Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Worst President of All Time? Really?
George Bush may be the worst president in history. I’ve been bouncing the idea around in my head for a few years. It’s obviously a very subjective decision, but its interesting mental exercise.
I don’t know, and even the most knowledgeable presidential historians can’t really know, which president was the most dishonest. There simply is a paucity of information on presidents from, say, the Gilded Age, compared to the Information Age. Obviously (but it deserves to be stated) there was no internet or 24 hour news channel in 1889. Nor was there a mass of political publications like The Nation, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic. Nevertheless, I can safely say Preznit Drinky’s* administration is only approached in dishonesty by the Reagan Administration (the contras are the moral equivalents of our founding fathers, the El Mozote massacre didn’t happen, etc.). I think, at this point, Reagan has been outdone. Read Corn’s The Lies of George Bush for a nearly encyclopedic account of his deceptions, and even then only in his first term. Corn is, along with Ivins, Alterman, and a handful of others the most consistently accurate and interesting critic of the administration. For a more insightful but somewhat less well-documented effort see John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate.
That one was easy. My next criteria are harder to judge. I was always resistant to putting Drinky ahead of Reagan because of Reagan’s Central American Policy. Reagan’s rampantly criminal CIA funded and armed militants in every Central American country in the eighties, militants who deliberately targeted and executed about 300,000 civilians. The slaughter was the worst in the Guatemala, but similar death squads operated in the Honduras and, obviously, Nicaragua. The southern arm of the contras operated out of Costa Rica, which was otherwise mercifully free of their depredations. El Salvador was also a bloodbath. Panama’s Noreiga was on the CIA payroll through the first six or seven years of the eighties, even after he stole the 1984 elections.
But then I started thinking. What about Johnson and Nixon? One or two million Vietnamese civilians died in the Vietnam War, largely through U.S. bombing. Is it any more moral to have killed those people through such relatively antiseptic methods? Yes, we were fighting a war, a war we couldn’t have prolonged as long as we did without the bombing, but we shouldn’t have been fighting it in the first place, should we? Starting an unjustified war based on the sham known as the Golf of Tonkin hardly gives one free license to butcher civilians because “we’re at war.” For that matter, what about firebombing Dresden in WWII? We killed 100,000 civilians in that raid alone, in a city with no military targets (Churchill, callow as ever, maintained Dresden was an important communications nexus for the German military. In other words, it was a big city with a lot of physical traffic and communications going through it. That kind of justification could be used to annhiliate any civilian city in a combatant nation during war).
WWII, though, I’m leaving out of the discussion, for relatively obvious reasons. Vietnam is a little trickier. Both the Second Gulf War and Vietnam were started by administrations that wanted to install a friendly government in a part of the world they considered to be a vast, hostile environment that needed a counterbalancing nation. Both wars were equally wrong because of that. I have no respect for administrations that see world politics as a chess game when they gamble with real people’s lives. Especially when those lives are counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Sadly enough, U.S. administrations have along history of dragging a reluctant public into wars based on fictitious attacks on U.S. ships. In addition to the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lusitania and the Maine were both shams. The Lusitania was mounted with guns and was carrying stores of ammunition in addition to its civilian passengers. The captain of the ship resigned a couple of weeks before its last voyage in protest of this. The Germans knew this and told the U.S. government they would fire on the vessel if it came within reach of their U-boats. Public opinion was solidly against getting involved in WWI prior to this.
No one to this day knows why the Maine exploded, but it probably wasn’t a planted bomb, as the priapic hawks of the day maintained. The Spanish-American War led to the U.S. acquiring Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as colonies. The U.S. granted independence to Cuba shortly thereafter, but only after the U.S. refused to allow the Cuban government to convene unless it accepted the Taft Amendment to its constitution, which maintained that the Cuban government had to sell off 80% of its mineral rights to the U.S., as well as large tracts of land for, in today’s dollars, a couple of hundred dollars an acre. The Philippinos weren’t so lucky. After the U.S. informed them that they would not be granted independence, their elected government fled Manila and waged a protracted and bloody guerilla war against U.S. forces that lasted four years and led to the slaughter of 200,000 Philippino civilians. McKinley promised to “civilize and Christianize” the Philippines. I guess by that that he meant “kill.”
McKinley is looking pretty bad right now, isn’t he? Thank God the U.S. had a cheap source of rubber, though. McKinley had some advantages that Drinky lacks, however. McKinley went from being one of nine children of working-class parents to being the President. He was legendary for his courtesy. He served in combat in the Civil War.
I’m also unwilling to put Wilson on the same level as Preznit Drinky. WWI was started by the Austro-Hungarian Empire declaring war on the Kingdom of Serbia out of a naked desire for territorial gain. The allies were the good guys, relatively speaking. The problem is that the American people were largely right in their reluctance to get involved. They were not measurably better off after the war than before. The IWW and the Socialist Party of America realized this and protested the war. Thanks to the draconian Sedition Act that Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld protesting the war in any significant way was illegal. This led to the largest mass arrest in U.S. history, with 10,000 members of those organizations being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail terms of between two and twenty years. Legal immigrants were deported. This effectively broke the back of those organizations for the remainder of U.S. history.
Drinky lacks some other things that McKinley, Wilson, Johnson, and Nixon had, however. Wilson was the President of Princeton. Drinky was a legacy admission. Wilson’s idealism led to the well-intentioned but failed League of Nations. Drinky’s administration scoffs at the U.N. and international law. The above four pulled themselves up by their bootstraps on their path to power: Drinky’s path to the presidency was paved with money his dad’s friends donated. Before becoming the Governor of Texas, Drinky’s resume consisted of a series of failed business ventures (including the Harken stock deal which was never prosecuted by the SEC) and minority stock ownership in the Texas Rangers, a deal brokered by yet another family friend. The same Texas Rangers who screwed the taxpayers of Texas out of ownership of the stadium they built for the team (sports business has always been one of the most transparently sleazy businesses in the United States, comparable only to the gangster-ridden gambling business of the mid-twentieth century and maybe the porn industry. Maybe also the railroad business of the late nineteenth century, but I diverge).
The list goes on. Nixon was a straight-A student. Drinky was a C student. Johnson initiated the most courageous civil rights reforms in U.S. history, bar none: after he did so, as he remarked, he knew he would lose the South for the Democratic Party for a generation or more. Drinky, along with the Republican Congress, has axed every civil rights and environmental initiative they could. Drinky and Co. has cut taxes, increased spending, and ballooned the national debt to levels that would have made Reagan proud. This includes the eighty or ninety-year-old Estate Tax. This is unprecedented stuff.
I scoff when I hear about how corrupt the Grant Administration was, or what a big deal the Teapot Dome scandal was. Bullshit. In inflation-adjusted dollars none of the above scandals come close to the suspicious no-bid multi-billion dollar contracts Halliburton has, or to the nine billion dollars that was “lost” (read “stolen”) from the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer (whose masterful oversight earned him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. This, along with the same medal given to George Tenet [allegedly responsible for what must be the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history] is one of countless instances of how performance is completely divorced from reward in the Drinky Administration).
I’m also not impressed by the “ineptitude” of the presidents leading up to the Civil War. Buchanan et al presumably could have done more to avert the war, but inaction as a form of ineptitude pales by comparison to preemptive war. I might also argue that the Civil War was inevitable, in some form or another, as long as this asinine argument about “could’ves” and “should’ves” continues. See where I’m going? Arguments about what these presidents might have done to avert the war are purely speculations founded on an assumption that the war was avoidable, which begs the question. They also involve projections along a chain of events that is so complicated it’s akin to guessing what might have happened if General Lee had decided to sit the war out. It’s far-flung guesswork and a feeble indictment.
I saw a lot of parallels between Reagan and the Preznit. That was why I was unwilling to place Drinky ahead of Reagan in the coveted position of Worst President of All Time. But Reagan had charm and he was a self-made man, even if the man he made himself into wasn’t very admirable. Drinky has never been charming. Drinky stutters and misspeaks like English is a second language for him. He smirks at inopportune times and mocked a woman on death row pleading for her life. He was beat like a drum in every debate he was in. He had to lie his ass off about his domestic plans just to look like he had a domestic agenda beyond looting the treasury for the benefit of his corporate masters.
Reagan had the Southern Strategy. Bush had the South Carolina primaries and the endless fearmongering. Reagan had his own pathetic enemy to prop up to the American people and justify massive defense spending: communism, not terrorists.
Reagan had the Iran-Contra Affair. Bush has Plamegate. Plamegate is more serious. The Iran Contra Affair was about the Reagan Administration illegally selling arms to Iran to free hostages and fund the Contras (also illegal, after the Boland amendment). Democrats, in an act of generosity (or spinelessness) elected not to try to impeach Reagan on these charges, presumably because he might not have been aware of the sales, though this is a laughable assertion not borne out by the facts. I guess breaking the Boland Amendment just wasn’t a big enough deal. Maybe it wasn’t. No Americans died in Nicaragua—at least, not very many. The deal didn’t involved billions of dollars, just millions of dollars.
The lies of this administration have led to 2,100 combat deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. The numbers grow every week. This is bigger than Nicaragua. This is bigger than a “second-rate burglary.”
This administration will never recover from this. Whether or not their poll numbers improve is of little interest to me. Both Reagan and Clinton suffered prolonged job approval ratings of around 40% in their first terms for little reason beyond economic malaise and perceived ineffectual leadership, respectively. JARs are frequently bad measures of the efficacy of the president. But the sins of this administration are horrendous and numerous. And the continued revelations regarding the intelligence in Iraq, the Scooter Libby indictment, the DeLay indictment, and the fundraising case involving Abramoff and Scanlon that is swallowing the reputations of 60 (almost all Republican) congresspeople will destroy the careers of the Drinky Administration and a huge swath of the Republican Congress. They largely already have. Every day for the President has been turned into a punishing marathon of angry journalists demanding answers and newspaper pages spinning tales of the latest allegations from Bob Woodward. Drinky has alternately been silent, lashed out at critics, and finally retreated into the seclusion of well-planned speeches in front of captive military audiences with programmed applause that looks as pathetic as a fat, balding man energetically humping an inflatable doll. Scott McClellan is batted around like a puffy white punching bag on a daily basis by irritated journalists for his administration’s secrecy and lies and is currently planning a hasty departure from his job, if rumors prove right.
By the time this president finishes his final term he will wish he had never been re-elected.
*again, term borrowed from Driftglass
I don’t know, and even the most knowledgeable presidential historians can’t really know, which president was the most dishonest. There simply is a paucity of information on presidents from, say, the Gilded Age, compared to the Information Age. Obviously (but it deserves to be stated) there was no internet or 24 hour news channel in 1889. Nor was there a mass of political publications like The Nation, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic. Nevertheless, I can safely say Preznit Drinky’s* administration is only approached in dishonesty by the Reagan Administration (the contras are the moral equivalents of our founding fathers, the El Mozote massacre didn’t happen, etc.). I think, at this point, Reagan has been outdone. Read Corn’s The Lies of George Bush for a nearly encyclopedic account of his deceptions, and even then only in his first term. Corn is, along with Ivins, Alterman, and a handful of others the most consistently accurate and interesting critic of the administration. For a more insightful but somewhat less well-documented effort see John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate.
That one was easy. My next criteria are harder to judge. I was always resistant to putting Drinky ahead of Reagan because of Reagan’s Central American Policy. Reagan’s rampantly criminal CIA funded and armed militants in every Central American country in the eighties, militants who deliberately targeted and executed about 300,000 civilians. The slaughter was the worst in the Guatemala, but similar death squads operated in the Honduras and, obviously, Nicaragua. The southern arm of the contras operated out of Costa Rica, which was otherwise mercifully free of their depredations. El Salvador was also a bloodbath. Panama’s Noreiga was on the CIA payroll through the first six or seven years of the eighties, even after he stole the 1984 elections.
But then I started thinking. What about Johnson and Nixon? One or two million Vietnamese civilians died in the Vietnam War, largely through U.S. bombing. Is it any more moral to have killed those people through such relatively antiseptic methods? Yes, we were fighting a war, a war we couldn’t have prolonged as long as we did without the bombing, but we shouldn’t have been fighting it in the first place, should we? Starting an unjustified war based on the sham known as the Golf of Tonkin hardly gives one free license to butcher civilians because “we’re at war.” For that matter, what about firebombing Dresden in WWII? We killed 100,000 civilians in that raid alone, in a city with no military targets (Churchill, callow as ever, maintained Dresden was an important communications nexus for the German military. In other words, it was a big city with a lot of physical traffic and communications going through it. That kind of justification could be used to annhiliate any civilian city in a combatant nation during war).
WWII, though, I’m leaving out of the discussion, for relatively obvious reasons. Vietnam is a little trickier. Both the Second Gulf War and Vietnam were started by administrations that wanted to install a friendly government in a part of the world they considered to be a vast, hostile environment that needed a counterbalancing nation. Both wars were equally wrong because of that. I have no respect for administrations that see world politics as a chess game when they gamble with real people’s lives. Especially when those lives are counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Sadly enough, U.S. administrations have along history of dragging a reluctant public into wars based on fictitious attacks on U.S. ships. In addition to the Gulf of Tonkin, the Lusitania and the Maine were both shams. The Lusitania was mounted with guns and was carrying stores of ammunition in addition to its civilian passengers. The captain of the ship resigned a couple of weeks before its last voyage in protest of this. The Germans knew this and told the U.S. government they would fire on the vessel if it came within reach of their U-boats. Public opinion was solidly against getting involved in WWI prior to this.
No one to this day knows why the Maine exploded, but it probably wasn’t a planted bomb, as the priapic hawks of the day maintained. The Spanish-American War led to the U.S. acquiring Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as colonies. The U.S. granted independence to Cuba shortly thereafter, but only after the U.S. refused to allow the Cuban government to convene unless it accepted the Taft Amendment to its constitution, which maintained that the Cuban government had to sell off 80% of its mineral rights to the U.S., as well as large tracts of land for, in today’s dollars, a couple of hundred dollars an acre. The Philippinos weren’t so lucky. After the U.S. informed them that they would not be granted independence, their elected government fled Manila and waged a protracted and bloody guerilla war against U.S. forces that lasted four years and led to the slaughter of 200,000 Philippino civilians. McKinley promised to “civilize and Christianize” the Philippines. I guess by that that he meant “kill.”
McKinley is looking pretty bad right now, isn’t he? Thank God the U.S. had a cheap source of rubber, though. McKinley had some advantages that Drinky lacks, however. McKinley went from being one of nine children of working-class parents to being the President. He was legendary for his courtesy. He served in combat in the Civil War.
I’m also unwilling to put Wilson on the same level as Preznit Drinky. WWI was started by the Austro-Hungarian Empire declaring war on the Kingdom of Serbia out of a naked desire for territorial gain. The allies were the good guys, relatively speaking. The problem is that the American people were largely right in their reluctance to get involved. They were not measurably better off after the war than before. The IWW and the Socialist Party of America realized this and protested the war. Thanks to the draconian Sedition Act that Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld protesting the war in any significant way was illegal. This led to the largest mass arrest in U.S. history, with 10,000 members of those organizations being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail terms of between two and twenty years. Legal immigrants were deported. This effectively broke the back of those organizations for the remainder of U.S. history.
Drinky lacks some other things that McKinley, Wilson, Johnson, and Nixon had, however. Wilson was the President of Princeton. Drinky was a legacy admission. Wilson’s idealism led to the well-intentioned but failed League of Nations. Drinky’s administration scoffs at the U.N. and international law. The above four pulled themselves up by their bootstraps on their path to power: Drinky’s path to the presidency was paved with money his dad’s friends donated. Before becoming the Governor of Texas, Drinky’s resume consisted of a series of failed business ventures (including the Harken stock deal which was never prosecuted by the SEC) and minority stock ownership in the Texas Rangers, a deal brokered by yet another family friend. The same Texas Rangers who screwed the taxpayers of Texas out of ownership of the stadium they built for the team (sports business has always been one of the most transparently sleazy businesses in the United States, comparable only to the gangster-ridden gambling business of the mid-twentieth century and maybe the porn industry. Maybe also the railroad business of the late nineteenth century, but I diverge).
The list goes on. Nixon was a straight-A student. Drinky was a C student. Johnson initiated the most courageous civil rights reforms in U.S. history, bar none: after he did so, as he remarked, he knew he would lose the South for the Democratic Party for a generation or more. Drinky, along with the Republican Congress, has axed every civil rights and environmental initiative they could. Drinky and Co. has cut taxes, increased spending, and ballooned the national debt to levels that would have made Reagan proud. This includes the eighty or ninety-year-old Estate Tax. This is unprecedented stuff.
I scoff when I hear about how corrupt the Grant Administration was, or what a big deal the Teapot Dome scandal was. Bullshit. In inflation-adjusted dollars none of the above scandals come close to the suspicious no-bid multi-billion dollar contracts Halliburton has, or to the nine billion dollars that was “lost” (read “stolen”) from the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer (whose masterful oversight earned him a Presidential Medal of Freedom. This, along with the same medal given to George Tenet [allegedly responsible for what must be the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history] is one of countless instances of how performance is completely divorced from reward in the Drinky Administration).
I’m also not impressed by the “ineptitude” of the presidents leading up to the Civil War. Buchanan et al presumably could have done more to avert the war, but inaction as a form of ineptitude pales by comparison to preemptive war. I might also argue that the Civil War was inevitable, in some form or another, as long as this asinine argument about “could’ves” and “should’ves” continues. See where I’m going? Arguments about what these presidents might have done to avert the war are purely speculations founded on an assumption that the war was avoidable, which begs the question. They also involve projections along a chain of events that is so complicated it’s akin to guessing what might have happened if General Lee had decided to sit the war out. It’s far-flung guesswork and a feeble indictment.
I saw a lot of parallels between Reagan and the Preznit. That was why I was unwilling to place Drinky ahead of Reagan in the coveted position of Worst President of All Time. But Reagan had charm and he was a self-made man, even if the man he made himself into wasn’t very admirable. Drinky has never been charming. Drinky stutters and misspeaks like English is a second language for him. He smirks at inopportune times and mocked a woman on death row pleading for her life. He was beat like a drum in every debate he was in. He had to lie his ass off about his domestic plans just to look like he had a domestic agenda beyond looting the treasury for the benefit of his corporate masters.
Reagan had the Southern Strategy. Bush had the South Carolina primaries and the endless fearmongering. Reagan had his own pathetic enemy to prop up to the American people and justify massive defense spending: communism, not terrorists.
Reagan had the Iran-Contra Affair. Bush has Plamegate. Plamegate is more serious. The Iran Contra Affair was about the Reagan Administration illegally selling arms to Iran to free hostages and fund the Contras (also illegal, after the Boland amendment). Democrats, in an act of generosity (or spinelessness) elected not to try to impeach Reagan on these charges, presumably because he might not have been aware of the sales, though this is a laughable assertion not borne out by the facts. I guess breaking the Boland Amendment just wasn’t a big enough deal. Maybe it wasn’t. No Americans died in Nicaragua—at least, not very many. The deal didn’t involved billions of dollars, just millions of dollars.
The lies of this administration have led to 2,100 combat deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. The numbers grow every week. This is bigger than Nicaragua. This is bigger than a “second-rate burglary.”
This administration will never recover from this. Whether or not their poll numbers improve is of little interest to me. Both Reagan and Clinton suffered prolonged job approval ratings of around 40% in their first terms for little reason beyond economic malaise and perceived ineffectual leadership, respectively. JARs are frequently bad measures of the efficacy of the president. But the sins of this administration are horrendous and numerous. And the continued revelations regarding the intelligence in Iraq, the Scooter Libby indictment, the DeLay indictment, and the fundraising case involving Abramoff and Scanlon that is swallowing the reputations of 60 (almost all Republican) congresspeople will destroy the careers of the Drinky Administration and a huge swath of the Republican Congress. They largely already have. Every day for the President has been turned into a punishing marathon of angry journalists demanding answers and newspaper pages spinning tales of the latest allegations from Bob Woodward. Drinky has alternately been silent, lashed out at critics, and finally retreated into the seclusion of well-planned speeches in front of captive military audiences with programmed applause that looks as pathetic as a fat, balding man energetically humping an inflatable doll. Scott McClellan is batted around like a puffy white punching bag on a daily basis by irritated journalists for his administration’s secrecy and lies and is currently planning a hasty departure from his job, if rumors prove right.
By the time this president finishes his final term he will wish he had never been re-elected.
*again, term borrowed from Driftglass
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 7:47 PM 
