Diner Review Pics Bush As Worst Ever

Sooooo... if your lucky enough to be reading this then you will one day in the position to tell your children and/or grandchildren that you had the blessing of living through the eight year term of the worst President...ever. Seriously... I mean I didn’t live through the Harding (supposedly he was fabulously corrupt as was his administration which frankly seems like an upgrade on where we are at now) years so I cannot really comment on them one way or another. I also missed out on James Buchanon (Presided over secession of the the south), Andrew Johnson (presided post Lincoln and took the side of the South in reconstruction and Franklin (Doughface) Pierce who tried to expand slavery to the western states. I have been however been conscious for Lyndon Johnson (14 who would have thunk it?), Richard Nixon (32), Jimmy Carter (28 tie), Gerald Ford (28 tie), George H.W. Bush (25), Ronald Reagan (15), Bill Clinton (21) and now this putz. According to historians this group in my life has been a pretty middling, muddling bunch. I mean, we have had 42 Presidents and if my math is correct they average out to about a 20+ and that is pretty much right in the middle.

But think about it. This guy won (some say stole but that is a whiny weak response because if he stole it we ALL watched it happen) an election by the barest of mandates inheriting a White House at peace, a robust economy with projected budget surpluses (whoever those guys were projected that need to be treated the people who put together Communist China and Russia’s much vaunted 5 Year Plans) and was off to just being a screw up, a caretaker President busy figuring out how to make the rich get richer with tax cuts for the rich and tax breaks for business, trashing the environmental laws and ignoring global warming. He did not believe in interventionism of “nation building” since they were bad for business. He was trying to be a good dogmatic, pro business republican. he paid lip service like a good business republican to abortion issues and gay marriage which helped elect him but did nothing because they had nothing to do with getting his friends richer.
Then we have 9-11. A disaster, devastates a mentally weak nations psyche and he becomes a hero. He invades Afghanistan with massive focused force and although he fails to get the bad guy, he and the folks he surrounds himself with suddenly see the vision...a stable democracy in Iraq. Lets clean up dads screw up there not unseating Saddam. It can all be ours...the oil, the glory, the no bid contracts... That is when his Presidency teetered and then fell with a thud. Either he lied us into the war or led us into war relying on such fantastic incompetence that he and his cabinet should be water boarded and executed in short order. WE WERE THE ONLY SUPERPOWER! We had a moral gravitas and a budget surplus to do so much good in the world and...he and Cheney literally...pissed it all away.

Perhaps we judge our recent Presidents too harshly because their failings are apparent but their long term victories are not yet judged. Lyndon Johnson at 14 seems like a stretch and Nixon at 32 seems unduly harsh for just being a mean spirited greed head. I mean he opened up China and that took a little guts and forethought. He messily got us out of Vietnam which was not his war. Makes you wonder how we will treat Hillary or Barrack for what will be a very messy retreat from Iraq (and it will be a shameful retreat). I think when comparing Bush to Nixon that Nixon comes out very favorably. Sure he surrounded himself with hustlers and crooks but they were used car salesmen type crooks. Fast talkers with wide ties and white shoes and bad teeth. Perhaps they were trying to screw us but it was a kinder gentler time.

Bush has surrounded himself with Haliburton type neo-con crooks who are looking to rape not just us, but the world in favor of lining their pockets, their family members pockets and implanting their “vision” all over the map. I guess the difference is that these guys are smarter, meaner and more dogmatic then Haldeman, Erlichmann, Mitchell and Dean could have ever mustered. Nixon had his enemies “audited” by the IRS. Bush sends his to Guantanimo. Nixon listened in on phones, Bush “data mines”. Nixon at least genuinely liked pro football (according to Hunter Thompson) and I do not think Bush likes anything. Since his PR Campaign of coming to Jesus he no longer has any public use for vice and that is just wrong on so many levels that it makes me queasy.


Sure Clinton was banging his aides (only to fulfill his Kennedy fantasies) but it is comforting to see the man in the White House has human failings, even very public ones. It really was not until Clinton that we knew it was wrong to carry on such dalliances because the prior guys since Kennedy were all to old and mentally screwed up to have sex anyway and I suspect sadly that the same is true of George now. There is something meaner about Presidents who are not getting laid regularly while in the White House. That is my theory. Hell, Kennedy was all smiles even when invading Cuba and enmeshing us in Vietnam. Perhaps that is the key lesson of the Bush Presidency. I would like to be able to draw at least on lesson out of it because this guy is going to be sitting in the bottom 5 sooner rather then later.