Bush: The Worst President in History?

vegyrex · #1 04-20-2006, 09:07 AM

Its a long article here's some highlights:

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Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

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Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job.

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No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

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All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War.

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The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

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Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/pro...ent_in_history

theoreticalchemist · #2 04-20-2006, 09:23 AM

Who's your fave?

klimt · #3 04-20-2006, 09:39 AM

Honestly, I would agree that Dubya is one of the worst... but THE worst?

Hoover was pretty god-awful. And some of the early presidents weren't too sharp (Jackson, who was impeached).

A lot of the youngsters here will clamor for Nixon, but they will not have any actual idea of what Nixon's record as a president was. For one, there would be no Title IX if Tricky Dick hadn't been around, as well as EPA standards and many other things (SALT, as a major example). He was a bastard, but not entirely irredeemable.

Dubya is probably our stupidest president, though. He is arrogant, and appears to believe he knows what's best for our country... but he doesn't listen to anyone but his inner circle, who are all manipulative asskissers who know how to make the guy do what they want while making him think it was his brilliant idea in the first place. EXAMPLE: The Iraq War. Rummy and Co. had that on their "things to do" list the first week Dubya was in office. There was a concerted effort to get this moron in place by much more devious people than he could ever hope to be.

And, in the words of the infamous Deep Throat: FOLLOW THE MONEY. Because that's who is really running things, and who Dubya is pandering to. One hand washes the other, with a sprinkle of "God talks to me" thrown in for added spice.

phoenix rose · #4 04-20-2006, 09:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by klimt

Dubya is probably our stupidest president, though. He is arrogant, and appears to believe he knows what's best for our country... but he doesn't listen to anyone but his inner circle, who are all manipulative asskissers who know how to make the guy do what they want while making him think it was his brilliant idea in the first place. EXAMPLE: The Iraq War. Rummy and Co. had that on their "things to do" list the first week Dubya was in office. There was a concerted effort to get this moron in place by much more devious people than he could ever hope to be.

And, in the words of the infamous Deep Throat: FOLLOW THE MONEY. Because that's who is really running things, and who Dubya is pandering to. One hand washes the other, with a sprinkle of "God talks to me" thrown in for added spice.

i can't say who is the worst
but i agree w/ this

vegyrex · #5 04-20-2006, 10:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theoreticalchemist

Who's your fave?

Fave President?

Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt.