Becoming the Worst President?
Some time back, I happened to write* that, in my opinion, it is the current president's destiny to be The Worst President Ever. I would claim extraordinary prescience, except that it's such a bloomin' obvious prediction. However, I'm please to discover# that Rolling Stone magazine has jumped on board with "The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush" (Sean Wilentz, 21 April 2006).
Here's just one paragraph from this extraordinary analysis.
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science — dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."
Comparisons are rather easy to make to previous Presidents who found themselves faced with "enormous difficulties" to overcome — Washington, Lincoln, & Roosevelt to name the three mentioned who found a way to overcome them — but no cases are mentioned in which the "enormous difficulties" were largely the President's fault in the first place. With Bush, he's created most of his own "enormous difficulties" himself: the war in Iraq, massive deficits, No Child Left Behind, Social Security "reform", immigration "reform", corruption and scandal, and notable failure with Katrina to name a few. So much for the "compassionate conservative uniter"!
We know now about W's messianic faith in himself and his personal feeling of destiny, but does anyone else get the feeling that — in addition to being childish, irresponsible, and self-important — he has an addictive personality? Here we have to listen as he goes through the same charade to puff up urgency about his hope of invading Iran that we went through with Iraq, knowing at the time that it was all puffery, too. Is he like the gambler who has lost everything at the tables and begs for one more stake so that he can win it all back and redeem himself? Does he believe that he can now invade Iran and, perhaps with yet another "shock and awe" campaign, "win" so handily that all will be forgotten about Iraq?
I realize, too, that the title of this piece is a bit ambiguous, but it should be clearer if I answer: "Already is". How reassuring it must be to have one's destiny secured so early in one second term, except for this apparent desire to redeem his "legacy" at all costs.
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* "Presidential Destiny", Bearcastle Blog, 7 December 2004.
# First seen at Shakespeare's Sister, "Worst President Ever", 19 April 2006.
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on Thursday, 20 April 2006 at 18.08
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I heard or read awhile back Bush and his cronies aren't all that worried about legacy in the short term. They're said to believe that in the long run most presidents are judged more favorably.
Examples cited were Truman, even though the Korean War that ended in a stalemate made him unpopular with many; and St. Ronald, whose Iran-Contra indiscretion and secret warmaking in Central America somewhat tarnished his image for awhile.
I tend to believe that theory, partly for the reasons given and partly because it fits with Bush's "What, me worry?" approach generally.
I think the driving motivation now is the same as it's been all along: Keep the base together, loyal, energized and donating money. Now, of course, there's the added impetus that losing control of Congress could mean years of ugly investigations, brass-tacks oversight and whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork. All very practical, immediate concerns.
That Bush might go for broke, so to speak, with an Iran misadventure is a real cause for worry. The gambler analogy is one I've used, too.
I think if he does that, he's going to cause some kind of political rupture the likes of which we haven't seen before. The Bush 43 experience has been so awful, with voter incompetence playing so terrible a part, I'm almost of the mind we need to go to a parliamentary system, wherein a government can be dismissed for lack of the people's support and sufficient confidence in the legislature.
It's a daunting prospect, but probably preferable to having single-term presidencies.
on Friday, 21 April 2006 at 16.40
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So much that comes out of the White House these days reminds me of the song with the bridge that goes "Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse." It's not only that they have transferred the "Hitler" epithet from Saddam Hussein to the President of Iran with the lovely but unmemorizable name; George Bush's strong support for Donald Rumsfeld this week sounds so much like last fall's "Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job here." It's scary. They don't seem able to connect even things as recent as that, much less things like tax cuts and out-of-sight national debt.
Then we had Donald Rumsfeld last week criticizing his opponents who, he said, make up their own reality because they don't like the real one. He criticizes OTHER people for doing that?
on Saturday, 22 April 2006 at 01.31
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Actually, one of the Pentagon neocon hawks responsible for the Iraq war was quoted as saying the neocons intended to create their own reality.