Democracy represents the best thing we have, but I don't accept that it represents accountability. Good people can get voted out and replaced by better people, for example. Or term limits kick in. They represent the electorate changing its mind on what approach to try in a no-fault-implied manner.
Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials. I can see that in the companies I deal with - they do what I want quickly and with no fuss by and large. They are accountable to me - if I don't like the service I go elsewhere and that is their loss. I can't see it in government, and I'm not seeing anyone in this thread who has managed to lay it out for me. Most of the politicians representing me I would dearly like to replace for their many and obvious failings. They certainly aren't accountable to me, and I don't know anyone who they are accountable to or I'd spend more time trying to argue my views to that person.
> Corporations actually have a built in accountability - if they don't have customers onboard with the idea that they are providing goods and services effectively then they disappear and their owners get hit right in the financials.
Do they? The continued existence of most American telecoms and insurers would appear to prove otherwise.
Really, the issue with American politics is that presidential incumbents rarely get challenged by their own parties, and the two-party system is terrible for providing any sort of nuanced choice. Bush's legacy was truly punished in 2008, when America elected the most serious looking anti-Bush candidate running by one of the largest electoral and popular vote shares in recent history. (Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were successfully painted as not anti-Bush enough during that campaign season.) And generally speaking American democracy doesn't outright prosecute former leaders, because generally speaking the government does not like the appearance of political retribution.
John Kerry was also not a great candidate to have run with an anti-Iraq campaign plank, and 2004 was too soon for most of the country to have soured on the war.
Corporations absolutely are held to account. The US is holding hearings on the tech giants at the moment. Apple is in court over the App Store. Microsoft got smacked down over anti-trust. Banks and google have been fined billions of dollars.
Theres a reasonable case that these sanctions were not sufficient, but that's just an opinion. Other people's opinions differ. Sorting that our is what democracy is for, but we cant always expect it to produce the results you or I personally prefer.