For your Sunday reading pleasure,
Rolling Stone magazine has a couple of
articles that should be getting play all over the MSM - so of course you'll be lucky to hear anything about either of them. Princeton historian
Sean Wilentz has put together a look at how the Bush presidency stacks up against other really bad presidents. This is worth looking at if only for the historical perspective. There are too many good quotes to pull out here. Definitely a must read.
The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
If that weren't enough, Rolling Stone sets
the Wayback Machine to1999 and reminds us we were warned.
All Hat, No Cattle We warned you! Look back at our 1999, pre-primary assessment of George W. Bush (more)
My apologies if these have already been posted about here; I don't have as much time to track these things as I once did, but repetition can't hurt in this case. I rather expect these articles to get the Colbert treatment by the MSM - at least initially. Ignore them, and hope they'll go away.
The 1999 piece makes you wonder how anyone in the MSM could have ever taken W seriously as a candidate - and why the hell didn't they ever question W about any of that stuff. Truly, if W ever stands in the dock for any of his crimes, the MSM should all be listed as unindicted co-conspirators.
As for the piece by Wilentz, this paragraph towards the end of the article provides a cogent summary of W's performance - why he's a strong contender for Worst President Ever.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
By now things have gotten so bad, you'd think the MSM would be all over this. Where are the jeremiads?
Instead we have the NY Times being threatened with treason trials and the rest of the press looking into Michael Jackson's finances and the 60th anniversary of the bikini. They're probably already working up articles on how Democrats are completely unfit to clean up the mess W has made, just in case the Democrats actually take back one or both sides of Congress. Don't even think about the White House in 2008. (All this assuming there actually will be elections.)
I suppose the only other thing to look for will be a response from the Mighty Wurlitzer to Wilentz. The Rove reflex is to defend by attacking. Tactical nukes anyone?