The Worst President Ever

Myself and many others have been saying this for years but now the historians are backing us up. There is a great article in Rolling Stone Magazine about bush. Its also the feature on the cover, although being rolling stone it loses some of its point by having Confessions of Nick Lachey sharing the cover.

Its a decent length article but it says that while its far from a unanimous vote the vast majority of historians would at least place bush in contention for the worst president ever. A few smart asses did label him the best president since Clinton. The others in the running, well lets say that nixion ws only considered an option by the younger historians. Polk Buchannan and Jackson were all in the mix.

then it gets into Why they consider bush so bad, this is when it gets fun. heres a few fun facts.

Yet that mighty advantage [republican congress] has not prevented the
indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie
Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be
indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.)

By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney,
a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the
presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of
presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and
personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the
president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous
wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim.

ok one more

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these
allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption
around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a
kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under
the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet
secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast,
the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's,
was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a
paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White
House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff
Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair,
illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and
Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce,
Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left
their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the
Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties,
despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan
impeachment drive.

Good stuff good stuff. its tough to argue with a historian when it come to the past.....