Posted on 08/27/2008 11:31:24 AM PDT by jackv
The current narrative of the Bush Presidency is that it is a failure (believed by 107 of 109 historians surveyed) and that George W. Bush is the worst President in history (believed by 61% of those surveyed historians). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The president already has the mark of the American people -- he's the worst president we ever had."
That's one narrative. I have another.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Denial is an ugly thing...
“I’d vote for Bush again if I could. Pass it on...”
I would too. History will treat him much better than the current “general consensus”, and better than some here on FR.
I wouldn’t say he’s the worst president. Jimmy Carter is hard to beat. We will have to see how he is as ex-president.
1st term was good, 2nd was a disaster imo.
While he’s certainly not the worst of the bunch, he hasn’t exactly been a stellar bastion of conservatism. I wouldn’t vote for him he was eligible for reelection.
Hey Harry, what's congress' approval rating again? 9%? Lowest in history, I suspect.
More than half the country hated Lincoln’s guts too...
Well, I think he was pretty bad.
Worst ever? Not even close.
But pretty bad.
The judgement of history will take a while.
Can I remind all that Harry Truman was considered a failure as president at the time. But historians have given him higher ratings in recent years.
We didn’t know that the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe would collapse on the day that Ronald Reagan left the White House. Yet setting things in motion for that to happen is one of the enduring legacies of Reagan.
And with Bush, we’ll have to see how the middle east and the world situation vs. Islamic terror plays out in the years ahead. If Iraq becomes a peaceful stable country and contributes to stability in the middle east, historians will praise Bush for taking us to war against Saddam, and also invading Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda. It’s way too soon to judge the place in history of Bush, just as it would have been to soon to judge Reagan on the day he left office.
I agree.
Very similar to Harry Truman.
Being academics, who largely skew left, most historians have a pretty myopic view of presidential history.
For those who need reminding, here are just FIVE of the many reasons why Clinton was far and away the worst and most dangerous president of my lifetime (and I'm 58):
1) Clinton’s own words show his often expressed innate hostility to, and utter contempt for, the core principles of the American founding:
``If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993
``The purpose of government is to reign in the rights of the people’’ –- Bill Clinton during an interview on MTV in 1993
``We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans…that we forget about reality.’’ -- President Bill Clinton, quoted in USA Today, March 11, 1993, Page 2A, ``NRA change: `Omnipotent to powerful’’’ by Debbie Howlett
“When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly… that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare… However, now there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.” – Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995
2) Clinton inevitably pursued his own political advantage at the expense of American interests and national security. Here is just one of many possible examples:
It is well documented that Clinton and the Democrats took illegal campaign money from groups and individuals tied directly to the Chinese People’s Republican Army. In January 1998, perhaps not coincidentally, Clinton went against the advice of then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Pentagon experts by lifting long-standing restrictions against the export of American satellites to China for launch on Chinese rockets. Not only did he move control over such decisions from the more security-focused State Department to the Commerce Department, but he intervened in a Justice Department investigation of Loral Space & Communications, retroactively enabling Loral to sell critical missile technology to the Chinese. Interestingly enough, Clinton’s decision was made at the request of Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, whose earlier $1.3 million campaign donation made him the single biggest contributor to the Democratic election effort.
The result, as stated eloquently by syndicated columnist Linda Bowles, was that “the Democrats got money from satellite companies and from Chinese communists; China got supercomputors, advanced production equipment and missile technology; Loral got its satellites launched at bargain basement prices . . . and the transfer of sensitive missile technology gave China [for the first time] the capability of depositing bombs on American cities.” Incidentally, Loral ultimately failed to benefit from this permanent injury to America’s security interests: in July 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and in order to raise cash was forced to sell its most profitable business – a fleet of communications satellites orbiting over North America.
3) On two occasions, Clinton used military action for the specific purpose of distracting the American public from the fallout of the Lewinsky affair:
• On August 20, three days after Clinton finally admitted publicly to the Lewinsky affair, the news media was poised to focus on that day’s grand jury testimony by Monica Lewinsky. That same morning, Clinton personally went on national television to gravely announce his bombing of a Sudanese “chemical weapons factory,” and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It was the first time most Americans ever heard the name of Osama bin Laden. The factory bombing in Sudan killed an innocent night watchman, but accomplished little else. It later was proven that the plant was making badly needed pharmaceuticals for people in that poverty-stricken part of the world, but no chemical weapons.
Several months later, the U.S. Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, stated: "...the evidence indicates that the facility had no role whatsoever in chemical weapons development." Kroll Associates, one of the world's most reputable investigative firms, also confirmed that there was no link in any way between the plant and any terrorist organization. As for the Afghanistan bombing, it failed to do any damage at all to bin Laden or his organization. Clinton’s action was accurately characterized by George W. Bush when he said right after 9-11: "When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt.”
Clinton’s pointless and murderous military actions did not make Americans safer that day, although they did destroy an innocent life, and for all the good they did certainly could have been delayed in any case. But they did succeed in diverting media attention from Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony for a 24-hour news cycle, which was the main point. So I guess, they weren’t a total loss.
• On December 16, 1998, on the eve of the scheduled House vote on his impeachment, Bill Clinton launched a surprise bombing attack on Baghdad. AS justification for this action, he cited the urgent threat that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction posed to America, and the need for immediate action. Almost immediately, the House Democrats held a caucus and emerged calling for a delay in the impeachment proceedings. House minority leader Dick Gephardt made a statement: "We obviously should pass a resolution by saying that we stand behind the troops. I would hope that we do not take up impeachment until the hostilities have completely ended."
Conveniently, a delay so near the end of the House term would have caused the vote to be taken up in the next session – when the newly elected House membership would be seated with more Democratic representation, thereby improving Clinton’s chances of dodging impeachment. The Republicans did, in fact, agree to delay the hearings, but only for a day or two. Amazingly, Clinton ended the bombing raid after only 70 hours -- once it became clear that in spite of the brief delay, the vote would still be held in the current session.
Naturally, once the bombing stopped Clinton touted the effectiveness and importance of the mission. As reported by ABC News : “We have inflicted significant damage on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, on the command structures that direct and protect that capability, and on his military and security infrastructure,” he said. Defense secretary William Cohen echoed the point: “We estimate that Saddam's missile program has been set back by at least a year.”
Whether or not one buys Clinton’s assessment of that mission, it is difficult to believe that its timing was so critical that it required commencement virtually at the moment the House was scheduled to vote on the impeachment. I think the most reasonable conclusion is that Clinton cynically deployed US military assets and placed military personnel in harm’s way for purely political reasons.
4) Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior was a threat to American national security: Clinton and his supporters have been very effective in persuading large numbers of Americans that the Lewinsky scandal was “only about sex.” But I see a bigger issue here, because Clinton is on record as saying that he would have done anything to keep knowledge of the Lewinsky affair from becoming public.
That statement raises a very serious question: What if, instead of sending her recorded Lewinsky conversations to Ken Starr, Linda Tripp had instead secretly offered them for sale, say, to the Chinese government? Or to the Russians? Or even to agents of Saddam?
What kind of blackmail leverage would those tapes have provided to a foreign government in dealing with America on sensitive trade, security or military issues? One of the few things Clinton ever said that I believe is that he would have done anything to keep the Lewinsky affair secret. Given his demonstrated track record of selling out American interests for personal or political gain (and there are more examples that I could have cited here), how far would he have gone in compromising America’s real interests in order to protect his own neck when threatened with blackmail? Pretty far, I believe. Equally distressing is the prospect Clinton might, in fact, have succumbed to foreign black mail on other occasions in order to hide different sexual episodes that ultimately did not become public. There is no way to know, of course, but certainly our country is best served by presidents for whom such a scenario is not a plausible possibility.
5) Clinton's 1999 war crime in Kosovo, sold with outright lies and undertaken without Congressional approval, not only was a humanitarian disaster, but laid the groundwork for the Russians to justify their current actions in Georgia.
In that NATO-led assault – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)
We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.
Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.
But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanians Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a “humanitarian war.” In March 1999 – the same month that the bombing started – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.
Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations have been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague was barely been able to document a questionable figure of 5,000 “bodies and body parts.” During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanians. But none have been found.
Dittos.
GWB was handed one sh!t sandwich after another by the 'Rats and their willing accomplices in the media from day one. All things considered, he's done fairly well. If he had managed domestic issues like a conservative and not worried about 'getting along' with the 'Rats like he did in the Texas state house, he'd be a candidate for Mount Rushmore.
I don’t think Clinton was the worst. Actually only marginal when you look at everything.
Jimmy Carter, now he was the worst. No questions asked.
On the other hand, you can accurately assess failure the day a President leaves office.
I give you: Carter, Jimmeh
Agreed. Even Nixon’s reputation improved over time, and Bush did better than Nixon on the Economy.
I like how you linked to the print page!
Much easier to read. Very clever...
This just in:
Those whose only political issue is that they cannot stand Mexicans cannot stand him - making so-called "conservatives" carp at him.
But on national security he was proactive and refused to back down.
He did a fine job with the economy - actually an outstanding one given the systemic pressures the economy weathered during his administration.
He appointed Roberts and Alito.
James Buchanan probably leads the worst President sweepstakes, followed by Jimmy Carter. Probably a tie here.
W will be held in high esteem in the future. He is quite good, but the story needs to be retold.
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