IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER?

From Yahoo courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

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.

Click here for the rest.

And all of these issues I've hit on over my last three years of blogging here at Real Art. It's debatable as to whether Bush is actually the worst President of all time, but I think there's no doubt that he's in the top two or three. My money's on him ending up being the worst. No surprise there, huh? After all, I was embracing this concept back in 2003 when Berkeley's Nobel Prize winning economics professor George A. Akerlof saw the truth before most others did. The real question is why it seems to have taken so long for everybody else to come to their senses. The writing was on the wall three years ago. Every item on the above excerpted list was known and understood at that point by anybody who cared to notice. I suspect the wild hyper-patriotism of the post 9/11 era had something to do with the collective insanity that kept people from seeing that the emperor was in his skivvies, but that's really no excuse: it is the duty, the patriotic obligation, of every American citizen to criticize his country, especially when he sees it going to hell in a handbasket; without such criticism, and the debate that it catalyzes, democracy cannot exist.

But then, I don't really believe we live in a democracy, anyway.

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