When us flying rabid venomous lambs say it, we're frothing at the mouth, suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, are revisiting our Dirty Hippy past, etc.
When a professor of American history at Columbia says it in the pages of the Washington Post, maybe The Establishment might take the hint...
The story, written by Columbia professor Eric Foner, will be on the first page of the Sunday Outlook section in tomorrow's Post. Some choice excerpts:
The title, "He's the Worst Ever" really says it all, but on to the text:
Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past.
[...]
More often, however, the rankings display a remarkable year-to-year uniformity. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt always figure in the "great" category. Most presidents are ranked "average" or, to put it less charitably, mediocre. Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon occupy the bottom rung, and now President Bush is a leading contender to join them. A look at history, as well as Bush's policies, explains why.
Now, he proceeds to look at what "feats" got each man on that list, and explains how Bush outdoes just about all of them.
Re: Harding and Coolidge, and their pro-business corruption,
"Never before, here or anywhere else," declared the Wall Street Journal, "has a government been so completely fused with business." The Journal could hardly have anticipated the even worse cronyism, corruption and pro-business bias of the Bush administration.
It's good to see that some things never change. Even back in the 1920s, the Journal's editorial page was every bit as screwed up as it is today.
As far as the rule of law goes,
Despite some notable accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, Nixon is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.
Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national defense. The court's unprecedented rebukes of Bush's policies on detainees indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.
I'll skip the lying to Congress and the people to foment a war (thank you, James Polk), and note that unlike James Buchanan, Bush has not (yet) presided over the start of an American Civil War. Presiding over someone else's Civil War doesn't count.
The end of the op-ed:
Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.
-dms