How bad is Bush - a reality check. [View All]

[Donald Ian Rankin]

I've seen various silly posts on DU trying to present George W. Bush as one of the worse leaders the world has ever known - comparing him to Saddam Hussein, or to Hitler, on equal terms.

This is absurd.

There is a simple test to see which of two leaders was the better and which the worse: imagine that their places had been swapped - that the country of each had been subjected to the government and actions of the other.

Is there really anyone out there who thinks that America would be better off if it had been being governed the way Saddam ran Iraq or Hitler ran Germany for the last 7 years?


If you were to rank the nations of the world in order of how good their current ruler is in the above fashion, then by most measures America would come in the top third - Bush would score above most non-Western rulers or governments, but below most other Western ones; he'd gain points on lack of corruption - I know it's an article of faith on DU that the American government is immensely corrupt, but compared with most of the rest of the world it's relatively clean - and on human rights - Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, while pretty awful by Western standards, just aren't up there with what most non-Western governments get away with - but lose significantly on economics - many other rulers styles of government do more to help their poor at the expense of their rich.



So the next time you're thinking that things in America today are as bad as they can be, go to somewhere like Wikipedia, pick a random African or south Asian or middle-Eastern nation, and see what you can learn about their government, and realise than Bush could be a lot worse.

Which is not to say, of course, that they couldn't also be a hell of a lot better...