IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT — EVER? – Yahoo! News
Columnist Richard Reeves reports on a recent poll of historians published by The History News Network at George Mason University:
This is what those historians said — and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives — about the Bush record:
- He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;
- He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;
- He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;
- He has repeatedly “misled,” to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;
- He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);
- He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;
- He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;
- He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic’s oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.
Quite an indictment. It is, of course, too early to evaluate a president. That, historically, takes decades, and views change over times as results and impact become more obvious. Besides, many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President Dick Cheney.
I love that phrase “ignorantly hostile.” Actually, I think it goes deeper than that – Bush is also “aggressively incurious” and “wilfully ineducable in the area of uncomfortable facts.”
I also love how the list reads like part of another well-known historical document.
