Posted on 04/18/2006 5:56:02 PM PDT by WestVirginiaRebel
"George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace."
So declares ROLLING STONE magazine in a planned cover story, sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
"The Worst President in History?" streets Friday.
Developing...
With the exception of Washington and Jefferson, few contemporary views of Presidents hold up over time.
What anyone thinks of President Bush today has very little meaning in the overall scheme of things. History will judge him on factors we are not aware of today.
All of this "media hype" is for only one purpose, to weaken him and his agenda. The President has shown a remarkable ability to stay focus, and not get side tracked on things like do the editors of the Rolling Stone magazine like me.
Thanks to the Rolling Stone, I am now confident that Bush's place as at least a near-great president is assured.
I have no love for Bush but he atleast beats Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, and plenty of others that I don't know too much about because they are old.
Rolling Stone is the Dixie Chicks of publishing: sales are down, gotta pander to the aging hippies, the CSN&Y and SimonUNdGarfinckle crowd, since,once suspects, the younger crowd doesn't subscribe to music mags, preferring instead to get its kicks and info from the best living would-be-wanna-be president's invention, you know, the Internet.
The leading historian is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor best known for criticizing the impeachment of President Clinton as not rising the to level of a high crime or misdemeanor.
Any current Republican president is the worst in history to the staff of RS.
What tools.
Agreed - here's something a bit more recent attacking Wilentz: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-berkowitz071102.asp
July 11, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
Wilentz’s Fabricated Scalia
The Princeton historian outdoes himself.
By Peter Berkowitz
"In the fall of 1998, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz prophesied that history would regard as "zealots" and "fanatics" members who sincerely believed they had good reason to vote to impeach President Clinton. In November 2000, days after the presidential election ended in stalemate, Wilentz assembled a bizarre group that included some of our nation's top professors of constitutional law (including Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, and Cass Sunstein) mixed together with actors and other celebrities (including Robert De Niro, Rosie O'Donnell, and Bianca Jagger) and persuaded them to sign their names to a full-page ad in the New York Times that spoke of Al Gore's having won a "clear constitutional majority of the popular vote," even though the Constitution says nothing about the popular vote in presidential elections and is perfectly clear that victory goes to the candidate who receives the most electoral votes. However, on Monday, in his scurrilous attack on Justice Scalia, "From Justice Scalia, a Chilling Vision of Religion's Authority in America," featured on the New York Times op-ed page, Wilentz outdid himself.
Wilentz, who directs Princeton's American Studies Program, centered his attack around remarks that Justice Scalia delivered in February at a conference on the death penalty at the University of Chicago, subsequently published under the title "God's Justice and Ours" in the May 2002 issue of First Things. According to Wilentz, "Justice Scalia's remarks show bitterness against democracy, strong dislike for the Constitution's approach to religion and eager advocacy for the submission of the individual to the state." Yet while he insists that Justice Scalia's "writings deserve careful attention," almost everything Wilentz writes about Justice Scalia's published remarks is wrong. In fact, Justice Scalia shows respect for democracy by identifying some of its self-destructive tendencies and suggesting remedies; embraces the Constitution's approach to religion, as opposed to the condescending and uncomprehending approach to religion that he finds rampant among contemporary intellectuals; and, far from advocating submissiveness, insists that citizens engage in politics to change laws they think immoral, and if ultimately necessary, revolt.
Wilentz's brief against Scalia is littered with perverse misinterpretations and sly errors. Begin with Wilentz's accusation that Justice Scalia views submission as the essence of faith: "Mr. Scalia seems to believe strongly that a person's religious faith is something that he or she (as a Roman Catholic like Mr. Scalia) must take whole from church doctrine and obey." If, however, those writings of Justice Scalia that Wilentz had assured us "deserve careful attention" are any guide, then Justice Scalia actually believes strongly that Catholic faith involves a complicated mixture of obedience and independent judgment. Indeed, Justice Scalia took issue in his published remarks in First Things with the teaching on the death penalty in the encyclical Evangelium Vitae and with Avery Cardinal Dulles's reading of it. By virtue of his analysis of, and dissent from recent Church statements on the death penalty, Scalia actually demonstrates that obedience to Church doctrine can and should be based upon an informed and reasoned encounter with it.
Nevertheless, Wilentz frets that "Mr. Scalia apparently believes that Catholics, at least, would be unable to uphold, as citizens, views that contradict church doctrine." In a country governed by the First Amendment, it is unclear under what circumstances the failure to uphold "views" — as opposed say to laws — would present an insuperable problem for Catholics or for anybody else. More importantly, contrary to the impression created by Wilentz, Scalia's discussion did not focus on the case of ordinary citizens who live in a society where not everything that their church doctrine teaches them is immoral is made unlawful. Rather, Scalia examined the much more limited question of whether a Supreme Court justice who "reviews and affirms capital convictions" and therefore (unlike the ordinary citizen) is "part of the criminal-law machinery that imposes death," could properly perform his job if he were convinced that his church taught that the death penalty were morally impermissible.
Wilentz professes to be worried that the opinion he (inaccurately) attributes to Scalia "is exactly the stereotype of Catholicism as Papist mind control that Catholics have struggled against throughout the modern era and that John F. Kennedy did so much to overcome." Yet in the process of unfairly blaming Justice Scalia for resuscitating an old stereotype used to stigmatize Catholics and banish them from public life, Wilentz resuscitates the old stereotype and stigmatizes Scalia as an unthinking servant of Rome whose beliefs ought to be banished from public life.
Next, Wilentz expresses fear about Justice Scalia's attitude toward democracy. "[A]larmingly, Mr. Scalia wishes to rally the devout against democracy's errors." The errors of democracy to which Wilentz refers revolve around Justice Scalia's suggestion that democracy in America has shown a tendency "to obscure the divine authority behind government." And the task to which Justice Scalia wishes to rally men and women of faith and of which Wilentz stands in such fear is a restoration of an understanding of that divine authority.
Weighing in on a matter that falls within the purview of his scholarly expertise, Wilentz declares that Scalia's view that legitimate government power is rooted in divine authority has been at best "a minority view, even an eccentric one, among Americans." Indeed, stresses Wilentz, Scalia's view, "has had no appreciable place in our constitutional history because the framers rejected it." All the respectable people throughout our history, according to Wilentz, followed the Framers who "rejected the idea that political authority lay with anyone or anything other than the sovereign people."
Contrary to Wilentz, however, the view that he asserts that all respectable people in America have always held does not conflict, but coheres both in theory and practice, with what he regards as Justice Scalia's sinister and disreputable view. This is because what Tocqueville called the principle or the dogma of the sovereignty of the people has commonly been thought to have its roots in our natural rights, which in turn have commonly been thought to be both self-evident and a gift of God.
In fact, the view that Wilentz suggests is a great menace to America and which he claims "has had no appreciable place in our constitutional history because the framers rejected it" — that political authority lies with the sovereign people because each was created free and equal by nature's God — certainly seems to be plainly inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.
It certainly seems to be the view of James Madison . . ."
This seems "strange" for a respected historian ; )
Tell me about it. How could anyone top Jimmy the Peanut.
The War on Terror could easily be called "The War We Have To Fight Because Jimmy Carter Put The Mullahs in Power In Iran". If that had not have happened the War on Terror would have Iran on our side. Consider the consequences of that and tell me again who the worst president in history is.
Well, that does it - thanks for nailing the coffin shut!
The only thing that would be better than this would be allowing a Democratic impeachment charge to go through the House/Senate, and having a hearing that smacks them all down.
As long as I am never forced to gaze at a "President Hilliary" poster I will consider myself blessed, lucky and down right appreciative.
TT
LOL! Long ago it become just another version of PEOPLE!
The most fundamentally amusing part of all this is the FR has even remotely considered listening to third party wackos and obvious DNC operatives who persuade people Bush is not the finest president we could possibly have right now.
How can any president be criticized who draws hatred from the left the way Bush has? We need to spend a little more time looking at what the opposition is and less musing idealistically about desired perfection.
And after you're done doing that, contact GOP candidates in vulnerable districts to find out how to help their campaigns.
I'd go even further and say there's no 911 if that hadn't happened! Iran has been the Number One sponsor and exporter of terrorism since the Ayatollah took over.
Found this about his "love" for Dylan (he's probably gay no too): http://www.bobdylan.com/etc/wilentz_live1964.html
Sean Wilentz, the distinguished historian and writer, is the author of several books, including Chants Democratic as well as, forthcoming, The Rise of American Democracy and a book about American ballads, co-edited with Greil Marcus. He has dim boyhood memories of Bob Dylan in and around the old Folklore Center on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, not far from his family's bookstore on 8th Street. At 13, he attended the Halloween 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall, his first Dylan show. He also writes regularly for The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications.
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