Cup of Cha
This is China

I once heard someone ask a Bush apologist if George W. was not the worst president ever, who was worse. The answer, after several moments of thought, came back Rutherford B. Hayes (it may have been someone else from the same era). The fact that someone who voted for Mr. Bush twice would have such a hard finding anyone worse than our current president somewhat stunned me.

My knowledge of late 19th century American presidents is perhaps not what it could be, so I’ll limit my scope to post-1930. After careful thought, I think it is fairly safe to assert that George W. Bush will go down as the worst president in that time frame. Looking back at the competition, it’s hard even to make a case for any of them, but Jimmy Carter is the one most people will point to. He are the others:

• Clinton. I doubt anyone would say he was the worst in the last 80 years.
• Bush I. Mediocre and horrible are not the same.
• Reagan. I’d say he was bad, but certainly not the worst.
• Ford. He gets an incomplete.
• Nixon. Bad, but he did open relations with China and start the EPA. At least he has something to point to.
• Johnson. Anyone who passes the Civil Rights Act can’t be the worst, even if Vietnam was a disaster.
• Kennedy. Essentially an incomplete, but he did avoid nuclear disaster. That gets you bonus points.
• Ike. Overrated historically, but certainly not a disastrous tenure.
• Truman and FDR. Goes without saying no one would claim they were worse than George Freaking Bush.

That leaves Carter, who undeniably was a bad president. Inflation and interest rates were both 18% at one point, the cause heavily OPEC II. That doesn’t get him off the hook, but then again, I never said he was a good president. The fall of the Shah in a Iran was a disaster, but it was also 50 years in the making. He didn’t handle it well, but then again Reagan was trying to ensure the hostages wouldn’t get freed before the election. Carter didn’t help much in the Middle East, but which president exactly has done a great job there?

Basically, he screwed up a bunch of things, but he didn’t generally invent crises. He was a bad, bad president, but a lot of things went against him.

Then we have George W. Bush. It’s hard to imagine screwing things up worse than he has. Supposedly his greatest accomplishment has been not having a second cataclysmic attack on American soil. Umm, does he know no other president since WWII has had any major successful attack on American soil from abroad? I’m not saying 9-11 was his fault (but he didn’t help), but I’m not sure how he can claim some major victory by only having it happen once. That sets the bar a bit low, wouldn’t you say? I feel like Reagan would have been unlikely to say that Beirut only happened once…so VICTORY!

But let’s go through the failures of W’s presidency, which are painfully apparent:

1. The war in Afghanistan, which was abandoned well before completion and is now turning into a nightmare.
2. Osama bin Laden has not been found (relates to point 1).
3. The Iraq War was a mistake from the beginning, was needless, and besides that was entirely poorly planned. We can count this as “poor preparation.” This allows us to separate the initial mistake from the major mistakes are currently being made, which will be extremely problematic in the long-run. Even though it is a McCain-ian simplification (the problem was the execution, not the war), we’ll let it go for now.
4. The Katrina response. This was one of the most embarrassing and despicable moments of my lifetime. And if you think that the poor recovery response had nothing to do with an arrogant and callus Bush mentality, you might want to remember that in the aftermath of the hurricane Barbara Bush said “So many of the [flood victims who fled to Texas], you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. Almost everyone I’ve talked to says: ‘We’re going to move to Houston.’” If you think there’s no connection, you’re nuts.
5. The North Korea debacle. Umm…they’re nuclear now!
6. Iran debacle: they’re the most powerful country in the region now. Plus no one wants to stop their nuclear ambitions anymore. Russia? China?
7. Surpluses have become deficits. Really big deficits. Maybe cutting taxes on the rich during two simultaneous wars is not a great idea.
8. Sanctioned torture.
9. Abu Ghraib.
10. Oil is the most expensive in real terms in the history of the US. This would have been okay if it had been an intentional and telegraphed policy to move people away from oil. But instead it was the result of a plan to make oil cheaper (i.e., the war).
11. Alberto Gonzales.
12. The elimination of privacy rights.
13. No bid contracts.
14. The economy is in the crapper…again.
15. But here’s the really scary one. You know how the escalation of the Iraq War (oh yeah, “surge”) is supposedly working so well. Did you ever wonder how we’re making “progress?” Well, we’re arming the Sunni “insurgents” who used to kill our soldiers. Read that again: we’re arming and paying people who were our enemies a few months ago. These are the same people Bush always used to call “the terrorists.” You see, now they aren’t terrorists, because they are momentarily on our side. And when I say “our side” it means they aren’t trying to kill us…today. Hmmm… this sounds familiar. Wasn’t there another group of people that didn’t like us that another Bush decided to arm because they appeared to dislike our enemies? That’s right, the Mujahideen, who turned out to be Osama bin Laden. Don’t believe me? Check out this 1999 article. But I’m sure this time will be different. Al Qaeda is completely different from the USSR. These guys are really bad.

It is hard to imagine that anyone could do so much damage in only seven years and two months. I challenge anyone to try to make a counter-argument.

Tags: Bush, Iraq, katrina
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