The Worst President in History?

Pseudomonas aeriginosa! And Ecoli too!!! You never give up on that weasely way of yours do you, BernardR(Massaggatto, whatever!)

Mr.Parados: You mean, of course, my post in which I said I predicted that the Dow Jones would break 10,000 and that quite a few people would be killed in Iraq.

I need some time to go through my files but when I find the data that led to those predictions, I will post it.

Thank You , sir!

Quote:

June 1, 2006 - Bush Tops List As U.S. Voters Name Worst President, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Reagan, Clinton Top List As Best In 61 Years

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x11385.xml?ReleaseID=919

Truman merely awarded China to the communists
after ordering that all captured Jap munitions
be turned over to the commies,
instead of to our Ally, anti-communist Chiang Kai Shek.

I am sure, Mr. Nimh, that your description of Quinnipiac's poll findings are definitive.

Inasmuch as President Bush has thirty months left to go in his Presidency, I am quite content to rank the Quinnipac rating as most premature.

I will wait until 2010 and then review the Quinnipac Poll., I do hope that you will be here to see the results then, Mr. Nimh.

Yea,
Truman merely awarded China to the communists
after ordering that all captured Jap munitions
be turned over to the commies,
instead of to our Ally, anti-communist Chiang Kai Shek.

I am sure, Mr. Nimh, that your description of Quinnipiac's poll findings are definitive. On the other hand, they may not be.

You may, of course, be aware that the all time low Job Approval Rating for Presidents since FDR was "22" gained by Harry S. Truman in February 1952 who was suffering from public opinion opposed to the Korean War.

I am also certain that you know that President Truman has, in many rating polls, been placed in the top ten of US presidents.

Inasmuch as President Bush has thirty months left to go in his Presidency, I am quite content to rank the Quinnipac rating as most premature.

I will wait until 2010 and then review the Quinnipac Poll., I do hope that you will be here to see the results then, Mr. Nimh.

Faced with disastrously low approval ratings, President Bush seems to have resigned himself to the hope that future generations will judge him more kindly than his contemporaries. I don't think this is a particularly realistic hope, but you can't blame a guy for trying to find a silver lining to an otherwise soul-crushing set of circumstances. Bush's most loyal apologists, and lately Bush himself, have taken to invoking the example of Harry Truman, a man who endured similarly dismal approval ratings toward the end of his presidency, but whose historical legacy has steadily improved since then. Just last week, Bush when out of his way to draw this comparison:



"By the actions he took, the institutions he built,
the alliances heforged and the doctrines he set
down, President Truman laid the foundations for
America's victory in the cold war," Mr. Bush told
the class of 2006.


Yeah, I get it. And I understand why this is a pleasing analogy for Bush. Presidents want to be judged kindly by history. This is especially true when they stand little chance of being judged kindly in the present. But here's my question: if Bush is hoping that his validation will come from future generations, why on earth is he yet again coming out in support of the Marriage Protection Amendment?

The march of history is often unpredictable. One generation's fool can be the next generation's visionary. In many respects, though, the march of history is entirely predictable. We know, for example, that future generations will enjoy technology and gadgetry that far exceeds our current technological know-how. The progress of science and technology is incremental and inexorable.

Similarly, free societies inevitably progress toward greater tolerance and greater equality. Old biases tend to die off with the people who hold them. Does anyone really doubt that gay marriage will be a fact of life in most parts of this country within a generation? In the few years since gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, public opinion has already shifted considerably. Polls consistently show that most younger Americas have no problem with allowing gay couples to marry. So the writing is clearly on the wall. Future generations will almost surely view the Marriage Protection Amendment (and its state counterparts) in the same light that we now view anti-miscegenation laws. Indeed, I suspect even most social conservatives realize this, which is why they are frantically trying to take advantage of popular opinion while it is still on their side.

I always marvel at this phenomenon. Why is it that each generation of social conservatives thinks that it will be the one to stop history's march? They never seem to realize the power or inevitability of the processes they're opposing.

Bush, of course, is under no such illusions, which makes his decision all the more strange. He knows the MPA won't pass. And as Steve Benen points out, he has to know that his 11th hour support of the amendment is unlikely to satisfy his fundamentalist base. And I doubt that Bush himself personally supports the MPA. So why bother endorsing it? Why publicly support a measure that future generations will overwhelming view as nothing more than a statement of ignorance and bigotry?

For someone who is so clearly hoping for historical redemption, this is certainly a counter-productive move.

Truman's order to seize the steel mills did not violate any congressional statute and he was clearly acting in the interests of national security and during a time of war. Nevertheless, he felt the need to explain his actions to Congress, in real time, and to make it clear that he would abide by the will of Congress, whatever that should be. Bush, in contrast, has authorized conduct which is expressly criminalized by a federal statute, a statute he himself had signed into law just weeks before. He kept most of Congress in the dark about this decision and, when caught, asserted that he had the inherent authority to disregard the laws Congress passes.

Bush is no Truman.

June 4, 2006, 12:51AM
HIJACKING HISTORY
G.W. Bush is no Harry Truman
Analogy about presidents popular but far from true


By PETER BEINART


No matter how polarized Washington becomes, there is still one Democrat Republicans love: Harry Truman. Last December, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared the Bush administration's democracy promotion efforts "consistent with the proud tradition of American foreign policy, especially such recent presidents as Harry Truman." Two weeks ago, President Bush devoted his West Point commencement address to an extended analogy between himself and the 33rd president, invoking Truman no fewer than 17 times. Conservative commentators are fond of the analogy, too. It is a virtual article of faith on the contemporary right that today's conservatives — not today's liberals — are the true heirs of the anti-totalitarian tradition with which we associate Truman's name.

The truth is rather different. Bush and Rice are correct that Truman saw tyranny as a threat to world peace and believed in resisting it, by means that included force. At West Point, Bush quoted Truman's famous declaration in his March 1947 speech proposing military aid to the besieged governments of Greece and Turkey: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

But there are other Truman classics that Bush conveniently overlooked. For instance: "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." Truman did not believe merely in promoting democracy and peace; he believed that doing so required powerful international institutions, which could invest American power with the credibility that the Soviets lacked.

In the years immediately after World War II, the United States encased itself in a web of such bodies — from the United Nations and NATO to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization). And Truman was frank in recognizing that such institutions gave weaker countries an influence over American actions. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, "It was not that the Americans lacked the capacity to force their allies into line ... (but) what is surprising is how rarely this happened; how much effort the United States put into persuading — quite often deferring to — its NATO partners."

Bush, by contrast, more than any president in recent history, has sought to liberate the United States from international treaties and institutions — from the Kyoto global warming treaty to the International Criminal Court to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. To be sure, even Bill Clinton sometimes had trouble getting international agreements through Congress. But in the Bush administration, opposing infringements on U.S. sovereignty has become a cardinal foreign policy principle. In Bush's view, American power legitimizes itself — we don't need to listen to other countries, because sooner or later they will realize that we were right and they were wrong. Had Bush been around in the late 1940s, he might well have accused Truman of seeking a "permission slip" before defending the United States. Indeed, some conservatives said almost exactly that at the time. It is they — not Truman — who are Bush's true ideological forefathers.

Truman also believed that spreading democracy required combating economic despair. He allocated between 2.5 and 5 percent of U.S. national income over four years to the Marshall Plan, in the belief that unless Europe's fragile postwar democracies improved their people's lives, they were likely to fail. Then, in his 1949 State of the Union address, he went further and proposed a Marshall Plan for the Third World. In fact, while Truman increased military spending, he and his advisers repeatedly described economic development as more important to the anti-communist cause. In 1947 his defense secretary, James Forrestal, noted that "at the present time we are keeping our military expenditures below the levels which our military leaders must in good conscience estimate as the minimum which would in themselves ensure national security. By so doing we are able to increase our expenditures to assist in the European recovery." Try to imagine Donald Rumsfeld saying that.

While the Bush administration has boosted foreign aid over its appallingly low pre-9/11levels, such increases have been trivial compared with the massive new allotments for defense. One of the primary reasons for mounting anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan is our failure to fulfill our promises to help rebuild that country after we toppled the Taliban. As The Washington Post's Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer reported in October 2004, "The president and his most influential advisers, many officials said, do not see those (economic) factors — or U.S. policy overseas — as primary contributors to the terrorism threat."

Again, there is a Cold War precedent for this view. But it lies in the arguments of conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, who ridiculed claims that Third World poverty aided communism's appeal. Harry Truman, by contrast, believed in fighting totalitarianism fiercely, but with more than just guns, and through international institutions that made U.S. power legitimate in the world. George W. Bush should remember that the next time he takes Truman's name in vain.

OmSigDAVID is noted for dumb conservative platitudes. [/img]

Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

A most cool insult --- but wait, dlowan and her Liberal ilk are not into insults. They are the manifestations of the universal love factor.

Only the most ignorant and/or evil commentary is deserving of a withering response from the Leftist Oz Bunny.

A wee something for the delusional ones. No names needed.

May 21, 2006 — Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., says George W. Bush is the "worst president of our lifetime," and "absolutely" worse than Watergate-tainted President Nixon.

In an exclusive appearance on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," the former presidential and vice presidential contender said of Bush, "He's done a variety of things — things which are going to take us forever to recover from.

"You have to give Bush and Cheney and gang credit for being good at politics — you know, good at political campaigns," Edwards added. "They're very good at dividing the country and taking advantage of it. What they're not good at is governing, and it shows every single day in this administration. And the country is paying a huge price for that."