This
article never made it to the front page of Yahoo! News -- I stumbled on it while reading the article posted yesterday about the GAO's finding on the 2004 elections.
The title of the article is "IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER?" That caught my attention.
James Buchanan is (for the moment) widely considered the worst president ever. Quoting the article:
. . . he was a confused, indecisive president, who may have made the Civil War inevitable by trying to appease or negotiate with the South. His most recent biographer, Jean Clark, writing for the prestigious American Presidents Series, concluded this year that his actions probably constituted treason. It also did not help that his administration was as corrupt as any in history . . . .
. . .his real failures were in refusing to move after South Carolina announced secession from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter, and in supporting both the legality of the pro-slavery constitution of Kansas and the Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott class declaring that escaped slaves were not people but property.
He was the guy who in 1861 passed on the mess to the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Buchanan set the standard, a tough record to beat.
Phew! I'll say! Buchanan set the bar pretty high (low??) But, you know, the repugs think they're better at everything than the Dems -- and this one time, they might be right. Dubya is proving to be better at being a bad president than the worst Democratic president ever. The author of the article goes on to say,
. . .there are serious people who believe that George W. Bush will prove to do that, be worse than Buchanan. I have talked with three significant historians in the past few months who would not say it in public, but who are saying privately that Bush will be remembered as the worst of the presidents.
There are some numbers. The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.
And, lest anyone think the respondents to this poll were a bunch of academic, liberal, radical, social elite types.
. . . it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives . . .
So, the rest of the world is beginning to wake up to what we have known all along.
Stay strong!