Ross Douthat blasts the historians who recently rated Bush as the worst President ever:
Remarking on this, er, finding, Matt takes the contrarian view that “Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly.” I wouldn’t go nearly that far (and nor would Matt, I suspect, if you really pressed him), but I will say, as someone who judges the Bush Administration more or less a failure, that it’s very easy for me to imagine a possible future in which Bush’s policies are widely judged to have been vindicated by events. (I have a piece on just this possibility forthcoming in the June issue of the Atlantic.)
***And yes, it’s also easy to imagine a future in which Bush ends up judged not only a failure, but a worse chief executive than James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover – though for this to happen, I would submit, the worst Bush-created disasters would have to still be ahead of us, since neither the occupation of Iraq nor anything else our current POTUS has been involved in rivals the Civil War or the Great Depression for sheer destructive impact.
All of which is to say that sixty-one percent of the historians’ sample are ax-grinding fools whose nitwittery dishonors their profession. Judge Bush a failure by all means, but the fact that his legacy is only beginning its long unspooling ought to give anyone with even a glancing knowledge of history’s cunning passages – let alone a so-called “professional” – pause before pronouncing his administration the worst in American history.
While I tend to agree with both Douthat’s assessment regarding Bush (although I would not hedge my language and simply stick to “failure,” and have, on occasion, noted he is the worst President of my lifetime) and his assessment that Bush’s true impact on history should best be judged by future historians who will have more of a long view, I do find his full-throated attack on the 61% who found Bush to be the worst a little harsh. After all, when you boil down Ross’s argument, what he is in essence stating is that “Sure, Bush is a failure, and we need to wait to determine if he is Civil War bad or merely Great Depression bad.”
That can’t be the legacy Bush and Rove set out to create.
demimondian
I merely observe that “merely Great Depression bad” has to rank up there as one of the all-time great examples of defining deviancy down.
DougJ
I hate that ugly fucker, Douthat. He, Yglesias, and Meghan McCardle must be the ugliest people ever to appear in any sort of visual medium at once.
xerixes
Were the depression and the Civil War a direct result of those presidents’ policies? That’s the difference in my book. Just because those presidents were there during those horrible times doesn’t necessarily mean they created those problems.
Guantanamo, Iraq, torture, Katrina “reconstruction”, politicization of the DOJ, and on and on are directly tied to the Bush administration…
HyperIon
So Hoover, who, like Bush, had a bad thing happen on his watch (the depression), screwed up by doing basically nothing for most of his term. Yet Bush, who actively fucked up repeatedly, MIGHT be judged the superior president. Hmm…does not compute.
John Cole
Don’t hold back, DougJ. Tell us what you really think.
Svensker
Were Hoover and Buchanan retarded sociopaths? No? Well, then.
jake
Sure Douchethat. If Bush’s Fuck Everything Up Tour results in him and all of his lackey’s mouldering in prison for life, if every crooked contractor has to return all of the money they’ve raided from the treasury, every government agency has such tight oversight that the employees can’t blink without a permission slip, the upper 1% income bracket has to actually pay some damn taxes and WingNuttism is listed as a mental illness, historians will certainly say his policies were vindicated by events.
jack fate
I’ll bet their stock portfolio and those of their friends disagree with that sentiment.
jake
“lackeys.” Sheesh.
DougJ
Sorry, but it bothers me that they’re always going on blogging heads and having cooking contests with each other. Wear something other than Cosby sweater or keep your ugly ass behind the keyboard. It’s not that complicated.
RSA
Douthat:
First, it’s much easier to imagine this future than one in which Bush’s judgment is vindicated; I expect that professional historians are good at making such comparisons. (In my field, there are as-yet unproven hypotheses that almost everyone believes are true or false. I suppose history is different.)
Second, as Hyperion observes, I don’t think that Buchanan and Hoover are blamed for having caused a civil war or a great depression. What Bush is being blamed for is largely his own doing. Further, I think it’s possible to judge someone’s competence not only by what actually happens but also by how he makes decisions and establishes policies. We probably all know someone who has escaped disaster by pure luck, despite having made terrible decisions. That person might even be the worst decision-maker we know, even if others have suffered worse outcomes.
ThymeZone
I personally don’t think that Bush is either GD bad or CW bad. Those are calamites on a scale that modern Americans are not really familiar with.
But he’s bad. First of all, those are historical contexts, not presidents. Hoover did not create the Depression, and a president did not create the Civil War by himself.
In the proper context, which is the direct relationship between decisions and results, Bush is about as bad as it gets. I still think Nixon was worse, and I think that the Nixon-Kissinger monster created a holocaust of death and destruction that ten Bushes might not be able to equal. maybe out of stupid clumsiness, but not out of evil caculation the way they did.
But anyway, this kind of navel gazing WRT to “how bad is Bush” is not really useful. What’s important is that he is bad, and he is still president, and we need to make sure that we draw a line here.
Eural Joiner
Damn! You beat me to it!
scarshapedstar
Worst Presidency ever? Maybe not, I guess.
Worst President ever? Abso-fucking-lutely. He has the exact opposite of every quality you’d hope for in a President, or even a dog-catcher.
AnneLaurie
No, Bush and his puppetmasters set out to destroy the entire American political system and replace it with a kleptocracy. They haven’t quite succeeded at this — yet — so Douthat is reduced to arguing “Hey, if the current mortgage/finance disaster brings an end to the Republican party, Dubya will be of no more note future historians than Millard Fillmore. And if the oncoming storm instead causes our new Chinese overlords to repossess the entire country, nobody will ever bother writing about dead American presidents anyway.”
DougJ
Why doesn’t Ross take this to its logical conclusion and refer to a parallel universe in which there were WMD in Iraq and we were greeted as liberators? Since historians can’t rule out the existence of such a parallel universe, there’s no way they can make judgments about how good or bad Bush is.
Andrew
Ross is pretty much a dick.
Keith
Don’t worry, they’re creating an entirely new, more uplifting legacy that will be found in documentary format at the new Bush Library that will one day grace the campus of SMU. Feel free to visit (and learn about!) the great Bush legacy that you thought only pundits and members of the AEI would get to experience.
Philip the Equal Opportunity Cynic
+1 for Hyperion and RSA.
What they’re really battling is what we poker players call “results-oriented thinking”. What?! Shouldn’t you focus on the bottom line? Well, often, yes, but not when the bottom line reflects pure dumb short-term luck rather than the quality of the process that got us to that bottom line.
If GWB gets off without being blamed for the collapse of the American Empire, he’ll be equivalent to the guy who called my raise with with king-five against my pocket kings (in hold ’em). He caught two fives and won the hand, but he showed so much ignorance in doing so that I would be delighted to sit down at his table again any day of the week. I’m sure the leaders of enemy nations feel the same way about the Idiot Dauphin.
leinie
Keith, how much are they gonna charge for that trip through Fantasyland?
Pooh
So what about the dishonor of the nitwittery of those who have spent the 7 years blowing…er defending Bush’s presidency? No to say that Douthat is a nitwit, but fuck him very much, I’m sure he had no ax[b]e[/b] to grind.
dbrown
Wait, you miss the key point like most do – bush whack and company took the sole super power at the height of its economic power and wrecked it economically, military, and even has broke the spirit of the American sprit (housing disaster was breath taking and is killing the middle class along with energy and food; soon, inflation will be growing fast as unemployment continues to get bad). The other presidents may have reached lower, but the US was itself, was a second rate power during those times; not the premier super power orders of magnitude above all others. To break the back of such a country in just two terms is amazing.
Tom S
The difference between Bush and other “bad” presidents is that the latter have been perceived as doing little or nothing as the country slid into disaster (Pierce, Buchanan; Coolidge, Hoover) or who tolerated corruption in their administrations (Grant, Harding). Bush, on the other hand, has actively promoted policies that have made the country worse off, and combined that with virtually encouraging and defending corruption (and incompetence) within his adminstration.
Incertus
I think that when you look at where the economy was at the beginning of Bush’s term and where it’s likely to be next January, factor in an unprecedented loathing for the rule of law and a willingness to subvert the Justice department to a degree not seen since the worst days of the spoils system (if even then), then you get a presidency that outdoes either Buchanan or Hoover, and even passes Nixon for sheer criminality.
libarbarian
I played 2-7 and hit a boat on the flop, ergo 2-7 is a good hand to play.
Z
Oh, and please, please, please let part of his legacy be to rot in prison for war crimes!
Zifnab
And that’s basically what we’re rating him on, right? If we had some future hypothetical President that walked around the White House punching people in the face, and that same year we watched the DOW grow 15% while poverty magically disappeared and world peace broke out, would we make the claim that President McFacePunchy was now the best POTUS since FDR?
We’ve got a guy in the White House who repeatedly breaks the law to accomplish some of the most reprehensible acts in human history – nationwide graft and corruption at the expense of natural disaster victims, a five year war responsible for literally countless deaths, economic imprudence that has doubled the national debt, an energy policy that totals the environment while tripling the cost of our primary energy source.
Even if, by some happy accident, Bush’s graft and corruption mysteriously saved lives and his war unexpectedly caused Democracy to break out through the Middle East, and his madcap spending somehow paid itself off, and gas for some reason wasn’t reaching for $4 / gallon, he’d still be the Worst President Ever because he managed to accomplish all his goals by rigging elections, blowing off his electors (you know, the people), and pissing on the Constitution.
He’s a vile, wretched, morally bankrupt little gremlin. That his legacy is imploding on him only proves how karma is a bitch. It doesn’t tell us anything we shouldn’t already know.
Blue Raven
I fear we will end up seeing a President with two legacies. Remember how Reagan was lionized after his death, including for things he was as responsible for as Hillary Clinton was responsible for peace in Northern Ireland?
AkaDad
Everyone knows that historians are a bunch of Liberals, who only care about the profits they make selling books.
paradox
It’s all very fun and adjective-filled, yes, but Bush will always stick in my craw for Election 2004.
If he is so fucked up and the worst of all time then perhaps a very long inward look would be necessary to understand why he was elected in 2004. I’ve heard it all and the answer basically always boils back to the same thing: there must be something very wrong with us as a people.
It isn’t about Obama or Clinton or Republicans, it’s about basic human functioning. If–if–there is something so fundamentally wrong with us I don’t see Obama or Clinton doing anything about it. They say and imply things are wrong, but not that we need a sharp break from terrible things that are really screwing us up.
More of the status quo, more or less. It won’t fix us.
Elvis Elvisberg
The historians aren’t speaking from some perfectly objective place called History, they’re speaking today. Of course it’s plausible that in some future universe, Bush won’t look as bad (though I can’t see how on Earth that could happen).
Their conclusion today is plausible, for the reason xerixes and Hyperlon point out: Bush created the catastrophe in Iraq, and the massive debt, and the pro-torture policy, and the politicization of bureaucracy to make way for Katrina.
He chose to ram the Titanic into the iceberg, unlike Buchanan and Hoover.
This is a strange thing to Ross to choose to flip out about.
Pooh
HU for Rollz?
DougJ
Yup, these guys are just trying to sell books, just like Richard Clarke and the others.
moe
http://welovebush.blogspot.com/2008/04/restoring-americas-image-bush-has.html
DougJ
But before we make any judgments on these so-called historians, we should probably do a survey about what kinds of countertops they have. If it turns out that exactly 61% have granite countertops, that will be quite a coincidence.
ploeg
Also, Buchanan and Hoover were given only four years as President (less than four, in Hoover’s case). President You’ve-Covered-Your-Ass-Now has had seven years two months and counting.
Zifnab
Before you hop on the Express Train to Hate-America-in-General Town, I think it is worth mentioning a couple of things about the ’04 election.
Firstly, a great deal of shit that has since hit the fan had not – as of ’04 – been released yet. The torture scandals and wiretapping scandals and attorney-firing scandals and child molestation scandals and corruption indictments and Iraq clusterfucks didn’t even really take off until 2005. America isn’t the sharpest pin in the pin cushion, but it catches on eventually. 2006 was certainly a vindication of the People’s Judgment once all the facts started coming out.
Secondly, if you watched the media campaign in 2004, its not hard to understand how a political novice or ‘values voter’ or run-of-the-mill conservative-minded swing voter would lean towards Bush. With what few facts were available, the media insisted on playing he-said-she-said and indulging in Swift Boat style rumormongering rather than actually nailing down facts.
Kerry didn’t offer any significant change in foreign policy and he didn’t inspire a great deal of passion in his domestic agenda. He played softball with Bush and he still came within 2% of victory. This, in the midst of district gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement and partisan dirty trickery that easily rivaled the crap from 2000.
Both ’00 and ’04 were close elections. Taking the entire population out behind the woodshed seems rather extreme once you understand how badly the game was being rigged from the start. Was a two-term Bush Presidency the result of an apathetic and ignorant electorate? That’s certainly not an unfair question to ask. But given that Bush was constantly trying to gin himself up as a “compassionate conservative”, a working man populist, and a devoted Christian, it seems hard to believe that the majority of America genuinely wanted the Bush-league corruption and crime that we’ve suffered through.
chopper
the way i see it is this; all else being equal, someone is going to point to the douchtard today as more of a douchetard than the douchetard of yesteryear.
why? well, first off, the douchetasticness actually affects this person’s life right here and now. if some douchelord’s doucherific policies totally douched over the value of your property you’re going to be more full of piss and
vinegardouche than when it happened to yer great-granddad.second, the douchiness is always better documented in the present day vs a hundred years ago.
Dennis - SGMM
Stop making fun of Bush. Someday his picture will be on the three dollar bill.
cbear
It’s very easy for me to imagine a possible future in which my dick magically grows 4-5 inches and I become the biggest porn star evah—but I don’t see it happening.
The idea that historians, you know the guys who study fucking history, can’t make informed value judgements based on an current president’s historically immense and possibly irreversible fuckups is bullshit.
It’s like arguing that, within the context of repeating the National Socialist experiment, Bush’s policies of gutting the Bill of Rights may be vindicated in the future.
Rick Taylor
This is off topic, but there’s a link to Hillary’s interview with the guard. Frankly I think there was an over-reaction to this one; this is the sort of gotcha right wingers are always pull. It’s not even clear on whether the hospital the guard was referring to was the hospital that made the denial. I’ve heard the argument that it’s fair game because it’s something the right wing would undoubtedly use in the general election, and she makes the claim of being more vetted and resistant to their attacks. But I’ve heard others making nasty attacks on Obama with the same sort of justification.
Dennis - SGMM
I’m sure that future historians in Iran will agree that Bush did all of the right things.
rawshark
I think it had to do with an electorate that thinks there is no substantial difference between the two parties and votes for the one that says it supports their pet issue.
Jay B.
Many of you are giving Buchanan short shrift as how bad he was. He led the US into war, he had a shitty/desperate economic policy
Many think even had a role in the Dred Scott decision (he and Taney were both alumns of Dickinson College), he supported slavery and he actively supported Kansas as a slave state, which led to the mini Civil War “Bleeding Kansas”, before the big one hit.
Buchanan was actively an asshole, not simply a mismanager.
Still, given the scope of Bush’s failure, it’s hard not to give our current “president” the edge.
Tsulagi
The man (more accurately gutless, spoiled brat) is garbage; his presidency is garbage. No one has more proven the “garbage in, garbage out” maxim.
Yeah, I can see the quibbling over use of the word “failure.” It just doesn’t capture the essence, the true Eau de Bush. Disaster? Catastrophe? Retarded? Little better, but combined that still doesn’t fully bring to mind the little fucker and his proper place in history.
Probably two entomologists came closest three years ago when they honored Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld by naming three new species of slime-mold dung beetles after them. Behold, Agathidium bushi in all his slime-mold,
byproduct of successdung glory.TR
There’s a reason Bush was singled out as worse than Hoover or Buchanan — unlike those two, he and he alone is responsible for the current mess.
The Great Depression was a result of not just Hoover’s policies, but the economic policies of his two predecessors, Coolidge and Harding. If anything, Coolidge deserves more blame than Hoover, given that the bulk of Andrew Mellon’s disastrous economic policies were put in place during his 1923-1929 tenure. Hoover was only in office for eight months when the stock market crashed.
And the Civil War was not just a result of Buchanan’s policies. He certainly dithered and made things worse, but the sectional crisis that exploded in 1861 had been coming for 20-40 years.
But Bush? He inherited a country at peace and in full prosperity, and he fucked it all up single-handedly. The messes he’s created — Iraq, Katrina, Constitution, etc. etc. — are all his own.
Worst. President. Ever.
marjowil
the sheer depth and breadth of the Bush disaster is surely unparalleled…and unparallel-able.
I’m no historian, but Bush plus Cheney plus Rumsfeld plus Gonzo etc. together flaunt a wealth of diverse failures, both willfully corrupt and negligently incompentent, starting with setting a match to the Middle East fuse, literally incorporating war crimes, trashing the economy, environment and middle class with supreme flourish, and culminating with the dismemberment of separation of powers, rule of law, and a little rag we used to call the Constitution.
but that’s just me.
TR
Also, I have a hard time believing that this administration would somehow look better in a few decades’ time, when all the records they’re keeping secret are released to the public and when the tell-all books have been written.
61% of historians think he’s the worst president now? It’ll be at least 90% when all the dirt comes out.
AkaDad
I gave this a lot of thought and analysis, and here’s my conclusion.
Bush’s shit is all retarded.
paradox
I do think this is unfair. I love my country and always help our people any way I can. I love sitting in public spaces watching Americans, and I help. I do not look down upon humans, that is not who I am at all. I can see how someone might infer differently, but it’s not me.
What about lying to take a nation to war? We all knew, yet Bush was elected.
Something is wrong, very wrong. It will take a long time to fix, and I can’t even define what the hell precisely needs to be fixed.
borehole
61% seems kinda low. Are we sure Harding didn’t screw up the curve?
Bey
Well, rightly or wrongly, many people were still reeling from 9/11 and the anthrax attacks (remember the anthrax?). Many of us – and I shamefacedly admit that I was one – squelched our doubts about Saddam and the WMDs by asking what could/would/might happen if we were wrong about his abilities and intentions. We were doubtful of the claims but there was *just enough* room for doubt that we chose the better safe than sorry route.
Lots of Americans were smarter than us, but they were shouted down. Not our proudest moment.
Tim F.
Lincoln provoked a war, but he won it. Reagan picked a fight but he was smart enough to stay out of it. Bush’s dad picked a fight and then got out. If there’s a president who did worse by his country I am all ears to hear it.
Asti
Which other president lost a major city? I can’t remember, sorry!
Asti
Which other president entered the presidency based on a philosophy to completely dismantle the entire government and suck it dry, and then did it?
I can’t remember, sorry!
ed
I’d feel better about things here if DougJ spent more time with pertinent issues and less about how the Atlantic Monthly heads look. The latter is douche-baggery at its finest.
Asti
Which other president had to win a presidential election by decision of a state supreme court because he couldn’t get enough votes?
Oh, I had better wait a while to ask that one, we might find someone else about to try that one over again.
Andrew
You obviously haven’t seen how ridiculous they look in those Atlantic round table videos. Those are like low budget Uwe Boll productions.
Asti
Don’t forget Karl, Condi and Grover.
AnneLaurie
Stop making fun of Bush. Someday his picture will be on the three dollar bill.
… and the writing on that bill will be in Pinyang. And if our ChiCom overlords retain their keen sense of fun, it’ll be printed on a nice soft paper, so we’ll all be able to do to Bush what he’s done to our Constitution for the past seven years.
sglover
Y’know, there was a time, not so long ago, that the Atlantic was actually worth paying money for. Then they decided that becoming the next “Slate” was a clever business strategy. So you get “talent” like Sullivan and Douhat and McArdle. Would you invest in a company with that kind of management?
stickler
Okay, look. This shit has to stop.
This is nothing but watered-down Confederate bullshit. Lincoln stopped taking Southern crap, and let people know he would even before the election. “Not kowtowing to slaveholding assholes” is not the same thing as “provoking a war.”
The bastards who provoked the war were Southerners. Full stop. Southerners fired on Fort Sumter. Southerners seceded in the name of slavery. Secession conventions were held before Honest Abe was even sworn in.
So stop it with the “honor of the South” crapola. Abe Lincoln had war thrust upon him: he could either kiss the South’s ass and embrace slavery, or he could stand up for what he was elected to do: stop the expansion of slavery and defend the political interests of 2/3 of the nation.
sglover
I think paradox, above, is essentially correct. Bad as Bush is — and I really do think he easily clinches the “worst ever” title — it’s not like this is the late Soviet government, with centralized information management. Bush was re-elected at a time when:
1) information of all kinds, from an immense spectrum of sources, was never easier to obtain;
2) it was vividly obvious that he’d lied us into a debacle with ZERO good options — the very definition of strategic mismanagement.
Bush’s re-election only confirmed the same anxious, depressed feeling I got watching the run-up to the Iraq debacle: Our “democracy” is dysfunctional, broken. It can no longer cope with — even discuss! — in any meaningful way, the circumstances that we find ourselves in.
Nothing makes this more plain than a quick skim of the many topics that no public figure will honestly discuss (or even hint at, in many cases: Our energy and land use habits. The “War on (Some) Drugs”. The increasing militarization of the society, from local police to foreign policy. The inevitable end of more than a half-century of American hegemony, and how that will affect daily life. No politician who wants to make it to DC will ever broach these unpleasant topics, because those who have get trounced by huge margins.
Sadly, in Bush we probably got the government we deserve.
(Corollary/caveat: Round about ’05, only about a year after his squeaker win, we started seeing lots of people who voted for Bush complaining about how awful he was. Those people were and are fucktards. Absolutely NOTHING about Bush had changed in the interim, and if you hadn’t noticed it before, you should probably do your country a favor and STAY THE HELL AWAY from voting booths for the rest of your life.)
fish
since neither the occupation of Iraq nor anything else our current POTUS has been involved in rivals the Civil War or the Great Depression for sheer destructive impact.
Tell that to the Iraqis.
Reverend Spooner
Can we at least say that Bush wasn’t as bad a President as Jefferson Davis? Come on!
Chuck
James Madison lost a major city. Washington DC was torched by the British during the War of 1812, which we were lucky to come out of with a draw.
Still, he accomplished a lot of good things before becoming President, which puts him squarely ahead of the Boy King.
Buchanan had quite a bit to do with the support of slavery and Dred Scott, even though one could argue that he could not have prevented the Civil War, simply delayed it.
Likewise the same defense could be made of Hoover, who actually did get the Government involved with the economy some to try and mitigate the Depression, though it wasn’t radical enough.
Harding was a pitiful SOB. Johnson was a drunk, who had to deal with uncompromising Radicals in the Congress who were H*** Bent on kicking him out.
The Boy King looks even worse in light of all of this.
Reverend Spooner
Isn’t Maliki WPE, then?
AnneLaurie
Can’t. The ones that aren’t dead already are afraid of being seen within telling distance of any American. Teh Surge Is Working!
Reverend Spooner
Well, Bush was elected to destroy the US government, and he did a damn fine job of it, too. Looks like Bush might be best President ever, eh?
The Other Steve
Now that’s interesting. I don’t know a lot about Buchanan. My understanding is that he’s primarily faulted for the Civil War because he tried to appease the South on the issue of slavery… I’m not sure that taking a hardline approach would have resulted in the South being lovey dovey though.
As for Hoover. You know, I think in the long run he get’s a bad deal and my understanding of most historians is they feel the same way. He largely gained the Presidency due to his reputation for humanitarian works. His efforts in WWI with bringin food to Belgium, and later his efforts as Sec. of Commerce under Harding to provide aid to the Missisippi river basin after the flooding of 1927. He was a Quaker after all.
As President, he governed much like Teddy Roosevelt. He established the anti-trust division at Justice, he proposed a pension for seniors, he got rid of tax loopholes for the wealthy, and so on.
As for the Great Depression. Hoover did try a number of things to try to help. Increased tarriffs on import goods, and increase government spending on infrastructure and ships.
What’s interesting is that in 1932 FDR campaigned against Hoover calling him a tax and spend wasteful big government loving socialist. Yet the policies that Hoover started were largely what the New Deal was modeled after.
What largely did Hoover in, though, was the way MacArthur responded to the Bonus Army in 1932. These were WWI vets had been given certificates in 1924 as a Bonus for their service. The problem was the certificates couldn’t be cashed for 20 years, and they wanted the money sooner because of the economic problems. They built a shanty town in Washington DC and staged a massive protest of around 15-20,000 veterans.
MacArthur claimed the group was overrun by communists, and ordered two regiments(one commanded by Patton) to get them out of their. The Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t apply to DC, just an FYI. They came in with bayonets, loaded rifles, tear gas and removed the protesters. Several were shot. Some were bayoneted. Most were exposed to tear gas. And then the camp was burned. I think there is some debate over who started the fire, the army or the vets.
There was great public uproar to this, and even though Hoover did not approve or really authorize how it was handled, he took the blame. Especially since he was opposed to the Bonus Bill which had attracted the vets.
Again, interestingly enough FDR was opposed to early payment of this bonus as well. Even vetoed a measure in 1936, but this was right after a hurricane had killed 258 vets working on CCC projects down in Florida and the veto was overridden by Congress.
Anyway, I guess my point is, I don’t know that Hoover was that bad. I think he got a bad rap because of the timing.
The Other Steve
stickler is right.
South Carolina seceded in December of 1860. This might have been after the election, but Lincoln sure as hell was not President. This whole thing had been brewing for 30 years, all over the issue of SLAVERY.
The Other Steve
By the way. I heard Bush today on the radio. Apparently he is sending a Columbia Free Trade bill to the Congress.
And he urged them all to pass it, because…
It is in the interest of our National Security.
DougJ
He said “cunning passages”.
DougJ
Blow me, shithead. How’s that for douche-baggery?
jake
Yeah. Columbia has threatened to take away the Chimperor’s bananas if he doesn’t put out.
Nothing more dangerous to national security than an petulant ape.
KC45s
The Atlantic pays Douthat to write about the future? Jesus, he can’t even get the present correct.
lone wolf
Jimmy Carter was universally judged to be a failure before the 1980 Democratic convention and the verdict has never altered.
He was weak, indecisive, and ill suited to the challenges he did not create.
Bush has been decisive in creating serial failures from fiscal mismanagement to Katrina response to invading the wrong country,
He’s NEVER had a majority approval in his second term. Every decision he’s made has been on the wrong side of common sense.
Saying history may judge him differently than the public already has is just wishful thinking.
Truman is a corner case. He led a weary country to make epic decisions they would rather not face and set in place policies that provided a foreign policy framework that lasted over 4 decades to a very positive long term result – winning the Cold War.
Bush is a screw up. Before he was president, while he was president, and no doubt when he’s an ex-president.
It’s really not very complicated.
stickler
Yeah, Bush is decisive, all right. There’s no doubt about that — the problem is, he always makes the wrong decision and he sticks to it like glue.
Look. I’m an historian (the archaic “an” should be a dead giveaway). I don’t know if Bush is going to be “the worst” so far, as far as Presidents go. It’s way too soon to know for sure. But as the evidence so far produced suggests, Bush has achieved a few things that none of his predecessors managed. Look at the other candidates for “worst ever”:
Harding — drunk, corrupt, incompetent, died three years in (but was banging his mistress in the Oval Office — worth a couple of woo-hoo bonus points!).
Buchanan — so far, the gold standard for malfeasance. Actively prepared the groundwork for secession, looked the other way while Southern states seized armories, probably connived in the infamous Dred Scott decision.
Nixon — ouch. But in his favor, was the father of affirmative action, and the EPA, and as the opera reminds us, Nixon went to China. Not all bad, just mostly bad.
Carter — cardigan sweaters and hostages and grain embargoes. But his economic growth numbers looked a damned sight better than Ford, or for that matter, George W. Bush.
Etcetera.
Not many candidates for WPE have managed that magic trifecta: failed to protect the country from attack; failed war abroad; miserable economic record. George W. Bush is, by most objective measure (n.b.: data set has an n=43), an EPIC FAIL. And Iran hasn’t even nuked us yet!
SpotWeld
I suppose Bush does have the useful attribute of making us all look favorably on the administration of William Henry Harrison?
Hume's Ghost
His argument seems fairly retarded to me. Current historians have to wait for future people to develop opinions about Bush’s “legacy” before they can judge where he fits in the line of presidents?
Huh?
And I wouldn’t make “worst” to be dependent on simply X disaster happened and he didn’t stop it (Depression and Civil War). Bush is up there in worst not only for his disastrous policies but his utter disregard and flat out complete lack of knowledge of how our system of government is supposed to work; along with his apparent inability to think critically about any issue whatsoever.
In the historian Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly – a tour of disastrous decisions made by leaders and societies through history – Tuchman used “wooden-headedness” as a critical marker of bad government:
So lets say for the sake of argument Bush isn’t the “worst” … my money is certainly on him for the most wooden-headed president in the history of this nation.
DougJ
Wow. That really sums up Bush perfectly. I doubt even Ross Douthat would disagree, even allowing for the long unspooling of history’s cunning passages.
Hume's Ghost
I also don’t get the bit about future events vindicating Bush.
If I jumped off a cliff and instead of breaking my neck and dying I miraculously had my fall broken by branches and what not and at the bottom land next to a post of goal would that mean my decision to jump off the cliff was vindicated?
Hume's Ghost
Apparently, wooden-headedness is a running tradition for executives named George
—Thomas Paine, Craig Nelson
And it just so happens that that kind of wooden-headedness earned King George III a spot in Tuchman’s book.
Texpope
Termites.
That’s going to be one of Bush’s most enduring legacy. The termites that he seeded throughout most of our federal bureaucracy, which is going to make it difficult for Government to effectively govern for years to come.
Anti-government ideologues placed in positions of responsibility. Making life miserable for some of the best career bureaucrats until they were driven out, eliminating their experience base. Rewriting agency rules to hamstring their effectiveness. Flat out destroying research programs and even materials. Underfunding programs that were working until they withered on the vine, while pumping money into things like “abstinence only” programs which were an abject failure.
Termites.
The appointees of the next President are going to be appalled as they go through their deparments and discover the damage that has been wrought.
jake
Especially when you consider that history is created by members of the public. But that’s the type of silly word game pathetic cretins like Douchehat have been reduced to playing. People won’t judge Bush. People can’t judge Bush, or at least not harshly. If they do they must have an axe to grind.
Instead we must wait for “the future,” and let “history” decide. Because it is possible something might happen that will vindicate something Bush did. Or more accurately something positive will happen that some dishonest hack can say is the result of something Bush did.
Get it? R.D. wants to put off acknowledgment that everything Bush has done is wrong and the country and the world are far worse for his “presidency.” The past and the present don’t count! Consequences? How can we judge consequences without waiting … 30, 40, 100 years?
Then, when he’s out of office the R.D.s of the world can either say “That’s in the past,” or “It’s too soon to judge.” But admit they were wrong? Never.
sparky
jackass contrarianism and playing gotcha on irrelevancies are some of the more annoying trends amplified by teh intertubes. e.g., this piece.
Xenos
Easily dealt with. What is the one thing a hack most greatly fears? WORK.
Make the buggers work. Give them deadlines, do regular performance reviews, make them pull their weight, make them accountable. When half of the DOJ can’t get their jobs done, then fire them, one by one.
There won’t be any brilliant Manchurian Bureaucrats willing to do their job well, waiting like sleeper cells to mess up at the best moment. Human nature being what it is, even the best sociopath can not hide his nature forever.
ParagonPark
There is a difference between a person who happens to he “a historian” arguing that he thinks Bush to be the worst (or best, or a middling) President and a person relying on his credentials as “a historian” to claim enhanced credibility for his opinion.
“History” by definition requires placing interpretation of events and actions in context. To do so legitimately one must have great knowledge of the relevant information involved not only during the time decisions were made, but before and after as well. Without that, it may or may not be a valid opinion, but it isn’t history.
The record is replete with examples of people “vindicated by history,” including Churchill and Truman and those “discredited by history” including Chamberlain and MacArthur. None of that is to say bush will be vindicated by history but merely to say “historians” should be more repsonsible.
DrDave
I think but works better than and but that’s a funny way to frame it, in a sick sort of way. Maybe it could be Bush’s epitaph.
Cyrus
It is unfortunate and depressing, I agree with you, but some context seems relevant. Incumbent presidents who ran for a second term during a war and lost: zero. In fact, looking at that list, I only see one or two times that the White House changed parties during a war. It’s unfortunate that there’s this trend, an irrational sentiment against changing horses in midstream or whatever, but wherever it comes from, it would have helped Bush.
LOL. Unfortunately for Bush the younger, Jefferson Davis was a citizen of the United States of America and a president at various times in his life, but he was never the President of the United States.
TTT
These 61% of historical experts have done little different from what majorities of technical experts have said about evolution, global warming, the Iraq War, the economy, etc. And the response all those experts get from Bush and his dead-end fan club is always the same: they get ignored for the sake of ideology and ego. Bush is anti-expertise, anti-fact, and anti-talent. He distrusts anyone who actually gains skill through study and effort, it’s totally the opposite of his own cronyist privileged legacy-brat way of life.
The Other Steve
I don’t really agree.
HyperIon
i agree.
so let’s have a dozen more navel gazing posts on how horrible HRC is on subjects A-Z. and they can be followed up with posts on how maybe she wasn’t that horrible on subject J. certainly that would be really useful.