Harpers Scott Horton: Worst. President. Ever.

[DemReadingDU]

4/5/08 Scott Horton: Worst. President. Ever.


“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

America’s historians, it seems, don’t think much of George W. Bush.

Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before passing judgment on a president’s who served recently, much less one still in office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After all, 81 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times poll, believe he’s taken the country on the wrong track. That’s the highest number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have a favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory.

But, as George Mason University’s History News Network reports, the historians have a different measure. They want to stack him up against his thirty-three predecessors as the nation’s chief executive. Among historians, there is no doubt into which echelon he falls–his competitors are Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce, the worst of the presidential worst. But does Bush actually come in dead last?

Yes. A Pew Research Center poll of 109 leading historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

more...
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002804

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. I've never been so depressed about being so right...most of us here

probably had this idiot pegged after the election was given to him...but instead of feeling smug about it, we all weep for the horros he has wrought upon the whole world. A tragegy of a presidency, an embarrassment and abomination as a human being.

[grasswire]

2. some of us had him pegged when he first appeared...

...as a national candidate. Many of us on the Internet were fighting his election by trying to expose his national guard record prior to the election. We were unsuccessful. There was a juggernaut that could not be stopped, largely because of the MSM.

[tabasco]

5. I thought, if they nominated the moron, it would be the end of the republicans for twenty years.

If he actually won the election, I thought, it would be the end of the republicans for fifty years.

God, I hope I was right.

[hlthe2b]

4. ditto...

hard to take anything away but profound sadness at the wreckage left behind...

[Aristus]

3. I knew it was going to be bad.

I just had no idea how bad it was going to get...

[grasswire]

6. the BFEE will always go lower than you could predict

They are more heinous and venal and traitorous than any American could have imagined.

[Ellen Forradalom]

7. That we're still even here

says something about the resiliency of the American people. Brighter days are ahead.

[Perry Logan]

8. The worst thing that can happen to Republicans is to get into power.

[DemReadingDU]

9. evening kick